Anthology Series

When an Anthology is a TV series. There may be a common cast, or be a Genre Anthology, or a Thematic Series. Unusual cases may keep the same protagonist but nothing else.

For how varied this can be, The Love Boat and Fantasy Island were both stealth anthologies. While they both had regularly appearing casts, each episode consisted of two or more stories at least one of which revolved around one or more guest stars as the main protagonists. In the case of The Love Boat there were even different directors for the different stories in an episode. Atlanta, for instance, has a main cast and plot but also a series of totally standalone episodes featuring different characters and in an entirely different continuity.

There are three specific types categorized by this page. The first is episodic anthologies, where the stories generally cover a single episode, are self-contained, and there are no recurring characters. The second is season-long anthologies that move on from their stories (aside from the odd Easter Egg, perhaps) after a single season of television. The third is stealth anthologies, which keeps certain characters (generally a protagonist) but otherwise totally rotates the story with no recurring, long-running plots.

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Examples

Episodic Anthologies

• Accused
• Alfred Hitchcock Presents
• Amazing Stories
• American Horror Stories
• American Playhouse
• Are You Afraid of the Dark?
• Atlanta
• Banjun Drama ^note Though the majority of episodes are standalone, some were split into two parts and aired on separate weeks.
• Beyond Belief: Fact or Fiction
• Black Mirror
• Bloodride
• Blue Literature
• The Boys: Diabolical
• Cartoonstitute
• Creeped Out
• Creepshow
• Criminal (2019)
• Electric Dreams
• Fear Itself
• Freaky
• Ghost Stories for Christmas
• Girl from Nowhere
• Goosebumps (1995)
• The Grimm Variations
• Guillermo del Toro's Cabinet of Curiosities
• Hammer House of Horror
• Hatchetfield
• The Haunting Hour
• High Maintenance
• The Hire: A series of web videos that have Clive Owen as the driver of a different BMW car, and a different driving job to handle in each episode.
• Inside No. 9
• Into the Dark
• Juro Que Vi
• Kizazi Moto: Generation Fire
• Lore
• Love, American Style
• Love, Death & Robots
• Mantis Woman
• Masters of Horror
• Modern Love
• Monsters
• Murder in Mind
• Night Gallery
• Night Visions
• The Outer Limits (1963)
• The Outer Limits (1995)
• Out of the Unknown
• Out of this World (1962)
• Play for Today
• Random! Cartoons
• The Ray Bradbury Theater
• Room 104
• Screen One
• Screen Two
• Shorty McShorts' Shorts
• Star Wars: Visions
• The Street (BBC)
• Tales from the Darkside
• Tales of the Unexpected
• Tales of the Walking Dead
• Thriller
• The Twilight Zone (1959)
• The Twilight Zone (1985)
• The Twilight Zone (2002)
• The Twilight Zone (2019)
• Two Sentence Horror Stories
• Walt Disney Presents
• What A Cartoon! Show ^note  A few cartoons had more than one short, but most were one-offs.
• Whodunnit? (UK)

Season-Long Anthologies

• American Crime
• American Crime Story
  • The People v. O. J. Simpson
  • The Assassination of Gianni Versace
  • Impeachment
• American Horror Story
  • American Horror Story: Murder House
  • American Horror Story: Asylum
  • American Horror Story: Coven
  • American Horror Story: Freak Show
  • American Horror Story: Hotel
  • American Horror Story: Roanoke
  • American Horror Story: Cult
  • American Horror Story: Apocalypse
  • American Horror Story: 1984
  • American Horror Story: Double Feature
  • American Horror Story: NYC
  • American Horror Story: Delicate
• Beef
• Castle Rock
• Channel Zero
• Cruel Summer
• Delhi Crime
• Dirty John
• Fargo: Each season follows a different series of crimes and their aftermath, but all take place in a similar geographic area and within the same timeline. Past and future events are referenced or shown later, and some characters appear in more than one season.
  • Fargo: Season One
  • Fargo: Season Two
  • Fargo: Season Three
  • Fargo: Season Four
  • Fargo: Season Five
• Feud
  • Feud: Capote vs. the Swans
• Genius
• The Guest Book
• The Haunting:
  • The Haunting of Hill House (2018)
  • The Haunting of Bly Manor
  • The Fall of the House of Usher (2023) ^note though not under the same naming convention
• Infinity Train
• Innocent (UK)
• Miracle Workers:
  • Miracle Workers (Season One)
  • Miracle Workers: Dark Ages
  • Miracle Workers: Oregon Trail
  • Miracle Workers: End Times
• Monster
  • Dahmer – Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story
• The Pact
• Slasher
• Super Pumped
• The Terror
  • The Terror
  • The Terror: Infamy
• True Detective
• Undressed has multiple stories taking place over multiple episodes. Stories vary in how many episodes they have, but everything begins and ends within the span of a season.
• The White Lotus
• Why Women Kill

Stealth Anthologies

• Atlanta: A mix of episodes that include the same characters and continuities, episodes that split off characters onto separate stories, and completely separate standalone stories with no recurring characters.
• The Booth at the End is an inversion. In the first season, all the characters appeared to be self-contained and not overlapping, combined only by meeting the nameless Man. In the second season, it turned out they had been Connected All Along.
• Cartoon Sushi, similar to its predecessor Liquid Television below, combined one-off shorts with recurring segments.
• Columbo
• Fantasy Island
• Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex is about as close to Exactly What It Says on the Tin - Stand Alone episodes are unrelated to others while Complex episodes are related to the same arc.
• Liquid Television features a mix of standalone shorts and recurring segments, which themselves could be episodic or serialized.
• The Love Boat
• Oh Yeah! Cartoons — a mix of recurring and standalone shorts.
• The Sinner

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