Prestige TV Eats Its Own Tail

I want to make an unfashionable argument. The formal toolkit of prestige television, developed painstakingly across the two decades from roughly The Sopranos (1999) to Succession (2023), has become a kind of closed system. The specific techniques that created the form are now, consistently, the techniques that constrain it. Prestige TV is eating its own tail.

This is not a declinist argument. I am not saying that prestige TV is bad now. I am saying that the formal vocabulary is exhausted, that the shows within the form are spending more of their running time navigating inherited conventions than discovering new ones, and that the next significant development in television will have to come from outside the prestige-drama idiom.

What the toolkit is

The prestige TV formal toolkit includes:

• The cold open. A specific opening sequence, distinct from the main title, that establishes tone before the episode proper begins. Pioneered by The Sopranos, codified by Mad Men and Breaking Bad, now universal.
• The extended musical-montage close. A sequence at the end of an episode in which a needle-drop song plays over a series of slow-motion shots showing multiple characters in parallel. The Sopranos again. Now ubiquitous.
• The “bottle episode” departure. A specific episode that breaks from the season’s main narrative to focus on a single character, location, or extended scene. Mad Men’s “The Suitcase.” Breaking Bad’s “Fly.” The Bear’s “Fishes.” Atlanta’s “Woods” and “B.A.N.” and “Teddy Perkins.”
• The flashback structure. Non-linear narrative in which past events are revealed to contextualise present ones. Lost codified it. Now universal.
• The long dialogue scene. An extended conversation between two characters, usually in a single location, that advances character rather than plot. The Wire, Succession, most Apple TV+ dramas.
• The specific prestige-cinematography palette. Muted colour grading, shallow depth of field, handheld camera with specific restraint, low-key lighting. Breaking Bad’s desert palette. True Detective’s Louisiana palette. Succession’s New York corporate palette.
• The silence-is-significant rhythm. Specific pauses in dialogue that signal interior processing. Mad Men. Succession. Most contemporary prestige drama.

Why the toolkit is exhausted

Each of these techniques was, at its introduction, doing specific dramatic work. The cold open on The Sopranos established the show’s specific tone of controlled menace. The musical montage close on The Sopranos let Tony’s interior life accumulate across multiple parallel character beats. The bottle episode on Mad Men allowed the show to slow down and sit with Don Draper’s specific professional isolation.

Each technique was, at its introduction, specific. It was doing a particular kind of dramatic work that the broader television idiom of its moment could not quite manage. The technique was a solution to a specific problem.

Twenty years later, these techniques are no longer specific. They are defaults. A contemporary prestige drama will reliably deliver a cold open, a bottle episode, a musical-montage closer, a flashback structure, and a particular prestige-cinematography palette. The techniques are in the production template. They are the show’s expected grammar, not its specific creative choices.

The consequence is that contemporary prestige drama reads, increasingly, as variations on a shared formal template. The specific show is distinguishable by its subject matter, its cast, its setting. The formal grammar across shows is increasingly interchangeable.

The specific case of The Bear

The Bear is, for me, the clearest illustration of the argument. The show is good. I have written about it at length. It is also, in its formal moves, an almost-complete inventory of prestige-TV techniques.

The “Fishes” bottle episode is Mad Men’s “The Suitcase” with different food. The “Forks” episode is Mad Men’s “Shut the Door, Have a Seat” with different professional aspiration. The musical-montage closers of multiple Season 1 and Season 2 episodes are pure Sopranos grammar. The long dialogue scene between Carmy and Sydney at the end of Season 1 is Succession grammar in a restaurant kitchen. The flashback structures of Seasons 2 and 3 are Lost grammar.

None of these borrowings are failures. They are all deployed with skill. The show is, precisely, a very well-executed prestige drama using the established prestige-drama toolkit.

What the show is not doing is developing new formal tools. It is refining the existing toolkit. The specific limitation of Season 3, which I have written about positively elsewhere, is that the show’s formal grammar is no longer capable of surprising the viewer. The tools have been in wide use for too long.

Where the form might break

Television periodically breaks its own formal conventions, and the breaks usually come from adjacent disciplines. The Sopranos broke with network TV by borrowing from cinema. The Wire broke with cinematic television by borrowing from documentary sociology. Atlanta broke from prestige drama by borrowing from sketch comedy and surrealism. I May Destroy You broke from procedural TV by borrowing from essay writing.

The next break, if it is coming, will likely arrive from a similar direction: a show that looks initially like prestige TV but is, underneath, operating in a different formal tradition. My candidates for where that break might come from:

• Documentary-adjacent forms. Shows that borrow from documentary structure (cold fact-based reporting, present-tense narration, specific archival strategies) could reshape what prestige TV looks like. Patrick Melrose gestured at this. Specific British productions are still experimenting.
• Long-form video essay. Shows that borrow from the YouTube video-essay format, structured around a specific argumentative through-line rather than a character arc. The form exists in adjacent television already (Lindsay Ellis-adjacent material) but has not crossed into prestige-drama territory yet.
• Theatre-adjacent forms. Shows willing to stage specific scenes as theatrical sequences, preserving the unities of time and place that cinema and cinematic television have generally broken. Jez Butterworth’s television work gestures at this. Fleabag did specific things with direct-address that broke the usual prestige-TV fourth wall.
• Non-anglophone prestige forms. Korean, Japanese, Scandinavian, and Latin American prestige-drama idioms each have specific formal vocabularies that the American prestige-TV idiom has only partially absorbed. The future of the form may be less anglophone than its past.

What I am watching for

I am watching for the show that feels formally unfamiliar. The specific sensation, when watching, of not quite recognising what you are watching. The Sopranos produced that sensation in 1999. The Wire produced it in 2002. Mad Men produced it in 2007. Breaking Bad produced specific episodes of it across its run. Atlanta produced it consistently across its first two seasons.

Nothing in the last five years has produced that sensation for me. Plenty of shows have produced the satisfied recognition of craft at the highest level (Succession, The Bear, Slow Horses, Severance). But the specific sensation of formal surprise, which is the sensation that defines the moments when television moves forward, has been absent.

This is what I mean when I say prestige TV is eating its own tail. The form has stopped producing formal surprise. The shows inside it are, increasingly, refinements of existing patterns.

The next significant development will, when it arrives, likely not be called prestige TV at all. It will be something adjacent that makes the prestige-drama grammar look, suddenly, old.

I look forward to it. I am not sure when it is coming.