It: Welcome to Derry is far from 2025’s best television show. But it might just be the most 2025 television show. The Stephen King adaptation arrives straddling an industry-wide wave of film-to-TV IP plundering: the last 12 months have already given us such corporately integrated kindred spirits as the Star Wars spin-off Andor, Batman spin-off The Penguin, Alien prequel Alien: Earth, and DC Comics spin-off Peacemaker. Derry – a prequel to the 2017 film It (and its 2019 sequel It Chapter Two), following the supernatural goings-on in a postwar New England town – is also a series that could only exist in the afterglow of Stranger Things’s candent popularity. Reviewers have bickered over the series’ similarities to, or divergences from, Netflix’s teens-vs-monsters nostalgia-fest; it’s true that Welcome to Derry is nastier and loftier, but make no mistake, the two shows are very much guzzling from the same well.
More than anything, though, Derry epitomises something that’s becoming ever more true about contemporary US television – a collapsing of high and low sensibilities. For years, there was a clear (albeit flexible) separation between what we might think of as “genre” shows and more supposedly sophisticated “prestige” television. Something like The Walking Dead, for instance, was a robustly made, well-received and popular series, but almost never mentioned in the same breath as, say, Mad Men. This was always something of an illusory divide – many of the most prestige-laden series of all time have been spins on an established genre, from NYPD Blue (police procedural) to Deadwood (western), to The Sopranos (crime drama). But the difference was always clear – in the way the series were produced, marketed, discussed, and voted on come awards season.
