All Her Fault. Task. The Beast in Me. These slick limited series look and feel like prestige television - they star genuinely talented actors and have twisty plots and are so, so pretty! - but they're more like ... prestigey. Prestige lite. Prestige-adjacent-esque-ish, if you will. And listen, I'm not knocking them. Prestigey can be fun! Last April, The New York Times' chief TV critic James Poniewozik introduced us to "the comfortable problem of mid TV." After years of masterful work in every genre, from The Sopranos to PEN15, an abundance of supply (new streamers every day) and demand (us, with our dwindling attention spans and intensifyingly quick consumption) resulted in a lot of big-budget shows that were... fine. Sarah Enticknap/PEACOCK Like, where we once had 2017's impeccable first season of the Liane Moriarty adaptation Big Little Lies, we got 2024's tepid Apples Never Fall (also a Moriarty adaptation, also with a standout cast). "TV was so highly acclaimed for so long, we were like the frog in boiling water, but in reverse," Poniewozik wrote. "The medium became lukewarm so gradually that you might not even have noticed." In other words, our Labubus were replaced by Lafufus when we weren't looking. New on Netflix in December 2025 - The Full List of Movies and TV Shows Today, we've entered mid TV's second watered-down wave. I think of these shows as Monets; in the parlance of Clueless, they're OK from far away, but up close, they're a big old mess. In the language of critical theory, we're in a simulacrum, where copies of copies get diluted and de-fanged with each iteration. The twists are less surprising. The writing is more on-the-nose. Nuance is gone. Apple TV Take Task, which had shades of its predecessor Mare of Easttown but lacked the smarts. The climax in Easttown was shocking but inevitable. In Task, figuring out who the bad guy was felt like a shell game. We knew the general vicinity, but no answer would have surprised us. Even the Delco accents felt forced this time around. When Kate Winslet and Jean Smart introduced us to "wooder" and "cricks" it was groundbreaking; when Tom Pelphrey and Emilia Jones - both terrific - did, it was a bit like watching a party trick for the second time. By the end of Lazarus - which would draw anyone in because it's another adapted Harlen Coben thriller that stars the very pretty Sam Claflin and the very talented Bill Nighy and also takes place across cozy flats and pubs in London - I was befuddled but also indifferent. I wasn't sure whether I was clear on everything that had happened, then realized I didn't actually care because there were so many other shows waiting to be watched. Not even Claflin's face could make me want to piece together all the untethered strands of plot and impossibility (e.g. a magical therapist's office where ghosts of patients past show up and feed information to the protagonist - or was that our hero having reverberations of a previous nervous breakdown? We'll never know). Again, I watched the whole thing. It was fun, it was fine. It killed a couple of nights on the couch when the sun sets at 5 p.m. and my other option is bed-rotting. All Her Fault, starring the fantastic Sarah Snook and Dakota Fanning, is another series I enjoyed, because who wouldn't enjoy these women in anything, especially when they drink wine in beautiful houses on the scenic Chicago coast? (Seriously, Snook is probably one of the top 10 best actors working today. Her one-woman performance in The Picture of Dorian Gray in London's West End and then Broadway was astounding, and she deservedly got both the Olivier and the Tony for it.) Only, the themes - important ones, like that women shoulder most of the labor in domestic relationships - are drilled into us with the subtlety of a wrecking ball, and the show's narrative thrust comes from the taking-apart of a straightforward story and putting it back together. It's like adding music to an otherwise deflated scene to give the illusion of drama. Or holding back information from the viewer so things that aren't twists feel like they are. Peter Kramer/HBO And The Beast in Me, a Robert Durst-tinged mystery that shot to No. 1 on Netflix right after its Nov. 13 release and which I gobbled up in two days, is autumny and sexy and stars two of the finest actors around, Claire Danes and Matthew Rhys. (Plus Dierdre O'Connell! And Bill Irwin! And Natalie Morales! And Brittany Snow! And Jonathan Banks!) But no amount of trembly-chin crying could make it riveting in the way only true prestige TV can be. It was just a bit too on the nose. New on Prime Video in December 2025 - The Full List of Movies and TV Shows As a comparison: In 2020's The Undoing, when we find out that the guy most likely to be the bad guy is actually the bad guy, it's a revelation that makes us look inward. Why had we resisted it? What did it say about us that we had looked for every possible outcome other than the most obvious one in order to absolve a charm