Making sense of what’s going on with television these days, even for those of us who write about it, can feel like going rafting with a rake. No matter how hard you paddle, you’re still barreling toward a cliff.

So it was on an afternoon this spring when, feeling optimistic, I clicked an article about the dispute between the Hollywood groups representing screenwriters and agents, which had set the television industry on edge. Each paragraph — on the inscrutable mechanics of “packaging fees” and production stakes — intensified that familiar cliff’s-edge feeling. I closed the tab.

But the next day I caught a lifeline. It was an episode of “The Watch,” a TV and pop culture podcast from The Ringer, hosted by Chris Ryan and Andy Greenwald. Greenwald, the former television critic at The Ringer’s predecessor Grantland, is now a screenwriter himself and creator of the coming USA Network series “Briarpatch.” On the podcast, Greenwald broke down the writer-agent conflict in about 30 seconds, using his own recent experience with deal packaging to describe the controversial practice in terms that were coherent, succinct and personal. Then, it was on to regularly scheduled recaps of “Veep” and “Barry.”

Few other entertainment podcasts could naturally cover TV from so many angles at once. But for Greenwald and “The Watch,” it’s become routine. All year, the show has held open an unusually intimate window on the modern television factory, as what began in 2016 as a twice-weekly conversation show featuring two best friends — an update of their Grantland podcast, “Hollywood Prospectus,” which ran from 2012 until the site shuttered in 2015 — has evolved into a kind of experiment in improvised immersive journalism.