The Rise of Prestige-Like-Ish TV

A-listers are showing up in series that look like 'the greats' but are really 'the fines'

- CARLA SOSENKO

All Her Fault. Task. Apples Never Fall. They look and feel like prestige television, but they're prestigey at best, and they're just three examples of many.

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 slick big-budget shows that were... fine. Where we once had 2017's impeccable first season of the Liane Moriarty adaptation Big Little Lies, we got 2024’s tepid Apples (also a Moriarty adaptation 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.

Today, we’ve entered mid TV’s second watered-down wave. I think of these shows as Monets; in the parlance of