You can have the most expensive cable or satellite subscription available and still not have access to everything out there to watch on television. Having cable AND Netflix AND Hulu AND Amazon Prime is the bare minimum of what’s expected if you want to be in on the pop culture conversation.

Trying to have access to everything can mess with your head. Just a few highlights of my confusion:

- I’ve got CBS on a local basic cable subscription for (insert generic procedural show here), but if I want to watch their new “Star Trek” series I’ll need the streaming app CBS All Access and six extra bucks a month.

- I can watch some FX shows on Hulu Plus, but not necessarily FXX shows, and I still don’t know which one of those provides new episodes of “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia.”

- Amazon Prime offers some HBO shows but not all the seasons, and forget about watching “Game of Thrones” there – you need an HBO GO subscription or just regular HBO or maybe both, I don’t know. If I can’t figure out where to watch it, how am I ever going to understand the dragon-speak in the actual show?

TV is too much to handle. There are countless channels with their own original programming, and Netflix wants to top all of them by releasing what seems like a new show each week. They release all the episodes at once and act like it’s a courtesy to me. You’re not being generous, Netflix, you’re just intimidating me.

I watched and enjoyed the first season of “Daredevil” on Netflix. Now I’ve got “Jessica Jones,” “Luke Cage,” “Daredevil” season two, “Iron Fist” and “The Defenders,” then I’ll be all caught up on their Marvel shows. Just 60 hours of TV and I can finally join the nerd conversation again. I miss the nerd conversation.

The kids programming is even more intimidating. Back when I was young, a couple of channels provided a consistent block of cartoons. Nickelodeon pitched me a portioned plate of “Doug,” Rugrats,” “Ren & Stimpy” and “Rocko’s Modern Life.” The local Fox station gave me a morning block of “Darkwing Duck” and “Goof Troop,” then an afternoon of “Animaniacs” and “Tiny Toon Adventures.” There was simplicity to the schedule, and it didn’t matter if there were reruns. You watched it anyway, and the episodes seemed to get better the more you were familiar with them.

Netflix now has more original kids programming than any other entity in the world – shows and specials that are impossible to track unless you let the Netflix app oversee the shows and episodes it thinks your kids want to watch.

No point in trying to keep track of it – you’ve got talking car shows, talking construction car shows, talking dinosaur shows, talking construction car dinosaur shows, and that’s just covering a fraction of the things my four-year-old son likes.

Prior to this golden-age content explosion, television was something that could unify people of different backgrounds. Just a few years ago, you could talk to pretty much anyone on the planet so long as you had watched “Breaking Bad.” It was the last show everyone seemed to see – no matter their social standing or how they voted. Everyone had an opinion on the “Seinfeld” finale, and even people who didn’t watch “American Idol” had a preference between Clay Aiken and Ruben Studdard.

I’ve never even heard of some of the shows people bring up now. My own wife says words to me like “Stitchers” and “Shadowhunters,” and I just keep asking her if that “X-Files” revival ever happened (it did – more than a year ago).

I haven’t been consistently hooked on a new drama series since the birth of our first child six years ago. I did watch “Westworld” last fall, and it took real commitment just to get through even one episode without falling asleep midway through. Even murderous robots in cowboy hats couldn’t compete with the exhaustion of chasing four children around the house for 12 straight hours.

So I’ve given up. Ask me if I’ve seen so-and-so and I’ll just shrug and say, “Nah, I’ve been meaning to catch up with that one.”

If you want to talk TV, I’ve still got plenty of thoughts on any single episode of “Lost,” “The West Wing,” “The Good Wife,” “Psych,” “The Office” and “Parks & Recreation.” You want a real nostalgia trip, ask me which DVD you can find a certain episode of “Batman the Animated Series.”

But asking me about a new Netflix show or a YouTube Channel or some random web series won’t get you anywhere. I know when I’ve been beat.

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Tyler Wilson can be reached at twilson@cdapress.com