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It’s a sentimental story about love, work and friendship, meaningfully set against the backdrop of gaming — a subject which fiction too often treats as a narrative gimmick, objective correlative or some other transient device.

Auden once said, “to this day, I have never understood exactly what the objective correlative is.”

That suggests “Top Chef: Portland” is the TV series that not only handled COVID-19 restrictions to finest effect but may also be the perfect objective correlative of our pandemic year more broadly.

“In a sophomore English class he’d taken at Park High, Mrs. Defrain was always going on about the objective correlative,” Wink writes, following a string of his own beautiful descriptions exemplifying just that concept.

In “Homeland’s” case, it’s not for lack of material; if anything, as we approach 20 years of the war on terror, the series’ continued relevance has become an objective correlative of the conflict’s endlessness.