TV anthology series have become lame, lazy and lifeless: Why have they lost their way?

The Guardian

"Amazing Stories is – wait for it – not that amazing," says Jack Seale. "The new Apple TV+ show, released last week, is a revival of a 1980s series that was overseen by Steven Spielberg. The master director is involved with the reboot, too, which arrives back to take its place within one of the big TV trends of the past few years. Amazing Stories is an anthology: a collection of self-contained tales rather than a running series. Such shows can be a haven for experimentation and offbeat excellence and ought to be perfect for our low-attention-span age, where new streaming services seem to arrive each week. But, as modern anthologies become more prevalent, so they become a byword for hokey lameness and a lack of quality control. Anthologies in the 21st century are led by Black Mirror, a show concerned with the telling of spooky, tech-related fables. Like its ancient precursor The Twilight Zone, its intriguing set-up/surprising twist/haunting moral format can only be done in an anthology: nobody wants a 13-episode season entirely about a weird app, or a forest that turns out to be made of haunted computers, or whatever. But as the years have gone by, the perfectly turned Black Mirror episode, with a fresh premise and devastating pay-off, has felt more and more elusive."