M. Night Shyamalan busted Margaret Lyons’s streak in 2015. The current New York Times TV critic had been reviewing television shows for a decade for various publications including Entertainment Weekly and New York magazine’s Vulture, priding herself on never having missed a scripted network pilot. For 10 years, as the television universe proliferated wildly, she had watched every single one that came her way: drama, comedy; half-hour, hour; multi-cam, single-cam. Then came Wayward Pines.

“That show broke me,” she said of Shyamalan’s mystery series starring Matt Dillon and Carla Gugino that went on to last 20 episodes on Fox. “I just wasn’t interested in it, and I knew my dumb streak had to come to an end eventually.”

Spend some time talking to critics and it’s clear that Lyons wasn’t alone in 2015. That same year, veteran TV critic Alan Sepinwall, who’s reviewed for The Star-Ledger, HitFix, and Uproxx, minimized his recaps of individual episodes; former Entertainment Weekly TV critic Jeff Jensen let the CBS procedurals fall by the wayside; Variety TV critic Maureen Ryan pulled away from reality competition shows like American Idol, Survivor, and The Amazing Race.

In the years since, it’s only gotten worse. Sepinwall now compares his job to hacking through a jungle with a machete. Jensen equates it to triage in an E.R., just trying to stem the bleeding. “When I was hired in 2013 to be a critic, I was told I was going to be partnered with another critic because there was just too much TV for two people,” Jensen said. “By the time I left four years later, my conviction was that there was too much TV for even three critics, which was funny because, by then, we only had one.” (Entertainment Weekly currently employs two TV critics.) Ryan compares the current landscape to “10 fire hoses being trained on your body, and every time you open your inbox, it’s like, ‘Oh, good. There’s a new fire hose, yay!’”

Before we go much further considering the plight of those who are paid to stay home and watch TV for a living, let us pause so that you may roll your eyes. While their jobs may beat a day in the salt mines, they couldn’t be more different from what they were, say, even 10 years ago, when a television critic could feasibly watch all the pilots for all the TV shows ahead of the September season. Give your opinion, spot a few trends, follow up a couple of times throughout the course of 22 episodes. Done. And then you got summer reruns. Nowadays, with its unpredictable shape and varied form, TV is the dominant medium of our age, and our critics are the cultural arbiters of—and tour guides to—the ever expanding galaxy of programming that many of us spend our precious free hours each night trying to navigate: network, cable, streaming, Web-only, and more.

“I don’t think one person could physically watch every show being produced.”

There is an actual consequence to the overworked, always-behind television critic. Their struggles mirror those of their viewers, for starters. How can a lay watcher be expected to consume even a fraction of what’s being offered them at the end of their harried days when TV critics, who do it for a living, are unable to. At its most basic, there’s service value in having trained critics trying to make sense of it all for us. More importantly, the best criticism out there takes what our artists are creating and filters it through the overall conversation. The best television turns the rudimentary form into high art, tackling both the mundane and the weighty with equal appeal, and it’s important to have people applying thoughtful, critical rigor to such ambitious pursuits. Movie critics seem to still be able to manage, while book critics have been dealing with the onslaught of too much content forever. (Just look at their offices and you’ll understand.)