Arrested Development fans not the only ones stuck on the watch, rinse and repeat cycle

Zevon liked to watch the same movies and TV shows over and over again.

It was one manifestation of his OCD, a condition which certainly plagued him yet could not excuse his behaviour. On the upside, it enabled the hellraiser to bond with fellow sufferer Billy Bob Thornton.

Really wish I'd been there.

Our lot fall more into the lazy category, a situation where workplace comedies have become the streaming equivalent of comfort food; an all-too-easy after-school malaise.

Brain in low gear, as their grandfather would say.

Despite all the premium content around, we continue, under sufferance, to check in regularly with the employees of Dunder Mifflin Paper Company, the public servants of the Pawnee Parks Department and the cops of the NYPD's 99th Precinct.

The Office, Parks and Recreation and Brooklyn 99 are silly and powerfully hypnotic programs which draw you into their insidious orbit. You emerge from a viewing as if blundering from the clutches of a fairy ring; re-entering the world to find everyone else is several years older and a headstone marks your empty grave.

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When it comes to our 13-year-old, however, none of these shows can match the gravitational pull of the Harry Potter franchise.

She'd watch these films under water, breathing with the aid of Gillyweed, of course (I shouldn't know what Gillyweed is, but I do, because Harry bloody Potter is always on the TV).

There was much consternation when the films suddenly exited the streaming platforms to which we subscribe. DVDs were purchased as a replacement, a nifty and permanent solution, one would think, to this gaping hole in our deprived child's life. Unfortunately, the physical effort of inserting a 15-gram plastic disc into the cobwebbed machine sitting forlornly on the TV cabinet seemed to rob Harry of his magic and he vanished (under the Cloak of Invisibility) from our screens.

Several months later, however, the young wizard was back, more powerful than ever. Two platforms, count them, two, began running the films and our child, in Hogwarts heaven, resumed her crummy routine.

Butterbeer for everyone! (kill me).

The abject fear to which our household was subjected when those films became inexplicably unavailable seems akin to the anxiety being felt by fans of American comedy series Arrested Development, which Netflix will reportedly be jettisoning next month.

The move is baffling given the platform was responsible for reviving the Emmy-award-winning show after it was cancelled by Fox in 2006. Netflix funded a fourth and a (novelistic, yet inferior) fifth season and garnered deep appreciation from those who, quite rightly, knew Mitchell Hurwitz's creation deserved more love.

Now, all that revived content, along with those earlier seasons, will be harder to access, living in our memories, on YouTube and within the 17 billion DVDs gathering dust on the shelves of JB Hi-Fi.

The outcry would suggest my children aren't alone when it comes to the repeat-viewing trap and that subscribers feel betrayed when quality content is consigned by committee to limbo.

Of course, rumours of death in the streaming age are often exaggerated and there is every chance Netflix will grant a stay of execution before Arrested Development even has the chance to be picked up by another platform, proving the law of conservation of energy applies to ageing streaming content as much as it does to physics.

But the case also highlights the ephemeral nature of what we watch, that which struts and frets its hour on the screen and then is heard no more. It's a parlous state which feels only exacerbated by streaming; as conga lines of content march their way past our eyeballs into the dustbin of history, an existential receptacle in which, let's be honest, much of it belongs.

As the cultural value of our creative history becomes more apparent, the movement to rediscover, preserve and catalogue so-called "lost films" is gaining momentum.

It's believed 75 per cent of all silent films are gone for good, a tragedy, and while the fleeting misplacement of a 21st-century comedy from a streaming platform may pale compared with the irretrievable loss of a 20th-century celluloid masterpiece, we are reminded that sometimes it's worth backing up with your own precious hard copies.

Like my Warren Zevon CDs.