We are living in the era of the epic. On the silver screen, movies like Dune and The Odyssey are showing just how vast and ambitious storytelling can really be. But on TV, we’re seeing a swing in the opposite direction, with more claustrophobic, smaller-scale stories finding success. The era of Game of Thrones is over, and now, smaller-stakes stories like A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms thrive. One of the most acclaimed new shows of last year, The Pitt, is set entirely in one shift in an ER.
But there are still opportunities for feats of epic television, and Netflix proved that with Season 2 of its Spanish-language series One Hundred Years of Solitude, based on Gabriel García Márquez’s classic novel of the same name. In these eight episodes, ending with a feature-length finale, the Buendía family reaches its end not with a bang but with a whimper; but it still makes for one of the most impressive works of television in recent years.
