The most popular narrative TV form of the last couple of years grew out of an attempt to avoid those yowls of disappointment. “True Detective,” “Fargo,” and Ryan Murphy’s trailblazing “American Horror Story” provide a story that reboots each season, which, at least in theory, should lower viewers’ investments to less mania-inducing levels and reduce the creative degree of difficulty at the same time. (Another more practical reason that the format has come into vogue: It’s easier to sign on a Matthew McConaughey or a Billy Bob Thornton when they only need to commit to one season.) “A lot of my frustration with serialized storytelling is a lot of shows don’t have a third act. They have an endless second act, and then they find out it’s their last year,” Nic Pizzolatto told an interviewer last year, explaining why he was doing something different with “True Detective.” “I wanted to tell something with a complete story, with a beginning, a middle, and an end.” But ironically, these hybrids put even more expectation on a tidy ending. And when a show breaks that contract, it can be even more infuriating—a prime example being the mystical scene at the end of the first season of “True Detective,” in which McConaughey and Woody Harrelson sit in a hospital parking lot, contemplating the battle of “light versus dark.” (So it went with the podcast “Serial,” which borrowed both its set up—“our hope is that it’ll play like a great HBO or Netflix series,”—and the inevitable fan letdown from the new breed of TV dramas.)

While the serial-miniseries mashups tease followers with a payoff that never comes, the recent British import “Black Mirror” has found a way to let itself off the hook. As a modern-day “Twilight Zone,” the sophisticated sci-fi drama harks directly back to the anthologies of television’s first golden age, deviating from the serialized blueprint of almost any other so-called quality drama of the last two decades. Equal parts melancholy and macabre, every episode of “Black Mirror” consists of a standalone story that begins and ends within the hour, linked to the rest of the season only by a shared aesthetic and point-of-view. The show drops us into an uncanny, near-future world to follow a premise to its often surprising end. In a second-season episode, a grieving widow subscribes to software that uses old emails, social media updates, and online photos to produce an idealized version of her dead husband. She is overjoyed to have him back—until she comes to see the doppelgänger as a sub-human half-servant, half-spouse, and winds up stowing him in the attic.

Then there is “High Maintenance,” the gold standard for Web series, currently in what the show calls its fifth “cycle” on the online-video platform Vimeo. Created on a shoestring budget by husband-and-wife Ben Sinclair and Katja Blichfeld, the show has only one regular character, if you can call him that: a gangly, bearded weed deliveryman. “The guy” is played by Sinclair and has no name; he’s merely a device. Each episode is about one of his customers, a constellation of lonely, needy, neurotic New Yorkers. There’s a couple driven crazy by their Airbnb guests, a comedian with PTSD, an asexual magician in his first year as a public-school teacher. (A few customers recur in multiple episodes, but only in the background.) Some installments take place in real time; others span months. Some are uproariously funny and some have a wistful irony to them. Some end with a punchline, but none result in what would be considered a traditional resolution. Watch a few of the six- to 18-minute installments, and you realize that you won’t get to find out what happens to these people when your brief time with them concludes. And so you stop asking. Without the suggestion of a dramatic pay off, the real drama lives in the ellipses. A pleasant ambiguity is built into the experience.

Most shows are best enjoyed the same way. An episode of “Mad Men” isn’t one more chapter toward an eventual conclusion; it’s an hour-long exploration of a theme, using the memories viewers have accumulated to produce a more potent response. Years later, “Lost” may not recommend itself as an intricately plotted mystery, but it holds up well if watched as a collection of character studies and pulp thrills. The emotional punch of its best episodes are still there: long-lost lovers, rekindled marriages, a paralyzed man stepping out of a wheelchair for the first time.

The water-cooler series of this golden age of television have taught us to look forward to that one final, stirring scene—but those final scenes were never really the point. The single-serving show might coax us into being better viewers, paying more attention to a show’s texture than to trying to predict its conclusion. They remind us of the folly of letting the pleasure of anticipation get in the way of the pleasure of what’s onscreen right now.

