In case you couldn't tell, we do love our TV anthology series! From A Man For All Seasons to seventies cult classic Thriller to Tales of the Unexpected; Alfred Hitchcock Presents; The Agatha Christie Hour... I love them all! And they don't all have to be anthologies of the suspense genre either, as I also enjoyed Storybook International which was a children's TV anthology - a collection of folk tales from around the world.
It takes great skill to come up with a whole load of characters and storylines for a series where the episodes are largely independent from each other. Not to mention fitting each storyline within the allocated time limit making sure all loose ends are neatly tied up. There's not going to be a 'to be continued' as that's not how anthologies work!
And more recently I've been coming across more and more TV anthology series such as The Ray Bradbury Theatre; Natural Causes which ran for one series on ITV back in the eighties, and The Hitchhiker. I'm definitely not bored in the evenings that's for sure.
Even though TV anthologies are still around, I don't feel they're as popular or as numerous now as they were in say perhaps the 1950s-1980s, and it started to peter out a bit during the 1990s. I know that growing up it was Tales of the Unexpected that was the most well known. My family enjoyed it and I still remember hearing that eerily haunting theme tune floating up the stairs and into my room as I was trying to sleep! Then I discovered Thriller a couple of years ago and I'm trying to work out which theme out of the two is the eeriest!
What are your views on TV anthologies? Do you enjoy them? And which are your favourites?
This is definitely one for my mum who's into things like short stories and films and things like that. My mum is a writer and she's said the same thing that Angel has in that there's a skill and technique that goes into creating any kind of 'short' where the reader/viewer doesn't feel as though everything is left unfinished and is left 'hanging'. I'm sure I've watched TV anthologies in the past although none spring to mind right now! 🙄 And I'd have to ask my mum which her faves are!