All Her Fault. Task. The Beast in Me. These slick limited series look and feel like prestige television — they star genuinely talented actors and have twisty plots and are so, so pretty! — but they’re more like … prestigey. Prestige lite. Prestige-adjacent-esque-ish, if you will.
And listen, I’m not knocking them. Prestigey can be fun! Last April, The New York Times’ chief TV critic James Poniewozik introduced us to “the comfortable problem of mid TV.” After years of masterful work in every genre, from The Sopranos to PEN15, an abundance of supply (new streamers every day) and demand (us, with our dwindling attention spans and intensifyingly quick consumption) resulted in a lot of big-budget shows that were… fine.
Like, where we once had 2017’s impeccable first season of the Liane Moriarty adaptation Big Little Lies, we got 2024’s tepid Apples Never Fall (also a Moriarty adaptation, also with a standout cast). “TV was so highly acclaimed for so long, we were like the frog in boiling water, but in reverse,” Poniewozik wrote. “The medium became lukewarm so gradually that you might not even have noticed.” In other words, our Labubus were replaced by Lafufus when we weren’t looking.
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Today, we’ve entered mid TV’s second watered-down wave. I think of these shows as Monets; in the parlance of Clueless, they’re OK from far away, but up close, they’re a big old mess. In the language of critical theory, we’re in a simulacrum, where copies of copies get diluted and de-fanged with each iteration. The twists are less surprising. The writing is more on-the-nose. Nuance is gone.
Take Task, which had shades of its predecessor Mare of Easttown but lacked the smarts. The climax in Easttown was shocking but inevitable. In Task, figuring out who the bad guy was felt like a shell game. We knew the general vicinity, but no answer would have surprised us. Even the Delco accents felt forced this time around. When Kate Winslet and Jean Smart introduced us to “wooder” and “cricks” it was groundbreaking; when Tom Pelphrey and Emilia Jones — both terrific — did, it was a bit like watching a party trick for the second time.
By the end of Lazarus — which would draw anyone in because it’s another adapted Harlen Coben thriller that stars the very pretty Sam Claflin and the very talented Bill Nighy and also takes place across cozy flats and pubs in London — I was befuddled but also indifferent. I wasn’t sure whether I was clear on everything that had happened, then realized I didn’t actually care because there were so many other shows waiting to be watched. Not even Claflin’s face could make me want to piece together all the untethered strands of plot and impossibility (e.g. a magical therapist’s office where ghosts of patients past show up and feed information to the protagonist — or was that our hero having reverberations of a previous nervous breakdown? We’ll never know). Again, I watched the whole thing. It was fun, it was fine. It killed a couple of nights on the couch when the sun sets at 5 p.m. and my other option is bed-rotting.
All Her Fault, starring the fantastic Sarah Snook and Dakota Fanning, is another series I enjoyed, because who wouldn’t enjoy these women in anything, especially when they drink wine in beautiful houses on the scenic Chicago coast? (Seriously, Snook is probably one of the top 10 best actors working today. Her one-woman performance in The Picture of Dorian Gray in London’s West End and then Broadway was astounding, and she deservedly got both the Olivier and the Tony for it.) Only, the themes — important ones, like that women shoulder most of the labor in domestic relationships — are drilled into us with the subtlety of a wrecking ball, and the show’s narrative thrust comes from the taking-apart of a straightforward story and putting it back together. It’s like adding music to an otherwise deflated scene to give the illusion of drama. Or holding back information from the viewer so things that aren’t twists feel like they are.
And The Beast in Me, a Robert Durst–tinged mystery that shot to No. 1 on Netflix right after its Nov. 13 release and which I gobbled up in two days, is autumny and sexy and stars two of the finest actors around, Claire Danes and Matthew Rhys. (Plus Dierdre O’Connell! And Bill Irwin! And Natalie Morales! And Brittany Snow! And Jonathan Banks!) But no amount of trembly-chin crying could make it riveting in the way only true prestige TV can be. It was just a bit too on the nose.
