From movies to gyms to holidays, we all love handing out a star rating. Joel Golby explains why – and reviews his life over the past week

Humans are compelled to review. The five-star and 10-point rating systems just make implicit sense to us, each number having its own gravity and texture that can be transposed on to a gut-feeling or opinion. So, last night’s dinner: what was that? I had a sort of dal and paratha thing that I’d put at about 7/10 (it was nice, but 8 feels too much). Obviously Dune: Part Two was a five-star movie whereas Dune was maybe only a four.

But we are powerfully swayed by other people’s reviews, too. I am forever in some area of London, not knowing where I am or what I want to eat, squinting at Google Maps through raindrops, deciding whether I want to eat at the 4.4-rated pizza place or the 4.3-rated Vietnamese place. Entire evenings of my life have been shaped by the aggregated internet review culture of Rotten Tomatoes telling me one streaming-service film is slightly better than another. I have blindly bought fragrances, books and music just based on what 1,000 or so anonymous reviewers sort of rated each one out of five. The number out of five having an experience pipeline is an intrinsic part of our lives.

Downey Jr dons bald caps and gnaws cigars to have the most fun imaginable in Park Chan-wook’s inspired espionage show. Believe the hype!

The problem with a hype show, of course, is the “getting excited about it” part. Oh, a big-budget HBO series based on the Pulitzer prize-winning novel by Viet Thanh Nguyen? A cleverly blank spy-with-a-brain-not-just-a-small-gun performance from Hoa Xuande and a knowing I’m-the-cheekiest-person-at-this-party turn from Sandra Oh? Robert Downey Jr, fresh from that impeccable Oscar acceptance speech, having the most fun possible with a host of increasingly extravagant characters? Directed with glee and style by Park Chan-wook? If life has taught me anything it is this: when something sounds too good to be true, it normally is. There is no way The Sympathizer can live up to that.

Except, well, hmm. I’m starting to suspect this might be one of those cosmic occurrences where TV just gets everything right. The Sympathizer (Monday, 9pm, Sky Atlantic) starts in Vietnam, and dips back there regularly – we follow Xuande’s anonymous Captain, both as he attempts to flee a collapsing Saigon and as he settles into a refugee community in Los Angeles (and as he tries to tell the story of what happened by scrawling it down in a prison cell), and the timeline jumps around a lot, and satisfyingly. There are a lot of little fold-out cameras in interior pockets, a lot of people on quiet car journeys revealing a dark long-held secret and looking into eyes for clues of disloyalty, a lot of coded messages daubed in invisible ink.

Long-distance couples meet for the first time, including a pair who started out in a Game of Thrones roleplay chatroom. It is bizarre but strangely sweet to witness

When the internet was invented nobody used their real names on it, and I am starting to wonder if breaking that covenant was a mistake. “Starting to wonder” – correction, I am fully sure that was an error. We need to go back to usernames – xX_tha_0rin0c0_Xx, that sort of thing – and anonymity and no webcams and, ideally, screeching 56k modems. The internet is too fast, too accessible, too always-on. Our phones can suck internet out of the sky and the idea of “logging off” is extinct. I am planning to start one of those one-topic political parties that always get obliterated at London mayoral elections about this, by the way, so keep your eyes out.

Anyway. As we all know, what Channel 4 excels at is documentaries that can be described as “sweet but weird”, and this week The Nevermets starts (Friday 24 May, 10pm), which is a classic of the genre. The Nevermets follows a series of, as narrator Dawn French keeps describing them, “ordinary Brits”, as they look at their phone screens and smile in bed. This is because they are all in love with someone across the world who they met in a chatroom or on Snapchat, or from extended Instagram or Facebook conversations, and – despite, in many cases, the couples professing to be in love with each other – they have never actually, you know, met. So we get to see them meet.