My conclusion, after watching a bunch of recent TV series, is that SFX started to fork in the mid-’80s. That was when it began to supplant pretty much everything else in the production of many films: not just minor issues like writing and acting but big things like budget. But that’s given way to something else entirely, which I’ll call MFX, for metaphysical effects. An obvious example is The Matrix, where art direction becomes metaphysics. But there was something disciplined about that version; since then, I’m seeing more and more stuff where nothing coherent is happening except visual effects that serve to move from plot points A to B, make some woolly proposal, or dissolve some distinction we more or less took for granted.