ANTHOLOGIES
AFTER YEARS AWAY, THE TV ANTHOLOGY SERIES HAS RETURNED WITH A VENGEANCE. STEVE O’BRIEN LOOKS AT WHY ONE OF THE OLDEST FORMATS IN TELEVISION IS BACK IN FASHION…
Forget all that multiseason arc stuff. Some of the best stories are bite-sized. Here’s a selection box.
In recent years, one of television’s oldest, trustiest formats has experienced something of a renaissance. the anthology TV show (of the episodic, not season-long variety, so forget about your American Horror
Story, your Fargo and your Feud) can pinball through a mélange of styles and tones from week to week. It doesn’t demand you mainline it. It doesn’t need you to tune in from season one, episode one.
our cultural landscape is teeming with noisily hyped TV shows that beg for our unwavering attention. every week, it seems, there’s a new prestige, media-approved series launching and, you know, it can be a headache to keep up, to keep ourselves plugged in to the cultural conversation, to commit to yet another series that will eat our evenings away.
anthology shows give us a welcome break from that pressure. they’re a form of TV that doesn’t control us. When one, cliffhanger-less episode finishes, no one’s saying, “oh, just one more episode.” In an age of ever-swelling cultural anxiety, the TV anthology show gives us a tiny window into another world and then gets us back in time for tea.
“With an anthology show, you get a quick fix and you’re not wedded to 24 years of a box set,” says reece shearsmith, whose series with steve Pemberton, Inside No 9, is one of the new breed of story-of-the-week shows. “It’s the antithesis of the slow burn. you have this opportunity to watch a good little tale and come out the other end once it’s completed.” although there was a long period before
Inside No 9 and charlie Brooker’s Black Mirror spearheaded the format’s return when it was out of fashion, its history stretches back to TV’s earliest, most primitive days. the precedent for different stories linked by a series title was established first on the wireless, with shows such as Nbc’s Mystery House bringing suspense thrillers into the homes of america between 1929 and 1944, and Dimension X broadcasting brutally scaled-down adaptations of sf stories from the likes of Isaac asimov, ray Bradbury and Kurt Vonnegut in the early 1950s.
mirror, mirror
for some reason, science fiction, horror and fantasy seems to have proved the perfect genres for the anthology series. there’s no costume drama equivalent of Black Mirror, no version of Electric Dreams telling stories pulled from the Mills & Boon back catalogue. even when serialised fantasy television had fallen out of fashion, sf and fantasy still had a place in anthology form.
there had been small-screen anthologies before The Twilight Zone, but rod serling’s sublime series of morality plays remains the apogee of the anthology format. serling’s stories could take place anywhere, at any time, and in any genre. there were whimsical comedies (“Mr Dingle, the strong”), creepy horrors (“the Hitch-Hiker”) and suitably twisty takes on sf (“the Invaders”). What threaded them together was serling’s silky narration and the weekly promise of being taken on a journey “into a wondrous land whose boundaries are that of imagination.”
But can anthologies be anything? they can certainly swap genres, time periods and often tone, but does there always have to be an overriding characteristic or theme or motif of the series that binds the episodes together? for roald Dahl’s Tales Of The Unexpected, it was its humdinger of a twist. for nigel Kneale’s Beasts it was bestial horror. for rod serling’s ’70s
Twilight Zone successor, Night Gallery, the sf was dialled down in favour of the supernatural. When charlie Brooker was prepping Black
Mirror, his fatalistic series about the impact of new technologies, he weighed up making the stories even more explicitly connected.
“Do we set them in the same street? Do we have characters who appear in each episode, a bit Three Colours: Blue/Red/White-style?” he
told SFX in 2013. “We did think about having a character who introduces them, Tales From the Crypt-style, or like rod serling or alfred Hitchcock or roald Dahl. But the more we thought about it we thought it was a bit weird. and then if we invented a character, why are they there?”
“you can’t just have another sci-fi show, the format and idea has to be strong,” says TV writer stephen Volk, who dipped his toe into anthology waters with the 1990s BBC series, Ghosts. “Black Mirror had a very strong format doc which was about technological fears. Electric Dreams is linked by the Philip K Dick mindset of ‘what is reality’, essentially. one can easily imagine an anthology show based on stephen King stories or ray Bradbury stories. the rules are – have a clean central theme but one wide enough to engender lots of stories.”
