I’m looking for a new word. Also a new TV show to watch, which is related.

For, okay, there’s this new television drama that I think is shockingly poor. I can’t tell you what it is. It turns out that I used to know the writer and I’m not a fan, but I promise that I didn’t know whose series it was. Before his or her credit came up on screen and told me, though, I had already had a moment’s thinking along the lines of “Christ, it’s not going to be all like this, is it?”

It was.

And so I want a word. The word needs to be something like exposition, but that one doesn’t seem to cover it. Because you know that exposition is when a writer tells the audience something they need to know — I think I’ve just written exposition, sorry — and actually what I need is close to being the opposite. I want a word for when a writer tells the audience something they don’t need to know.

Example. In this show, it is certain, certain without one single pixel of doubt, that Character A is going to do X. There is nothing else they can or would do. It is impossible not to know in every detail what it is they’re about to do. But still we had to have Character B ask — I’m paraphrasing in case you Google the script — what Character A is going to do. And then sodding Character A has to tell Character B while we wait.

I have this distant memory of a film writer talking about being forced to help out what he or she called the Dimwit Element. It was never entirely clear — and I think deliberately — whether they meant the audience or the studio executives giving notes.

Either way, the reasoning was that there will be some people who don’t see the stunningly obvious and will feel bad. Will feel stupid. Who might then decide to go watch something else.

The theory goes that if we just help them out, they’ll stay and nobody who already saw what must happen will even notice our brilliant solution.

But the practice goes a different way. It tells the viewer to prepare for an hour’s worth of being patronised. It tells the viewer that there isn’t much to the show. It tells us, I think, that there is going to be no life or verve or wit in any of the writing.

I can see an argument that this does fall under the term exposition, but after an hour of watching and half a week of thinking, the only word I can come up with is shite.