The first season of Citadel cost $300 million and scored 51% on Rotten Tomatoes. Both of those numbers matter. The budget figure established Prime Video’s ambition. The critical reception established how badly that ambition was misfired. Reviewers consistently identified the same problem: the show spent so much energy building a universe that it forgot to give audiences characters or stories worth investing in. The spinoffs — Citadel: Honey Bunny from India, Citadel: Diana from Italy — have both been cancelled after single seasons.

The Yellowstone franchise has been expanding in every direction simultaneously — prequels in 1883 and 1923, a Kayce Dutton procedural in Marshals, the Pfeiffer-led Madison reconfigured as a standalone. None of them have replicated the original’s combination of melodrama, landscape, and moral pressure. Dutton Ranch, premiering May 15 on Paramount+, may be the closest anyone gets to a genuine continuation. Beth Dutton and Rip Wheeler are in South Texas now. They are building something of their own, away from the wreckage of the Montana saga, and running into a rival ranch operation backed by Ed Harris and Annette Bening.

Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan ran for four seasons on Prime Video with diminishing returns. The third and fourth seasons traded the geopolitical complexity of the earlier episodes for tighter action plotting that felt more conventional and less distinctively Ryan-ish. John Krasinski was always a slightly counterintuitive casting choice who grew into the role, and the series ended without the kind of conclusion that closed the story permanently. Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan: Ghost War, arriving May 20 on Prime Video, is a feature-length film rather than a new season — a format choice that signals the franchise is testing whether the character has theatrical-scale appeal or whether the streaming-series model was the right container all along.

William Golding’s 1954 novel has been adapted for film twice — Peter Brook’s bleak 1963 version and Harry Hook’s muddled 1990 American take — and neither has held up as a definitive interpretation. Jack Thorne, who wrote Adolescence, now has a four-episode BBC series that landed on Netflix in the US on May 4, and critics are calling it the adaptation that may make all subsequent attempts unnecessary. The Rotten Tomatoes score sits at 91%.

The premise of Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed sounds like it was assembled from a generator: a newly divorced mom named Paula falls into a dangerous rabbit hole of blackmail, murder, and youth soccer while fighting a custody battle. Tatiana Maslany plays Paula. The combination of domestic crisis, amateur investigation, suburban satire, and whatever “youth soccer murder conspiracy” means in practice creates a tonal mixture that could collapse into incoherence or become exactly the kind of genre hybrid that generates devoted audiences.

Adapting One Hundred Years of Solitude was considered impossible for most of the decades since Gabriel García Márquez published it in 1967. The novel’s narrative structure — seven generations of the Buendía family in the fictional town of Macondo, with magical realism woven into the historical fabric so completely that separating them is not a meaningful operation — resists the conventions of visual storytelling in fundamental ways. The García Márquez estate spent decades refusing film rights.

Shelby Van Pelt’s novel Remarkably Bright Creatures spent an extended period on bestseller lists largely through word of mouth — the kind of book readers press on other readers with an insistence that can be off-putting until you actually read it. The premise involves a widow working at an aquarium who forms an unlikely bond with an octopus named Marcellus. It is also a missing-persons mystery and a story about grief and the ways humans project emotional intelligence onto creatures who may or may not share it.

There is a version of this show that fails spectacularly. Ghost Rider failed. The Superman Lives project never even got off the ground. Nicolas Cage has spent two decades being the punchline of every conversation about actors and comic book movies. Spider-Noir, premiering May 27 on Prime Video after a May 25 MGM+ debut, is his chance to close that file. The premise is legitimately interesting. Ben Reilly is a 1930s private investigator in Depression-era New York, aging and burned out, who once operated as the city’s only superhero.

The pitch for The Boroughs is exactly what the cast suggests: Alfred Molina, Geena Davis, Alfre Woodard, and Bill Pullman live in a retirement community that gets invaded by an otherworldly threat, and they do something about it. Netflix premieres it May 21. The premise requires a tonal balance that is difficult to sustain — too much genre earnestness and the comedy collapses, too much winking at the audience and the suspense disappears — but the cast is experienced enough with tonal complexity that the possibility of something genuinely good is real.

The first season of The Four Seasons on Netflix worked because Tina Fey understood what the Alan Alda source film understood — that a dramedy about middle-aged people in long-term relationships has to actually believe in the relationships to generate any comedy worth having. The show was warmer than expected and funnier than its premise suggested. The second season arrives May 28 with the same structural premise: six friends, four vacations in a single year, and the annual reckoning that time-based stories impose on characters who are trying not to notice how much is changing.

HBO’s new adaptation of Wuthering Heights is being described, without apparent embarrassment, as the version that leans into what the novel was actually doing. Brontë’s 1847 text has always been more violent and erotic and structurally strange than its reputation as a tragic romance suggests — the relationship at its center is obsessive and destructive and explicitly includes class warfare, generational revenge, and a ghost. The sanitized versions have historically missed the point.

Some stories don’t announce themselves as connected—you just feel it, like déjà vu that won’t quite resolve. Watching Traqués / The Hunt (2025), that sensation creeps in early. Not from a specific scene, not even from a character, but from the way tension is constructed. That slow, almost methodical transition from order to breakdown. And once you’ve seen it before, it becomes difficult to unsee. The closest structural ancestor is unmistakably Shoot.