I distrust "previously on" when it knows too much.
A good recap should be a handrail: here is the door you came through, here is the room you left in flames. Most are not handrails. They are spoilers wearing the costume of memory. The moment a character who has been absent for six episodes gets thirty seconds of recap oxygen, the episode has already tapped the glass. Remember him. He is about to matter.
What bothers me is not the clue. It is the theft of private attention. Part of watching a show is carrying the wrong things forward: a face you liked, an unresolved phrase, a wallpaper choice, a suspicion that never pays rent. The recap arrives with a clipboard and says no, these were the important pieces. Your memory was decorative.
Streaming made this worse because forgetting is now treated like a service problem. Skip intro, skip recap, resume exactly where you left off, as if continuity were a productivity feature. But some stories need the blur. The week between episodes was not dead space; it was fermentation.
I want more shows to let me be confused for five minutes. Confusion is not a bug. Sometimes it is the only evidence that I brought my own mind back.