I cannot watch “Black Mirror” anymore. Its metaphors have grown stale, its winks are now klaxons and its messages — once distorted and eerie — now land with a thud. The same holds true for most so-called “prestige” television, from the violent, misogynist dystopia of “The Handmaid’s Tale” to the violent, misogynist dystopia of “Westworld.” They feel inevitable and manipulative, and watching them does nothing but intensify my already simmering anxieties — which I suspect is the point. So nowadays, when the kitchen is clean and the cats are fed and my brain is on its downward spiral toward sleep, all I want to do is sink into the couch and turn on “House Hunters,” a show about a specific kind of darkness I have complete control in avoiding. It provides all the thrill of a dystopian hellscape with none of the fear.

“House Hunters” is on HGTV, a channel whose mission is to make all Americans not only want to own a home but also to be perpetually dissatisfied with it once they do. Over the past decade, the network’s slate of personality-driven home-improvement shows — “Property Brothers,” “Flip or Flop” and “Fixer Upper” — has made it the ninth-most-popular channel on basic cable. The faces of these shows are on morning shows and lifestyle brands and the covers of tabloid magazines. But “House Hunters,” which has been broadcast since 1999, remains its purest, most magnetic property.

Instead of a host yearning for celebrity, there is only a soothing, nameless narrator who functions as a Greek chorus to support the rotating cast of laymen who populate the screen. Each episode follows a tidy formula: Potential home buyers, usually a couple, tour and critique three homes (and, inevitably, each other) while a real estate agent looks on. By the end of each episode, they decide on one of the three and put in an offer; a home, any home, is always purchased — that’s the point. Suddenly, through the magic of video editing, the homeowners’ things materialize, and the show fades to black before the home has the chance to disappoint its new occupants. Every episode I’ve seen (there are nearly 2,000) is a thrilling cultural artifact, a tiny parable about the way we romanticize the stresses of modern American life and pile on more in hopes of assuaging those festering below.

Recently I watched a young couple look for their first home in Cincinnati. Matt, a dapper toothpaste salesman, and his wife, Kim, a soft-spoken physical therapist, seemed helplessly in love with each other, but the hunt quickly turned passive-aggressive. He wanted a move-in-ready Craftsman or a Cape Cod; she wanted a historic Victorian that begged for renovations. He set the max at $400,000, but she felt they could spend more. With every opened door — and the host of surprises behind each — they were reminded that no house could possibly compare with whatever each of them had imagined. Eventually they settled on something neither really wanted in the first place: a Craftsman for $389,900 that needed a new kitchen and substantial cosmetic improvements to nearly every room. In the final sequence, we see Matt applying a layer of paint to an old door frame. “Sure happy we bought a house that requires all this work,” he says, a hint of sadness in his voice.