Thank heaven for summer TV (without it, what would tired brains do?)

We all need to unplug sometimes.

For me, that usually means five nights in a tent in Maine in August, with my family, way too many mosquitoes, and absolutely no moving pictures. Between the sixth and seventh episodes of Game of Thrones that bracketed our recent vacation, I watched not a single minute of TV,  ignoring the shows I'd at some point downloaded to my iPad in favor of kayaking, hiking, biking, and reading.

(Yes, I brought an iPad camping. Judge away, but I had a 230-day streak going on the New York Times' fiendishly addictive crossword puzzle app that I wasn't about to break just to commune more fully with nature.)

I told myself  I was escaping the often intellectually challenging entertainment that also happens to be my work. But when I got back, my DVR told a different story: I'd been on the loose for weeks. How else to explain that, beyond Game of Thrones — recorded so I could double-check details for my weekly reviews — the shows I'd been recording and usually watching within a day or two were BET's Being Mary Jane, Freeform's The Bold Type, TV Land's Younger, and Bravo's Girlfriend's Guide to Divorce?

It was as though the equivalent of a Sex and the City marathon had taken control of my brain, even as episodes of Showtime's Twin Peaks piled up, unwatched and unanalyzed.

And I couldn't have been happier.

Because if there's one thing I'd thought I'd lost in the 500-show universe of year-round TV, it's the sense of TV as something that's sometimes just meant to be fun, and of summer TV, in particular, as programming not meant to overtax the brain.

But in a year when Game of Thrones didn't show up until mid-July — "winter is here," my foot — and Lifetime's escapist Project Runway was nowhere to be found until mid-August, I wasn't always sure what season it was. All I know is that when the temperature outside reaches a certain point, my handle on Targaryen genealogy grows fuzzier.

And that's when paying attention instead to fictional TV newswoman Mary Jane Paul (Gabrielle Union) of Being Mary Jane, or Liza Miller (Sutton Foster), the fortysomething divorcée masquerading as a millennial in Younger, seemed like a great idea. Their love lives may be absurdly complicated, but neither has yet come even close to sleeping with her brother (or her nephew). They spend their days and nights in a world free of White Walkers.

It's not that I wasn't interested in the doings in Westeros so much as that writing about them every Sunday night had been cutting into my time with Issa (Issa Rae) on HBO's Insecure. And if The Bold Type has offered me a little less escapism than might be expected from its glitzy promos, it's only because it's set in a media world I recognize a little too well. Yet, even as a recent episode dealt with looming layoffs, the clothes were still fabulous.

Labor Day weekend isn't the absolute last gasp of summer TV. If real-life disasters on cable news haven't spoiled your appetite for the scripted ones, CBS's Salvation and Zoo aren't quite finished saving the world, and NBC's America's Got Talent, which is having its most-watched season ever,  won't air its finale until Sept. 19 and 20.

By this time next week, I'll have begun sharing the results of dozens of hours spent screening new and returning fall series, including some, like Ken Burns and Lynn Novick's PBS series The Vietnam War (8 p.m. Sept. 17, WHYY12) and HBO's The Deuce (9 p.m. Sept. 10), that are well worth back-to-school-level attention.

But before we get there, let's hear it for television no one has to watch. If you've ever tuned in to — or rushed to catch up on — a show just to be part of the conversation, you deserve a break.

Maybe you don't find your bliss in romantic comedies, talent shows, or disaster series, but there's bound to be something that lets you rest your brain to prepare for the return of a Mr. Robot (10 p.m. Oct. 11, USA) or a Blindspot (8 p.m. Oct. 27, NBC). Last August, when I wrote about goofing off with Scandinavian TV shows, I heard from readers who were as obsessed as I was with Nordic noir. Streaming services like Netflix, Amazon, and Hulu have opened up a world of possibilities for those looking to escape without a passport.

I can thank (or blame) the women working at the Hooked Fine Yarn Boutique in Haddonfield for pointing me toward Offspring, an Australian dramedy on Netflix about a thirtysomething obstetrician (Asher Keddie) and her complicated family that I promised to try after they raved about it during the June 10 World Wide Knit in Public Day.

The next thing I knew, I was halfway through the fourth season.

Acorn, the Brit-centric streaming service I've added to my Amazon Prime subscription, has been a great place this summer to find no-pressure gems. Between mysteries Single-Handed and Loch Ness (turn on the subtitles — you'll thank me), I've been charmed by No Job for a Lady, a 1990-92 Britcom I'd never heard of, starring Penelope Keith (To the Manor Born) as a Labour Party member of Parliament struggling to learn the ropes in the House of Commons.

None of these is meant to fill that dragon-size hole in the next year or so of Sunday nights. You won't need to argue the finer points of the plots, or worry that you missed the episode everyone will be talking about on Monday morning. These are summer flings, and we should enjoy them while we can.

Autumn is coming.