1. They are expensive

2. They take up a lot of space on the shelf.

3. They are for middle class people to lay around watching for hours at the weekend, and then bore everybody at work about how good Borgen/The Killing/ some other European shite was.

The Bridge: someeone somewhere will be heralding this as the greatest Danish crime drama since the last great crime Danish drama

4. They take away the immediacy of watching a program broadcast for the first time and encourage people to wait until the release of the DVD, thus rendering the cliffhangers completely unnecessary (a cliffhanger only works if you have to wait, ideally a week until the next installment. Charles Dickens , when he wrote Household works, was well aware of this.

5. There are far too many of them. Nowadays, any show, regardless of whether they’re any good, is given a DVD box set release. This is fine when its Mad Men, not so good  when we are talking about the Real Housewives of Orange County.

6. They are already on TV anyway, repeated ad nauseum.

7. The excruciating question asked by a serious box-set watcher:

‘I’ve just finished watching The Killing/Homelands/The Wire. What box-set shall I watch next?”  There is no sensible answer to give to this question.    

8. Anyway, I didn’t grow up with them. There are other ways to watch TV.