“Maybe it is my brain,” I thought, 20 minutes into episode one of Tales from the Loop (from Friday, Amazon Prime Video), a point at which absolutely nothing had happened. “Maybe my brain is ruined from years of endorphin-rush Instagram notifications and YouTube videos, or whatever, and maybe I am the problem, and I can’t focus on something slow-moving any more. Hey: maybe I’m just thick.” Then 20 more minutes passed without anything happening. There were 20 more minutes to go. Nothing happened. I tried another episode. Long story short: my brain is not the problem.

Tales from the Loop is an artfully slow-moving sci-fi set in a half-world between the weird and our own, a sort of 60s/80s amalgam where creaking and rusted robots and unreal creatures and vworping floating rocks exist in an insular backwater town somewhere in the midwest. You know how Netflix did Stranger Things (odd things happen to children in an alternate version of the 80s; the town itself is a character; there is always an ominous quarry)? Imagine a version where very little happens. You just imagined Tales from the Loop.

I am being harsh, but on paper this should be crack to me: episodic, hour-long tales set in an eerie town with its own mystery; where characters – the brainy girl who can’t find her mum, the low-ranking booth guard who shockingly has an interior life, Man With Robot Arm And No Other Personality Trait – interconnect and lean on each others’ stories; where every episode serves as a standalone feature that all comes together at the end; human stories tinged with sci-fi, rather than human stories completely dominated by sci-fi; the entire premise of the show being based on nostalgic hyper-real paintings by Swedish artist Simon Stålenhag that spawned a successful Kickstarter board game. That is the exact sort of TV show I want to watch, like it was made in a lab, especially for me. But nothing happens. Nothing happens!

Loop is very beautiful, but that’s where the praise ends. Fundamentally, I consider it rude to take an hour of someone’s life and only tell seven to nine minutes of story across it. There are lots of tracking shots of brave little children struggling through a snow-scattered wasteland or scenes where someone moves from A to B across a wide-shot field, where you can see scraps of retro-future buildings looming in the distance. But the dialogue is minimal, and bad when it happens; throughout, you get the feeling I assume most of my lecturers had at university, reading an essay that struggled to flesh out the last third of the word count – very little of substance, padded out so much as to be absurd.

Illustrative point: there is a moment in episode four where a grandfather shows his grandson a sort of big rusty egg thing in the middle of a field. “Look at that,” he says. The grandson can see it. We, the viewer, can see it. But still I had to endure a 20-second shot of them walking over to it, in silence, for the rest of the scene (which was bad) to commence. I am trying to squeeze a bite-sized jolt of entertainment into the scant hours I have between finishing work and going to sleep. Don’t waste my time. Edit every episode down to a five-minute synopsis, and then we can talk.