With no returning characters or storylines threading the episodes together, every anthology series has to promise to be distinct and identifiable, if only to stand out in a swarming small-screen marketplace. When ABC’s The Outer Limits emerged in 1963, it had to stand apart from Cbs’s The Twilight Zone. It launched then with 50-minute episodes, as opposed to The Twilight Zone’s 25, promising its sf-hungry audience a rich diet of bug-eyed monsters and shiny spaceships. (serling’s series was always more earthly in its approach to science fiction.) It was The Twilight Zone, only louder and brasher, in the same way that George a romero’s Tales From The Darkside was a grimier version of steven spielberg’s Amazing Stories, and Electric Dreams has established itself as a more human-centric companion piece to Black Mirror.
Story Time
the conceit of reece shearsmith and steve Pemberton’s Inside No 9 is that each episode takes place, well, inside a number nine, whether that be house, flat or dressing room door. outside of that, the series can accent the comedy or the drama, depending on the episode. some, like series two’s “the 12 Days of christine” are hauntingly elegiac, others, like series one’s “a Quiet night In” are darkly farcical. What binds the episodes together though are that shearsmith and Pemberton appear in every one and bring their storytelling sensibilities to each episode.
“steve and I are always in them and we’ve written them all so our taste is across it all,” says shearsmith. “that’s the theme, even if it’s only tonally and thematically, rather than the characters or story being the same.”
the american sf writer Paolo Bacigalupi once called short stories “hand grenades of ideas”. When they work, they hit, they explode, and you never forget them. It’s the same with anthology episodes. William shatner’s “terror at 20,000 feet” episode of The Twilight Zone remains better remembered that anything else in the shat’s non-Trek oeuvre. Last year’s Inside No 9 episode “Bernie clifton’s Dressing room” is possibly the best, and richest, thing reece shearsmith and steve Pemberton have ever penned. Hammer House Of Horror’s “the silent scream” meanwhile is sicker and scarier than anything else in the studio’s crop of ’70s chillers. and roald Dahl’s deliciously black short story “Lamb to the slaughter” was thought such a jewel of the form it was adapted
With anthology shows you’re not wedded to 24 hours of a box set – it’s the antithesis of a slow burn
by two anthology shows, Alfred Hitchcock Presents (directed by Hitch himself ) and Tales Of The Unexpected.
“a lot of the time we think, ‘What are we doing, we’re pissing away hundreds of pilots, of potential things that could run and run!’” says shearsmith. “the turnover of content and ideas is huge and that’s sometimes worrying because you think, are we going to get to the bottom of the well and not be able to think of anything else? But the reason why they’re good and they’re exciting is precisely because they’re disposable and you don’t return to them. If you try to reset the next week you couldn’t do some of the things that you do.”
and if the rule of an anthology show is that anything goes, then that surely means that sequels aren’t out of the question. a rare example of a follow-on within an anthology is from new Line’s 2002 Twilight Zone revival, which screened an episode which acted as a sequel story to the original run’s “It’s a Good Life”. considered one of The Twilight Zone’s best episodes, about a six-year-old boy (played by Bill Mumy) imbued with god-like powers, the sequel “It’s still a Good Life”, brought back Mumy as a now middle-aged parent who discovers his daughter has inherited his talents.
“We may do one one day,” says shearsmith about the prospect of a sequel episode for
Inside No 9. “I don’t know if we’d do it out of a feeling of popularity but if steve and I thought something was worth going back to and we had a good idea, yeah, it wouldn’t be beyond us. the only reason we’d blanche at the idea would be that we’d be immediately blamed for running out of ideas.”
Maybe it’s because longform storytelling is the all-pervasive norm in TV now that anthology shows are back in such a big way. not only do Inside No 9 and Black Mirror have their next series commissioned already, but the granddaddy of them all, The Twilight Zone, is due a 21st century makeover (the CBS all access series will be its third reboot since rod serling’s version went off the air in 1964), courtesy of oscar-winning Get Out writer/ director Jordan Peele. not only that, but a revival of Amazing Stories, spielberg’s much-loved 1980s anthology show is in the planning stages at apple, with amblin’s Darryl frank and Justin falvey producing .
“the inherent fear was always that there was no hook for audiences,” says stephen Volk. “no regular characters, too many sets, location moves, there’s no precinct, it’s so expensive – I always say it’s the idea that’s the star, and the joy is that of a box of chocolates with different flavours. you’re not quite sure what next week will bring!”