Having believed they had reached El Dorado during the streaming big bang of the 2010s – a time when Netflix and Prime Video (an Amazon subsidiary), soon after joined by Apple TV+ and Disney, were vying in creativity and boldness – the world of American series has learned the laws of the market. From lockdowns to Hollywood strikes, from flow of capital to political upheavals, platform and studio decision-makers have relearned to account to their shareholders rather than their creators.
On screens, this normalization is reflected in a proliferation of products designed to reassure, based on "IP" (for Intellectual Properties, a term that can refer to anything from a Jane Austen novel to a video game brand) already familiar to the public.
This trend affects both cinema and TV aseries, but it seems that in Hollywood, the latter are better at resisting it. While the biggest Hollywood box office success since the beginning of the year, Minecraft: The Movie, is derived from a video game, billions of minutes (the measure of a show's popularity) have been devoted in recent months by hundreds of millions of viewers to three series – Adolescence, Severance and Andor – whose complex and demanding subjects and aesthetics are no longer in vogue in multiplexes across the Atlantic.
Adolescence, a British miniseries composed of four episodes and as many single takes, produced by Netflix and released in March, depicts the murder of a teenage girl by one of her classmates and the aftershocks of this earthquake in the murderer's family; Severance, whose second season was released starting in January on Apple TV+, reinvents the corporate world in a dystopian mode, imagining a multinational character who implants a device in her employees' brains that erases all awareness of the outside world as soon as they arrive at work; and finally Andor, whose second and final season is currently airing on Disney+, uses the Star Wars universe to finely analyze the dialectic that unites and opposes a repressive system and the forces seeking to overthrow it.
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