Stay tuned Sadaf Ahsan

The future of TV is the anthology-within-the-anthology

There are two directions in which television will diverge next year: ever deeper into the half-hour drama pool, and experimentally into the realm of the hour-plus anthology-withinthe-anthology.

Here me out: the last five years have seen a steady increase in the traditional anthology, largely thanks to super-producer Ryan Murphy and his television cavalcade, including American Crime Story, American Horror Story, Feud and an upcoming #MeToo-based series titled Consent.

Each season has operated like a self-contained miniseries with a different set of characters, all while operating within the same genre (and sometimes, universe). ACS, for example, followed the real-life murder trial of O.J. Simpson in its first season, while Season 2 explored the murder of designer Gianni Versace. The third season will follow a set of doctors working during Hurricane Katrina. Apart from members of Murphy’s goto ensemble, most notably Sarah Paulson, each season has had a different cast. The same goes for AHS and Feud.

It’s a model Noah Hawley’s Fargo adaptation has most successfully followed, with each season set in a different period though connected between the same family at its core. To that list, add The Girlfriend Experience, True Detective and American Crime.

In each case, travelling between time periods, settings and characters has allowed these series the space to explore different genres, while giving its cast and writers the opportunity to play and stretch different thematic muscles. Viewers, meanwhile, are granted the ability to digest more refined content in a limited time — all within the same creative infrastructure.

But in 2018, specifically, we witnessed showrunners dip their toes into anthologies-within-the-anthology, which functions like a collective of TV movies rather than as episodes of a single season. In each instance, an overall theme was explored as a connective thread rather than a narrative arc. In the past year, Room 104, Electric Dreams, Lore and Matthew Weiner’s The Romanoffs all adapted this trend from predecessors Black Mirror, High Maintenance and Easy.

Again, each of these series has been critically acclaimed, and that seems in part thanks to the ability to zero in on one story without spreading it too thin — as has become the curse for much of cable television’s 20-episode plus primetime series.

Another asset for these brief vehicles is pulling in high-wattage casts. Here’s a smattering of some of the A-listers who have starred in the aforementioned series: Jessica Lange, Susan Sarandon, Kathy Bates, Lady Gaga, Angela Bassett, Penelope Cruz, John Travolta, Billy Bob Thornton, Ewan McGregor, Kirsten Dunst, Rachel McAdams, Colin Farrell, Matthew McConaughey, Woody Harrelson, Mahershala Ali, Diane Lane, Aaron Eckhart and the list goes on.

The appeal, of course, being the minimal time commitment: one episode or one season and they’re out, with potential Emmy and Golden Globe recognition (and the honour of portraying as rich a character as any featurelength film might offer). It’s a quid-pro-quo, with networks having an easier time marketing a potentially more thoughtful series thanks to a batch of famous faces.

The Television Academy has even had to change its long-held rules to accommodate the genre, announcing last week that any series episode submitted for consideration under the “TV movie” category must run at least 75 minutes — after several years of Black Mirror episodes dominating the category at shorter lengths. Streaming networks, after all, have the freedom of varying episode runtimes, hovering anywhere from 27 minutes to 90. If the new rule suggests anything, it’s that it may be time for an entirely new category.

After all, it’s only going to get more refined in 2018, when we’ll not only have more anthological vehicles from Murphy, but also Jordan Peele. The Get Out director is well underway on production for a reboot of The Twilight Zone. Meanwhile, Amazon has Modern Love, adapted from the New York Times column, and has already cast Anne Hathaway, Dev Patel, Tina Fey, Catherine Keener, Andy Garcia and countless others. It won’t just be a rotating cast, either; Emmy Rossum, Sharon Horgan and Tom Hall are all set to direct individual episodes, among others, while Horgan and Hall will also have writing duties. We will also see Lena Waithe’s horror series THEM, along with an anthology based on Akira Kurosawa’s film Rashomon, with each episode set to tell the same story but from different points of view.

For an industry that has been obsessed with spinoffs, reboots and remakes, it’s a move in the opposite direction: entirely new stories from completely different perspectives, all within the framework of a single series. I’ll take that over Old Sheldon or The Bad Doctor any day.