TV Tuesday: New Faces

[yourlibrarian]

Anthology shows have been considered risky bets if one wants a long running series. Do you enjoy them? And are there shows which might be considered “stealth” anthology shows, where a lot, if not the main focus of the show, is on non-recurring characters?

Comments

[shadowkat]

They are oddly still prevalent on certain streaming platforms. Netflix loves them for example. It has Black Mirror, and the animated short anthology series Love + Robots (I think that's what it is called). Also, Amazon and Apple have dived into it at times, as has Disney. What If, Tales of the Jedi, Goosebumps...it's done a lot now with animation and horror, which are apparently easier to do it with.

Love American Style was a bit of a series - short lived, but Happy Days spun off from it, it was one of the shorts in that series.

Fantasy Island and the Love Boat are also examples - of stealth anthology series. They are hard to do well, though? Since you have the space of 43-50 minutes to tell a complete story.

[yourlibrarian]

Oh that's a good point about animated projects! I never really thought of What If as an anthology series, largely because it used characters we already know in short new adventures. I can see the argument for it since many of the episodes are unconnected to other stories, but there's also a number that not only connect to one another but will do so with later films as well.

But you're absolutely right about Star Wars leaning into this. In most of these new projects they center on a known character but the Visions series is very much an anthology.

[shadowkat]

I'm not positive, but I think Eyes on Wakanda is also one? I've not tried it - but it looks like it deals with various short tales around different characters?

Disney likes to do them with animation apparently.