It is the year of television.
Faced with the collapse of the cultural industry, the small screen (or computer, tablet or mobile) has been the only sector whose numbers have not collapsed with the coronavirus.
Quite the contrary, they have shot up.
This 2020 has turned out to be a year of historical consumption data, of unusually large phenomena in fiction (
Unorthodox, Hollywood, Mrs. America
).
Now the industry seeks to finish the year with big bets that could not be released at the time because of the quarantine.
But also with one unknown: how long will the sector be able to maintain this pace?
What the virus took
As security regulations tightened, filming became scarce and by March 12, Netflix had suspended filming of all its series.
Apple TV + and Disney + followed.
The consequences of this hiatus will begin to be noticed in the coming days, when we will not see a large part of the promised productions (among many others, the new seasons of
Succession, Atlanta, Fargo
and the returns of
Friends
and
Gossip Girl
).
Yes, series rescued from other moments will arrive, especially the long-awaited
HBO Spain
Homeland
(September 27), which should have premiered in March.
And the lack of great premieres will be made up for by advancing works that seemed reserved for 2021, such as the fourth season of
The Crown
(Netflix, November 15).
enlarge photo Hilary Swank, in the Netflix series 'Away'.
Diyah Pera Courtesy of Netflix
Parade of names
This change of premieres has caused a reversal of the traditional order of
streaming
, and if, in the first half of the year, several bets of greater or smaller size coincided (
The Great, It could destroy you
), autumn will be, for once, the season of the sure thing.
In the coming weeks, a parade of big names will begin that will begin Hilary Swank with
Away
(Netflix, September 4), where she imagines a first trip to Mars and, of course, the technical failures that must be solved from Earth (
spoiler
: the phrase “Houston, we have a problem” is pronounced).
Jude Law will suffer the unbearable, cry and scream in
The Third Day
(HBO Spain, September 15), a drama with touches of fantasy about a group of people who arrive, separately, on a British island for which they feel an indomitable attraction .
Hugh Grant and Nicole Kidman will play a wealthy couple built on lies that will be dismantled in
The Undoing
(HBO Spain, October 25), a drama with one foot in the soap opera directed by Susanne Bier (
After the wedding, The Night Manager
) and supervised by David E. Kelley (
Big Little Lies
).
A moment from the series 'We Are Who We Are', by Luca Guadagnino.
The creator is the star
However, the big names in television are less and less its interpreters (than also) and more and more its creators.
Several of the great titles of the fall are attached to the name of the person who had the idea, which may be Ryan Murphy (see a little below) or Carlos Montero, from
Physics or Chemistry
and
Elite
, who now opens in the direction with
El disorder that you leave
(Netflix, no release date), adaptation of his own novel, winner of Primavera de Novela in 2016, a thriller in rural Galicia (there have already been several in recent years: one can speak of a
Galician Noir
phenomenon
) .
Álex de la Iglesia opens in the middle with
30 coins
(HBO Spain), like Luca Guadagnino with
We Are Who We Are
(HBO Spain, September 15).
Mexican Roberto Caro, from
La casa de las flores
, is proposed as the main attraction of his new project,
Someone has to die
(Netflix, still without a release date), which has Carmen Maura, Cecilia Suárez and Ernesto Alterio as protagonists.
The wheel 2.0
Ryan Murphy's new project is
Ratched
(Netflix, September 18), and it tells the life of that perverse nurse from
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
(Milos Forman, 1975) before facing Jack Nicholson: it is a story shot at Douglas Sirk style, with pastiche music by Bernard Herrmann, with Sarah Paulson in the lead role and Sharon Stone in a supporting role.
It will seem Martian to experiment with something so familiar, but it is a norm of the season.
Netflix will also tell the youth of Kurt Wallander (September 3), where the character of Henning Mankell, who in his day played Kenneth Branagh, appears as a twenty-something.
The producers of
The Curse of Hill House
have also reinvented the wheel: they will extend their adaptation of Shirley Jackson by mixing it with the legacy of Henry James, in the form of
The Curse of Bly Manor
(Netflix, September 30).
And in December, Filmin will also bid farewell to the Beethoven year with a great German blockbuster (December 1) that tells the life of the genius from Bonn.