Photo-Illustration: Vulture; Photos by Netflix, Apple TV+ and HBO
As television evolves through the COVID epoch of the late-period streaming era, the once familiar anticipation cycle built around semi-annual “seasons” has gone increasingly askew: Major, much-hyped series can debut at any point on the calendar, returning shows can go anywhere from mere months to several years between new episodes, and projects that have lain dormant for ages can be unexpectedly revived by a parent company’s streaming division.
But seasons are still as good an organizing principle as any when it comes to forcing a sense of order on the nonstop churn of TV content, and so if 2022 started out relatively dormant, with a promising handful of bright…
