Love “Fargo” but Hate “True Detective?”: Inside the Good, the Bad and the Ugly of TV’s Prestige Anthology Shows

You may have heard that we have a lot of good television these days. As David Carrwrote in this 2014 column, “In the short span of five years, table talk has shifted, at least among the people I socialize with, from books and movies to television. The idiot box gained heft and intellectual credibility to the point where you seem dumb if you are not watching it.”

And in the space of prestige TV—that niche of expensive and critically acclaimed television, made for that niche of wealthy and critical audiences—you’re dumbest of all if you’re not hip to “anthology series,” a fancy-sounding name for a show that reboots its premise with some regularity. (Often, it switches up the actors, too, though that’s not a requirement.) It’s a phrase that gets used a lot today, but anthology series are nearly as old as television and haven’t gone anywhere, though they have changed quite a bit. The heyday of the anthology series was in the 1950s, when American audiences were looking for theater, literally, on television. There’s a lot to say on this topic—Stephen Bowie wrote an in-depth piece for the A.V. Club last year on “Playhouse 90,” a CBS anthology series that swept the Emmys in 1957 with its high quality, huge budget, and live broadcasts. PBS’ ongoing “Masterpiece Theatre” is an extension of this same desire to see plays enacted on television, except exhibited in installments, over the course of a few weeks or months. But it’s not just theater. Thrillers like the iconic “The Twilight Zone” and “Alfred Hitchcock Presents”—and the decidedly less iconic Nickelodeon series “Are You Afraid Of The Dark?”—are also anthology series.

Like everything else TV does, the format is an attempt to snag a consistent audience. Some shows go for serialization (“Lost”) or even hyperserialization (“All My Children”) in order to keep an audience interested. The anthology series has a different angle; it promises a thrill or a chill, but is always mixing up the how. As a result, the viewing experience is shot through with a bit more tension; the audience can’t expect the same actors, relationships, or storylines that got them interested in the first place.

Currently, anthology miniseries represent a middle ground between film and television—even more of a middle ground than traditional prestige drama, which often stretched to five, six, or seven seasons. An anthology promises a collection of stories that definitively end, instead of trickle off; but it also promises eight or 10 or 12 installments of each story, to develop over a few months. The boundedness of the format means that movie stars like Matthew McConaughey, Felicity Huffman, and Jessica Lange can be drawn into starring roles without being tied to a years-long contract. It also means a viewer can join the show in season four and still watch a complete story. And as evidenced by how all four of the anthology miniseries on air right now are headed by distinctive showrunners, the format offers a canvas for an incredible exploration of style.

But though each one has had elements of brilliance, there isn’t one that is peerless — “True Detective”’s second season was a failure, “Fargo” has too many weird wannabe problems to be really great, “American Crime” is a bit too broadcast-network boring, and “American Horror Story” is out of its goddamn mind. That’s a lot of time and money spent on four shows when none of them are the next “Mad Men” or “Breaking Bad.”

I think this is because each series is trying so hard to be relevant and popular, albeit in four rather different ways. Anthology miniseries have been packaged and presented as the next big thing for studios as well as audiences, and each one has its own tragic flaw. “True Detective,” the most well-known series, has the most romantic origin story possible—unknown writer Nic Pizzolatto creating a script on a shadow and a dream, and then somehow getting it noticed by A-lister Matthew McConaughey, who angled to play Rust Cohle and attracted fellow star Woody Harrelson to the project. “True Detective” was the subject of a bidding war in spring 2012, as HBO, Showtime, and FX battled over it. HBO, as we know, won this battle. Showtime stepped out of the anthology miniseries game. FX went on immediately to create “Fargo,” in a studio-driven creative process that is almost the exact opposite of Pizzolatto’s lonely scribbling. FX teamed up with MGM’s television arm to choose a movie to adapt into a series. The Coen Brothers’ cult hit “Fargo” was selected from a list.