Westworld may have made me like TV again. It’s not that I hated television—it’s just that I’ve been exhausted by it. I’ve rambled on about this before, expressing a weariness with the demands of the current television landscape, its massive requirements of time and attention and encyclopedic mental capacity. It’s a problem anyone who’s ever spent half an hour scrolling through Netflix and then just given up knows all too well: there’s so much to watch, such an embarrassment of options, that it kinda puts you off watching any of it. Or at least it does for me. There are times when I wonder if I didn’t have to watch TV for work, if I’d watch any of it at all. (Other than House Hunters, of course.) Sure, that would mean missing out on great shows like Insecure and The People v. O.J. Simpson, but it would also mean not having to slog through hour after hour of gloomy Marvel shows while they meander toward something resembling a plot.

Part of this aversion is, yes, just a symptom of the “too much TV” thing we’ve all talked about ad nauseum. But there’s a deeper, more personal factor at work too—one that, in a surprising way, Westworld has helped to address. One reason I resist television, and am often annoyed by the fandom culture surrounding it, is that TV is so often unsatisfying. How many truly great multiple-season television shows have there been, ones that have not been riven with disappointments as they’ve ambled to a close? It’s extremely rare! A perfect show from start to finish may be asking too much of TV. Imperfections are a part of art, after all. But knowing that intellectually doesn’t do much to mitigate the rawer feeling that you’ve wasted a lot of time after your favorite show lets you down. Have that feeling enough, and it becomes hard to love again.

Six years ago, Lost broke my heart; I haven’t recoverd from that slow and terrible betrayal. There are plenty of shows I think are better than Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse’s maddening mystery machine. There are more accomplished pieces of work. But there really hasn’t been a show I’ve cared about as much I did Lost. Its ascendancy, starting in 2004 with one of the greatest first seasons of network television ever made, dovetailed perfectly, and dangerously, with the rise of the recap and the deep-dive. An Entertainment Weekly–fueled synergy turned being a Lost fan into an obsessive, immersive, around-the-clock experience. It made hopeless addicts of so many of us, and then, like most drugs do, it failed us.

It was a gradual disaster. But by the show’s bitterly disillusioning final season—both senselessly overstuffed and stultifyingly simple—it was clear that we’d all been fools to pin so many hopes on Lost, to have spent so many bleary-eyed hours glued to fan sites, poring over intricate theories about philosophers and quantum physics. The Lost letdown was profound, and I think it hardened my heart against series television. It made me sure that deep investment would only result in disappointment. So I’ve kept most television at an aloof distance ever since; I’ve been entertained and appreciative, but only mildly engaged.

Then along came Westworld. Though by no means a perfect show—and one with more than its share of problematic violence—Lisa Joy and Jonathan Nolan’s sinister and spellbinding invention has roped me like no show since Lost. The thoroughness of its world, and the sharp hook of its mysteries, quickly enveloped me. Soon, I found myself back on the Internet, reading recap after recap, theory after theory, diving into the show with a sort of witless zeal. Witless because it has to let us down eventually, doesn’t it? Stop reading here if you haven’t yet seen the show’s Season 1 finale, “The Bicameral Mind.”

With Anthony Hopkins’s devious, omniscient Robert Ford seemingly dead and gone, the show will lose some of its defining calm and alluring menace, won’t it? And with the central mystery of consciousness somewhat solved—we at least know what the maze is now, and what it means—can the show really continue to combine moody and probing philosophy of the mind with more traditional thrills? It’s likely the show can’t sustain what it managed to do for these first 10 gripping and entrancing episodes.