LONDON — I’ve recently been struck by how much following British politics reminds me of watching “Lost,” the long-running TV series from the early 2000s. The show was about a group of plane-crash survivors and was built on a bewildering structure of flashbacks, flash-forwards and, by Season 6, flash-sidewayses. It featured mysterious number sequences, a “smoke monster” and constant references to the philosophers of the early Enlightenment, the significance of which you later had to trawl internet discussion forums to understand.

The tone was one of desperate urgency, and every episode ended on a cliffhanger. There were about 400 important characters. If you missed a week, it was almost impossible to catch up, but somehow nothing really changed throughout the show’s 121 episodes. Each involved the same group of people abandoned on an island, trying to think their way out of the mistake their pilot had made in Episode 1.

Writing about Brexit, for a journalist, is simultaneously frenetic, heady and dull. The dial fluctuates crazily, but by the end of the day it is often in the same place it was at the start. “It’s an endless stream of anticlimax,” a reporter told me. “Almost every day promises to be a grand, important day in our country’s history, but most of them come to nothing.” The public, meanwhile, grows increasingly bored and uninterested in us, ever more ready to turn the page or change the channel. A version of this dynamic has been in place for more than two years now, but within the last week it reached new heights.

The week started out promisingly enough for journalists hoping for something new to write about. It was the week, in theory, that Parliament was finally going to vote yes or no on a withdrawal agreement from the European Union, a deal 20 months in the making, the negotiations over which have been followed in painstaking detail.