This Bad-Vibes-TV Moment Needs to End

First came a 40-minute, mostly wordless episode of television that seemed designed to replicate a character’s traumatized, fracturing psyche. Second: a courtroom procedural punctuated with bizarre dream sequences and misleading fantasies. Then a prestige series threw in a Freudian vision of a character having sex with his own mother. Lately, TV has felt to me like one long bad trip, a season of moody episodic rhapsodies that eschew the conventional architecture of narrative for something more subliminal, and more disturbing.