Oh, new Netflix teen drama The Society, how I love thee! Let me count the ways. There’s:

The highly derivative high concept

Let’s face it: we’re quite late in human history and all the good ideas have gone. Who needs constant innovation, anyway? Sometimes a gal just wants to kick back and relax. We need, absolutely, this tale of a group of high-schoolers (played, as hath been traditional unto the days of Dawson’s Creek and Beverly Hills 90210, by actors in their mid-20s) who arrive back in their New England hometown after a school trip to find that their parents, and every other non-buff, non-16-year-old soul has disappeared. Dum-dum-DAH!

It’s Stephen King’s Under the Dome meets the CW’s The 100 meets Michael Grant’s Gone series meets Lost meets The Breakfast Club (everything teenage meets The Breakfast Club, still, even if it appears to 2019’s adolescents as Casablanca did to us) meets a billion other things, with Lord of the Flies waiting in the wings. It’s a sci-fi Dawson’s Creek, a supernatural Pretty Little Liars. It doesn’t matter – take your pick!

Watch the trailer for The Society

The people

Who aren’t people. They are algorithms. Blond or brunette ciphers with diverse skintones, each allocated one defining characteristic or secret sorrow. In a main character, the two may be skilfully entwined. Cassandra, for example, has a Secret Heart Defect. Fortunately, brunette Gordie’s defining characteristic is noticing when girls he secretly likes go blue under stress. He is always around to help.

Just to put your minds at rest, there are also jocks, mean girls, rebels without a cause, good Christians, party girls with hearts and hymens of gold and – of course – nerds holed up in the library trying to figure out what the hell is going on and make the jocks understand that a finite food supply in the supermarket is Not A Good Thing.

The shameless illogic

• The phones that work only to let the characters communicate with each other.

• The absence of panic with which these abandoned teenagers greet their situation.

• The mysterious appearance and disappearance of graffiti around town assuring them that they are being judged in pretty much biblical fashion.

• The unfailingly clean, ironed clothes and full makeup for all.

• The lack of even the slightest attempt to clear the trees and bushes that are blocking the road out of town.

Good! I have enough detail in my life. I don’t need it in my art.

The inexplicable fondness arising

There is something endearing about a programme so carefully and competently engineered to be not one iota better than it needs to be. It’s soothing to watch something run so efficiently, to know that not an ounce of effort, vision or budget has been uselessly expended, that no one’s life’s work is being set loose to roam the brutal TV landscape like a fragile gazelle, that no hearts are going to be broken, whatever ratings it does. We are free to enjoy or not, and I am grateful.

And finally …

There’s the suspected pregnancy, the golden boy who’s nastier than he looks and the nasty boy who’s nicer than he seems; the dramatic unexpected death; the eventual realisation of which older stars it is the youngsters remind one of (Allie is a dead ringer for Virginia Madsen; Cassandra is Sarah Paulson); the rigorous hewing to the pathetic fallacy as legitimate dramatic device. All of this and more makes for a brilliantly average, perfectly imperfect show for bouncing teens, cankered fortysomethings and nothing in between. A joy.