In the past five to ten years, television and I have drifted farther and farther apart, like a childhood friend that I just don’t see eye-to-eye with anymore. I used to balk at the “Kill your television” bumper sticker my high school physics teacher had posted on his bulletin board, but recently, I find myself ready to tell people just that.

There’s a lot of reasons to dislike television that are pretty uncontroversial: constant advertising and product placement, gossip and fear-mongering dressed up as news, wave after wave of reality and talk shows. But those all amount to criticisms of content, and in discussions with TV defenders, I hear again and again about what they feel are shining paragons of artistic expression. They’ll admit that much of the television spectrum is garbage and filler, and even that some of it is active poison, but they will still defend what they think of as the Good Shows. Gripping, critically acclaimed drama’s and inventive comedy that can’t be matched on the big screen.

But I think there’s a fundamental flaw with the format of television itself that rarely gets addressed, and it has to do with the episodic nature of television programming. It’s because of this that I feel the worst films are still better than the best television shows. In a word: they end.

A film tells a story. Like any story, there’s a conflict, some tension, and a resolution. A well executed film will carry the viewer along that path emotionally, which is why a great film can feel so viscerally rewarding. When the resolution arrives, it brings with it relief to your own internal tension that you experienced right along with the protagonist.

In many television shows, especially dramas, which the TV apologists like to point to as the hallmarks of artistic bravery in the medium, that resolution is withheld from you. The central conflict of the show’s overarching plot will not be resolved this week. If the show’s successful enough to get another season, it probably won’t even be resolved this year.

That point is at once the format’s greatest strength (financially) and it’s greatest detriment. This story will stay with you, unresolved, in the back of your mind after you step away from the television and try to rejoin the real world. Those unanswered questions are like fishhooks in your psyche, pulling you back next week. When your mind is idle, instead of falling back to unanswered questions in real life, it will go back to the questions created in this fantasy universe.

What’s more disturbing is, in a very real sense, there are probably parts of your brain that don’t know that the story is fictional. A well told story engages the mind on an emotional level. Each of us knows experientially that our rational, conscious mind can distinguish the borders between the real world and the world of a story, but what makes us so sure that our emotional minds are that self-aware?

As an example, we’ve all experienced how anxiety-inducing those “To be continued” cards can be at the end of a television show. It can be something even the conscious mind can be actively anxious about. When you glance at the clock and you see that there’s only three minutes left, and you know they can’t resolve this plot in that amount of time, you begin to dread the “To be continued” that you know is inevitable. You won’t get that emotional payoff of a resolution tonight. In fact, it’s at least a week away.

This is a psychological effect of television that is specifically avoided by film, simply by the nature of the medium. Most stories won’t continue beyond a single two-hour sitting. And in the rare occasions that they do, they’re typically resolved in one or two more sittings. But in modern television shows, the effect grows stronger with each decade. Story arcs are getting intentionally longer, stretching out over the course of a season or even an entire series. The most conscious example of this to date is probably Lost. I’ll admit, I never watched the show, but I’m familiar with the basic outline and concept. This was a single mystery that unfolded over the course of six years. Millions of people spent six years of their lives with some part of their brain (however small) constantly concerned over the ongoing mysteries of an island and a group of people who never existed.

Episodic fiction is, of course, an industrial age invention. Charles Dickens famously employed it to great (financial) success. But there is absolute no artistically valid reason to structure fiction this way; the sole motivator is profit. Stretch the story out in installments, and make the reader (or in TV’s case, the advertisers) pay for each one individually.

But there’s a remarkable difference between visual media and written language. Visual media are more than simple fictions. They are experienced with more senses than the universe of a novel, which exists only in the readers mind, not before their eyes. There are likely animal parts of your mind that have no idea you’re safe when your eyes are ears are receiving so many manufactured indicators of danger. Or sorrow. Or anxiety.

Could the rise of depression and other mental disorders in the last 60 years be related to the rise of television during the same period? Could all this misplaced first world anxiety and malaise be caused by whole nations of people walking around with unresolved, manufactured conflicts in their backs of their minds? It’s conjecture,admittedly (I’ve never seen any studies on the effects of television on mental illness), but the extrapolation at least warrants some consideration.

So, if the episodic nature of television programming is fiscally maximized by intentionally embedding unresolved conflicts in programs, and if the persistence of these unresolved conflicts in our minds after the program ends could be a source of anxiety in our real lives, it follows that television is intentionally destroying our mental health for profit. That seems like a pretty valid reason to kill your television.