Fall TV Can't Stop Looking Backward

This season, streaming embraces a model that makes it safer to tell stories about the past.

- KATHRYN VANARENDONK

THE FALL TV OF 2023 has an allergy to modern life. There’s the last season of Netflix’s The Crown, which will pick up in the ’90s. Season two of Julia (Max’s Julia Child show) takes place in the ’60s and ’70s. Lessons in Chemistry (Apple TV+) and Fellow Travelers (Showtime) start in the ’50s. Faraway Downs (Hulu) and All the Light We Cannot See (Netflix) are both set in the ’30s and ’40s, and Our Flag Means Death (Max) is in the early 1700s. Then there are The Buccaneers (Apple TV+), an Edith Wharton adaptation; a miniseries called The Gold about an ’80s heist (Paramount+); and season two of The Gilded Age (HBO). Even Krapopolis (Fox), a new animated show from Dan Harmon, is set in a mythical ancient Greece.

The trend would be less obvious if the network-TV slate hadn’t been hollowed out by this summer’s strikes. (Most TV this fall comes from a backlog of releases for streaming and premium-cable channels.) Network television is more immediate—an episode written in February could be out by March—and it has always been full of contemporary series: police procedurals, soapy dramas, and sitcoms that take place in an eternal now. (Somehow, one of the few network shows that banked episodes for a fall premiere is the reboot of Quantum Leap, which is about a guy who gets transported into the bodies of people in the past.) There will be no new episodes of Abbott Elementary or Grey’s Anatomy or, so help us, Law & Order: SVU.