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As a comparison: In 2020’s The Undoing, when we find out that the guy most likely to be the bad guy is actually the bad guy, it’s a revelation that makes us look inward. Why had we resisted it? What did it say about us that we had looked for every possible outcome other than the most obvious one in order to absolve a charming man played by Hugh Grant? In Beast, though there are moments when you wonder whether the sociopathic, carnivorous Rhys could really be as bloodlusty as he seems or is just a red herring, mostly you know the whole time that of course he killed his wife. (But also, if it turned out that he didn’t, the script had hedged enough that we’d buy that too. It was all pretty anticlimactic. Which I guess makes it more mid than Monet? I don’t know. Who cares. Let’s move on!)
For me the biggest indicator of a Monet, and the most frustrating part, is the lack of trust in the viewers. Sometimes things are so spelled out they are literally said — in expositional dialogue, from the characters — and some of that is by design to cater to second-screen viewing habits. But those moments make me want to shout, “Just trust us, we’ll get there! Show more, say less! And if we don’t, one of our friends will tell us and we’ll be gobsmacked!” I’m not saying it’s easy to create work like that. I literally jumped out of my chair when Keyser Söze was finally revealed in 1995’s The Usual Suspects, and I’ve been searching for that feeling ever since.
But sometimes that lack of trust can feel like arrogance, or worse, contempt, and in those moments, it’s not that things are spelled out too much but not at all — because they can’t be. They don’t make sense, and nobody could possibly explain them. In those cases, I don’t want the shows to say more or less but say better; to go back and take another stab at revising the draft, to make it as complex as it’s pretending to be.
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Or to admit to itself that it’s not complex at all and stop trying to look like it is — to lean into its schlockiness instead of taking itself so seriously. This is what separates Monets from shows that know exactly what they are and don’t pretend otherwise, like the widely panned but already-renewed-for-season-2 All’s Fair, which is pure Ryan Murphy camp and knows it. The biggest tell there is Kim Kardashian, and I don’t mean that negatively. No amount of Sarah Paulson, Glenn Close, Niecy Nash-Betts and Naomi Watts could counter the Kim Kardashian of it all. Her presence tells you right away that you are not watching prestige television or anything vaguely like it. And even if you hate it, at least it knows what it is.
Hunting Wives falls into this group too. When I started it, I rolled my eyes because it wasn’t what I was expecting, but that was my fault: I’d made assumptions about it, but it actually never pretended to be prestige. From minute one, it knows what it is — Duck Dynasty plus Dallas plus lesbians — and once we do too, it’s just fun.
I asked Us staffers which shows they think fit the bill for a Monet. Music editor Eliza Thompson picked the candy-coated all-star dazzler Palm Royale: “The jokes don’t land, it’s not enough drama to be a drama and it wants to be campy but doesn’t lean in hard enough.” Associate editor Molly McGuigan named 2024’s The Perfect Couple with its “winding, melodramatic plot, way too many characters and unsatisfying ending.”
Deputy executive editor Erin Strecker offers one explanation for the phenomenon: “Fifteen years ago, mid TV shows would have been fun but forgettable 90-minute movies. Now, with people not going to theaters and streamers needing so much content, the way to get any budget for this type of story is a six- to eight-episode series. The plot often gets stretched out without enough story to support, so you’ve often got great talent — even movie stars! — working with not much.” These shows, she says, are designed to be binged and forgotten.
One possible fix: Retroactively recalibrating our expectations. These are not poorly executed prestige shows; they are very entertaining average shows that happen to have a high production value and star some of the best actors around. And here’s the best part, about all art: It’s subjective! The Times’ Poniewozik called Rian Johnson’s Poker Face a mid copy of Russian Doll. Though both feature Natasha Lyonne doing her Natasha Lyonne thing, I don’t actually think they have much in common, and I loved both. For me, season one of the Columbo-tinged Poker Face was a smart, nostalgic romp that I couldn’t get enough of.
Also, kudos to any artists creating anything today. Keeping people engrossed is not nothing. I am in awe of TV writers and actors and everyone else who comes together to create the series keeping us alive right now. Maybe, especially during hard times, we should just be grateful we have so much to watch: good, bad or a Monet.
