"The 2023 writers' and actors' strikes, coupled with the 2024 California wildfires, froze the production pipeline and reduced the number of industry jobs, while Warner Bros. Discovery's cost cutting, the steady deterioration of Paramount, and Disney's announcement that Hulu will disappear as a standalone service by the end of 2026 added to a blanket unease. Amid all this uncertainty about what the future of TV holds, these series demonstrated the medium's possibility."
"Director Justin Kurzel's interests lie in outlaws, mass murderers, white separatists, and doomed leaders like Macbeth. But instead of glorifying or condemning them, Kurzel and his frequent collaborator, writer Shaun Grant, interrogate the weaknesses and traumas that push them into aggression. The pair's first TV project, an adaptation of Richard Flanagan's Booker Prize-winning 2013 novel The Narrow Road to the Deep North, follows surgeon Dorrigo Evans, a Japanese POW (played as younger and older versions by Jacob Elordi and Ciarán Hinds)"
2025 television faced production freezes from the 2023 writers' and actors' strikes and the 2024 California wildfires, which reduced industry jobs. Corporate cost cutting at Warner Bros. Discovery, Paramount's decline, and Disney's plan to fold Hulu added industry unease. Several series nonetheless demonstrated television's potential by telling stories that reached through screens and demanded attention. One series even foregrounds Malin Åkerman finding novel ways to say the word "cunt." Justin Kurzel and Shaun Grant adapted Richard Flanagan's The Narrow Road to the Deep North, following surgeon Dorrigo Evans, a Japanese POW played by Jacob Elordi and Ciarán Hinds, forced to tend fellow soldiers as they toil and starve building the Burma Railway during World War II. The miniseries is brutal, gory, and bleak, with no romanticizing of combat.
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