The Anthology Films And Shows That Get It Right
A little bit of everything
The first season of Love Story has wrapped with its deep dive into John F. Kennedy Jr. and Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy, and its very structure hints at a larger trend in streaming right now. Anthologies are now becoming the preferred format for telling real-life stories that are too messy, too contradictory, or too culturally loaded to fit into a single neat narrative. White Lotus much?
As it turns out, each season of Love Story will focus on a different couple, making the show an anthology like Black Mirror or animated showcases such as Love, Death & Robots. The appeal is identical: new characters, new emotional stakes, and a clean slate every time. If this has you hooked, below is a catalogue of anthology films and series on OTT that deliver the same rotating-cast, ever-changing narrative thrill.
The Ballad Of Buster Scruggs
A Western anthology was always going to feel like a relic, but the Coen brothers turn it into something both elegiac and wickedly funny. Each story moves further away from cartoonish violence and closer to existential dread, until the final segment ends with a bleak joke about mortality itself.
Where to watch: Netflix
Modern Love: Mumbai
Adapted from the New York Times column and its American series counterpart, this Mumbai edition expands the idea of love beyond romance: aging, queerness, domestic labour, and self-respect all get their own narrative space. The city itself becomes a connective tissue between otherwise unrelated lives.
Where to watch: Amazon Prime Video
Bombay Talkies
Created to mark 100 years of Hindi cinema, this anthology brings together four major directors: Karan Johar, Anurag Kashyap, Zoya Akhtar, and Dibakar Banerjee. The result is uneven but historically interesting; each filmmaker’s signature preoccupations are intact, whether it is Johar’s emotional melodrama or Kashyap’s moral murkiness.
Where to watch: Prime Video
Folklore
HBO Asia’s horror anthology draws on supernatural legends from different countries across the continent, with each episode directed by a filmmaker from the region being depicted. The result feels less like a single show and more like a rotating showcase of Asian horror sensibilities, from Japanese ghost stories to Indonesian urban myths.
Where to stream: Prime Video
Kinds of Kindness
Yorgos Lanthimos returning to a triptych format feels inevitable in hindsight. The film follows three strange New Orleans-set stories, with repertory casting that keeps looping Emma Stone, Willem Dafoe, Jesse Plemons, and Margaret Qualley through different lives. The repetition begins to feel intentional, as if the universe itself is stuck replaying the same cruel experiment on its characters.
Where to watch: JioHotstar
Black Mirror
Black Mirror began as a bleak techno-satire, but has since evolved into a pop culture's benchmark for the dystopian times that we live in (ICYMI, some of the episodes have actually happened in real life, like a simpsons prediction). The format allows wildly different tones: some episodes function as intimate character dramas, others as full-blown dystopian nightmares. Few anthology shows have managed to stay culturally relevant across so many seasons.
Where to watch: Netflix
The French Dispatch
Wes Anderson’s most self-referential film is structured as a fictional magazine’s final issue, with each segment adapting an article from the publication’s archives. The result is less a traditional anthology and more a meticulously staged literary collage, filled with reporters, artists, revolutionaries, and Anderson’s usual parade of symmetrical compositions.
Where to watch: JioHotstar
Marvel’s What If…?
Marvel uses the anthology format to do what its main cinematic universe rarely allows: kill heroes, rewrite origins, and explore alternate timelines without long-term consequences (think Spiderman becoming a zombie). The animated format also lets the studio push visuals and scale in ways that would be cost-prohibitive in live action.
Where to stream: JioHotstar
Navarasa
This Tamil anthology builds itself around the classical Indian theory of nine emotions, or rasa, and assigning each rasa to a different filmmaker and cast. With directors like Mani Ratnam, Gautham Vasudev Menon, and Bejoy Nambiar involved, the stacked project was conceived during the pandemic to support film industry workers who had lost their livelihood.
Where to stream: Netflix
Love, Death + Robots
One of Netflix’s most ambitious anthology experiments, this animated series jumps between studios, visual styles, and genres, from hard sci-fi to grotesque horror. Alberto Mielgo’s wordless episode Jibaro, with its surreal depiction of a siren and a deaf knight, became an instant standout and is often cited as the show’s artistic peak.
Where to stream: Netflix