It is not easy to quit a series you once loved, but in the age of peak TV, there is no time for hate-watching shows that no longer rock your boat

When I’m on my deathbed, surrounded by people I love, I know the regrets that will flash through my mind. I’ll regret trying to grow my hair out as a teenager. I’ll regret spending so much time on dishwasher comparison websites. But most of all – and I guarantee that this will happen – I will regret sticking with Westworld.

Because I am still watching Westworld. Even though it is airless and overblown. Even though it is 75% smugger than it needs to be. Even though I don’t care a jot about any of its characters or mysteries. Even though the entire series annoys the ever-living hell out of me. I am still there, watching the bloody thing out of a sense of grimly resigned duty. Because, hey, I’ve watched this much so far. Westworld has become a sunk cost. There is no getting out of it now.

And I suspect this is the case around the world. I have yet to meet a person – a real flesh-and-blood person, who does not work in television or get paid to write Westworld recaps – who can summon even a hint of excitement about it. Westworld’s entire audience, I am certain, is made up of people who sit there idly checking their phones during episodes because they’re still on the fence about formally giving up.

I think I can feel the start of something similar happening with The Handmaid’s Tale. What started off as something timely and necessary has given way to out-and-out torture porn. The first episode of the second series – which variously included muzzling, nooses, freezing, chaining, burning and graphic, closeup self-mutilation – was essentially one liquidised pig’s carcass away from becoming Saw III: The Series. The Handmaid’s Tale is now so relentlessly grim, so spectacularly, queasily bleak, that it overwhelms any point it might be trying to make. I would be much happier if I gave up on it now and never looked back. But guess what? I am still here, because it is a big important show, and that apparently overrides whether or not I like it.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The Handmaid’s Tale … is it torture porn? Photograph: George Kraychyk/Hulu

This is not to say that I am entirely hamstrung by apathy. There have been a couple of moments this year where I have victoriously given up on a programme. The first was Amazon’s The Crossing, billed as The New Lost, but which ended up being a honking great mess of too many ingredients hurled at the screen with a shrug. Yes, it might have taken five episodes for me to get there, but turning to my wife at the conclusion of another hour of nothingy bullshit and asking “Do you actually want to keep watching this?” felt like a moment of genuine triumph. Same goes for BBC One’s’s Hard Sun, which I bailed from two episodes in because I’m only human.

There was a time when I would have persevered more aggressively with these programmes. I might have even made a sport of it, turning Westworld into a hate-watch endurance test, gleefully yelling at the TV whenever Jeffrey Wright murmurs another faux-intellectual phrase with all the pretend idiot profundity his stupid robot body can muster. But what is the point, when there are dozens of better shows I could be watching instead? Or a new show that I would otherwise never get around to watching? To hate-watch Westworld in 2018 would be even more self-indulgent than Westworld itself, if you can imagine such a thing.

So here I am, trapped in purgatory. This is what I want to know: at what point do you summon the courage to give up on a show? Is there a tipping point, a moment of no return, where you can happily cash in your chips and move on from a series you no longer enjoy? If there is, for God’s sake tell me, because I would love nothing more than to stop watching Westworld and The Handmaid’s Tale. I won’t stop watching them, obviously, but I would love to.