Are We In the Era of Peak Limited?

By Chris Revelle | TV | June 18, 2024 |

By Chris Revelle | TV | June 18, 2024 |

Suppose we are to define Peak TV as the high-volume proliferation of high-quality “prestige television” that has lasted from 1999/2000 to this age. Twenty-four years and counting is not terribly long in the historical sense, but it’s quite long, culturally speaking; so much has happened in that time! Network TV slipped into catatonia only to be resuscitated by diamonds in the rough like Abbott Elementary, streaming rose to seemingly exclusive prominence, HBO rebranded out of its untouchable prestige status by becoming Max, streamers enjoyed brief times in the sun as the quality platform before succumbing to content bloat, the list goes on. It feels strange to refer to the whole 24 years as being one age when there have been distinct eras under the Peak TV umbrella. One of the most enduring eras is the Movie Star Limited Series craze that was kicked off by Big Little Lies, which by all accounts is still ongoing. Prestige limited series were usually led by some manner of movie star and with the big name(s) came big production values, high-quality writing, excellent direction, and so forth.

For a while, this model worked, and we enjoyed the heady rush of A-listers bringing weight and clout to our screens at home. However, corporations are not artists, they’re business people and they look for ways to get the same product for a lower cost and/or lower effort. Thus the prestige limited series concept was sheared down from an all-star appointment viewing experience to a weakly plotted star vehicle with barely enough plot stretched over 8 episodes. This type of Limited Series is flooding seemingly every corner of the streaming world, representing a veritable tide of mediocrity buffed and polished to seem way better than it is. It has the trappings, tricks, and famous faces associated with prestige, but it feels strangely paced and lacks the urgency of a great story. It feels a little wan, a little like it shrugged its way into existence. Welcome to the Peak Limited era!

The tricky thing is that many of these ungainly limited series have extremely compelling and interesting premises. A Murder at the End of the World was about a young true crime author invited to a retreat in a luxe high-tech hotel who reunites with her ex, meets her hacker idol, and finds herself in a twisty murder mystery involving the rich luminaries of the world who have gathered to save Earth from climate-doom. The Regime told the tale of the clownishly corrupt chancellor of a fictional central European country that balances threats within and without the palace as she embarked on a psycho-sexual relationship with a sociopathic soldier who opened fire on protestors. Sugar was about a lionhearted gumshoe who’s hired to find the missing daughter of Hollywood royalty, but the gumshoe is hiding the fact that he’s an alien and his otherworldly brethren are connected to the disappearance. Expats showed us the insular world of rich Americans in Hong Kong as they all deal with familial strife, infidelity, and the loss of a child creating a pit of grief so occlusive that one mother cannot move on. Feud was the examination of the love/hate relationship between Truman Capote and the high society women he befriended before publishing embarrassing stories from their personal lives in Vanity Fair. Presumed Innocent retells the story of an 80s erotic thriller starring Harrison Ford (that was adapting a book) in which a hotshot prosecutor sees his life upended when the co-worker he was having an affair with ends up murdered and he is suspected to be the killer. The Curse spun capitalistic and philosophical nightmares from the fibers of HGTV-style home-renovation shows by laying in spiky satire with a dark absurdism. These are all fantastic premises, so why are the resulting limited series so much less than the sum of their parts?

While each of those aforementioned shows had their distinct strengths and weaknesses, I feel that they’re united by one specific issue: they all have about a feature film’s worth of plot that they’ve inelegantly chopped and stretched into multiple hour-long episodes. Each of these intriguing plots get paced and oftentimes padded out to justify 8-10 episodes in a way that leaves deep pockets of negative space and dead air in between the plot beats that throw the whole experience off. It’s as if these limited series began shooting with nothing but a great pitch and a famous face, expecting some kind of alchemy to create itself. It’s as if the creators expected their one tantalizing plot to fill 8 or 10 hours on its own without subplots to help fill the space. Like I complained about with Sugar, these series spin their wheels, repeating things we know instead of moving us deeper into the series’ world. It’s a frustrating thing because it’s not like these stories had to be limited series. So why are we doing this?

One possibility that’s been on my mind is the state of theatrically released films. I am far from the first person to observe that theatrical releases are trending toward IP-driven epics, horror flicks, and kid-friendly animated features. This narrowing space that once had more space for other forms of film might’ve driven creators into the arms of streamers eager to get big-name prestige projects on their slate. And sure, they could release a movie directly to streaming, but that still comes with a bit of direct-to-video stigma these days and it will only engage viewers for two hours or so. Even if it doesn’t make artistic sense, it makes business sense to use a limited series to keep viewers coming back to the platform. In essence, we make limited series in place of movies, but misunderstand the difference between the two. Films have to be more economical than limited series by dint of having less time to tell a story. Limited series have more time to tell a story, but that means there needs to be 8-10 hours of story to tell.

The Peak Limited era is essentially a misunderstanding of forms. I enjoy seeing celebrities in prestige series too, but good TV isn’t created by that alone. If streaming is the refuge for the movies we used to see in theaters, creating misshapen, awkwardly-paced limited series won’t help us much. We either need to let these be feature films or retool them for a serial format. Shoving a square peg in a round hole accomplishes little.