In spring 2019, as “Game of Thrones” aired its final season, the talk among TV-industry pundits was that the age of dragons was not the only era coming to an end. “Thrones,” the thinking went, might just be the last big TV series that would ever dazzle a mass audience.
But a lot has changed since spring 2019.
The pandemic, obviously, bolstered TV’s status as a virtual arena. “Tiger King” was a TV event, as were “Hamilton” and “Godzilla vs. Kong.” With the shift to working from home, it’s not clear how much of this ground TV will cede back, now that we know how much it’s possible to do without leaving your couch. “Dune,” when released this fall, will also be partly a TV event, via HBO Max, even though theaters have reopened.
But if we focus just on the TV part of TV — that is, series made for home-and-device distribution rather than for theaters — the post-“Thrones” question remains: Can any one program, in an age of bingeing, streaming and thousands of choices, bring together a mass audience?
Several high-profile genre spectacles — from sci-fi to fantasy to dystopian fiction — are betting on yes. On Sept. 24, Apple TV Plus premieres “Foundation,” based on the Isaac Asimov novels about the attempt to use “psychohistory” to shape the future of a galactic empire. On Monday, FX unveiled “Y: The Last Man,” about an apocalypse that kills every human with a Y chromosome save for one.
Amazon’s “The Wheel of Time,” this fall, is another long-in-the-making epic, based on the sprawling fantasy series by Robert Jordan. Next year, “The Lord of the Rings” is getting a major series adaptation on Amazon and HBO will air the “Thrones” prequel, “House of the Dragon.”
If the age of blockbuster TV is over, the coming season has not been informed.
And there is evidence that event TV is not dead, even if “events” no longer involve us all gathering around our TV sets at 9 p.m. on Sundays. There has been a rise of the next generation of streaming platforms, which provides a direct pipeline from the biggest megatainment companies to the screens in your living room and in your pocket.
Disney, in particular, has driven this change. Its engulfing of the “Star Wars” and Marvel franchises put two of the movies’ biggest universes into one company, and Disney Plus promptly started turning them into TV.
The drawback of TV’s new blockbusters, then, may be that they are doomed to become more like the movies’ blockbusters: dragon-like in scale, mouse-like in creative ambition, at least when it comes to anything that does not involve an established brand.
On the one hand, the fact that the next “Lord of the Rings” expansion is coming to your living room rather than your local multiplex is a sign of a more TV-centric entertainment future. On the other hand, that future, at least for high-profile TV, may be more and more like the movies’ recent past: big-budget but cautious renderings of stories with built-in followings.
If we are stuck with old stories expensively retold, the hope is that they at least have something to say to a new moment.
The epic TV event, that most elusive of fabulous beasts, may well have been pronounced dead. But that does not mean it cannot rise again — even if it is in a too-familiar form.
