"Night Sky."

Amazon Prime drops that rare hybrid -- a show about old people and sci-fi -- with two Oscar winners in J.K. Simmons and Sissy Spacek. What does the Two Episode Test tell us about it?

One of the great pleasures in culture is “surprise discovery.” And what I mean by that is not, “I read online that Writer X has an amazing new book out so I read four reviews and looked at her Instagram and Twitter pages and I can’t wait to read it now.”

No, that’s just discovery. That’s just research. That’s going down a rabbit hole, after you’ve been alerted there’s a hole.

“Surprise discovery” is, shifting art forms, walking into a museum because they have a great gift shop and cafe, finding out today is a free day for everyone, then wandering the floors and having your mind blown by two or three artists you’d previously never even heard about.

“Surprise discovery” is, if we get in the way-back machine, driving alone and hearing a song on the radio from a band you’ve never heard before that changes your life. Back to the original metaphor, it’s going into the bookstore to buy that book by Writer X you read about and leaving, instead, with three different books you’d never heard about, flipped through the pages, and decided you needed to have on your bedside table (or book nook?) immediately.

And so it was that I sat down Thursday night to watch something and chose Amazon Prime as the place to start and stumbled upon “Night Sky,” which basically got dropped that night, as in, last night. Fans of “Counterpart” already know that they should watch anything J.K. Simmons is in, up to and including his insurance commercials, so having featured “Counterpart” in our Box Set television club I figured, “Oh, hell yes. I”ll watch this. And Sissy Spacek is in it. OK, sure.”

What I didn’t do was use Google, even though I wondered when the hell this thing premiered — and if you’ve been reading this Substack for more than a week, you’ll know the answer to that, for me, could have easily been “sometime in late 2019.”

Ah, but it wasn’t. It was last night, aka May 19. Great. I’ll watch this. In fact, how convenient, I’ll watch two episodes and write about the Two Episode Test (my great, flawed, but useful concept that I am apparently going to keep doing).