A thoroughly democratic medium—perhaps the most democratic of this century—TV series reach everyone, everywhere: in their plots, you don’t need to be an art critic or an architect to enjoy worlds carefully designed, spaces that tell us how we live, how we plan, how we coexist—or how we confront collective fears and tensions.
It’s autumn, TV series season: 15 titles every Domus reader should watch
A Domus-curated guide to TV series, from haunted houses and dystopian designs to Frank Lloyd Wright-inspired spaces and post-apocalyptic cities, exploring how design can sometimes outshine the story itself.
Courtesy Netflix Italia. Photo Lucia Iuorio
Black Rabbit. Photo Krista Schlueter/Netflix. Courtesy of Netflix © 2025 (COURTESY OF NETFLIX)
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- La redazione di Domus
- 27 October 2025
In these television productions, places and objects are always important and never random. So important, in fact, that we’ve explored them multiple times through their creators’ perspectives, from director Luca Guadagnino, whom we interviewed for Domus in 2022 about interior design, to set designer Stefano Baisi, who turned the houses in After The Hunt into stages for social and generational conflicts.
Across Netflix, Amazon Prime, Disney+, and Apple TV+ productions, Domus has curated a journey through 15 series to rewatch what has happened in the world over the past five years.
There’s the overarching theme of the apocalypse, which today no longer erupts spectacularly—it unfolds silently. This is shown in the new Alien series on Disney+, which abandons deep space to explore an inner, claustrophobic future—the same one that drives Black Mirror and Squid Game (Netflix), where control has become invisible and internalized.
There’s also the microcosm of the ultra-rich: yachts, luxury resorts, isolated houses, and open-plan offices—like those in Scissione—spaces that were once bourgeois and have become places of unease and estrangement. Meanwhile, series like Cristóbal Balenciaga or The Beef tackle the world of design, designers, and architecture directly, often with a critical, unflinching eye. Others reinterpret historic architectures and iconic spaces in a irreverent way, as in The Studio on Apple TV+.
Finally, there’s urbanism: the transformation of cities into arenas for play and survival, an imaginary most fully expressed in The Last of Us and Paradise.
Scroll through the gallery to discover the Domus selection.
With two completely different storylines, The Bear and The Studio have both fallen under Wright-mania. In the first, the award-winning series starring Jeremy Allen White (available on Disney+), you can explore Frank Lloyd Wright’s first house in Chicago. In the second, you can visit a Wright building… that doesn’t exist yet.
Black Mirror is the ultimate speculative design TV series: the anthology to turn to if you want to understand which objects—both beautiful and ugly—humanity has imagined and will continue to imagine. Its seventh season, released this year on Netflix, marks fourteen years of dystopias, many of which have already come true.
The White Lotus is perhaps the fiercest satire of the “new rich” ever to appear on Netflix — a series that has redefined the imagination of the “glocal” architecture of luxury resorts. White Lotus is a fictional brand, yet so convincing that it feels real.
From Ridley Scott’s original 1979 Alien to Alien: Earth, now available on Disney+, this saga has never stopped exploring what truly scares us. Not the monsters lurking on spaceships, but the architectures of power: corporate metropolises, industrial infrastructures, interstellar assembly lines, and dystopian devices that reflect our most earthly fears. It is in these artificial landscapes, built by humans, that Alien continues to find its most authentic horror.
At the heart of the corporate dystopia in Severance lies the Bell Labs Holmdel complex, designed by Eero Saarinen in 1962. It serves as the headquarters (for exterior shots) of the fictional Lumon Industries, the company at the center of the show’s events. Prefabricated panels, narrow corridors, integrated artificial lighting: what was once a claustrophobic “nice to five” dream of stability has become a nightmare across two seasons on Amazon Prime.
Since its first season aired on Netflix in 2021, Squid Game has developed a mythology that is entirely architectural. The island where participants in this sadistic game for the wealthy are confined is at once a prison and a childhood dream. Plastic and surreal, the “architectures” of Squid Game have become more iconic than what happens within them.
A series that would be narratively negligible if not for Julianne Moore’s performance and the dream villa in New England where it is set. Sirens is a testament to the bourgeois dream of opulent surrealism and the interior design that has accompanied it for years. The design objects that appear on screen serve as its epitaph—most notably, the Boa sofa by the Campana Brothers for Edra.
Who was Balenciaga before becoming a brand, and where was Cristóbal Balenciaga before conquering Paris? In the series available on Disney+, not only the clothes but also the Spanish designer’s locations have been faithfully recreated.
On one side, there are those who have turned design and art into tools of power and markers of their status — social, financial, and cultural. On the other, there are those who, out of necessity, create the furnishings for the homes of the 1%. These two sides of the same coin don’t exactly see eye to eye. Beef, released on Netflix in 2023, offers a brutally honest portrait of the world of design and… of designers.
Both Luchino Visconti’s 1963 film and the recently produced Netflix series depict the decline of an era — that of the Sicilian aristocracy — along with all its architecture. From Villa Boscogrande in Palermo to Palazzo Chigi in Rome, the settings and costumes are reason enough to watch this TV series.
The series that, for the first time, depicted fascism in Italy, but also the one that best portrayed postwar Milan — as a city of defeat, poverty, and the despair of all Italians, a fertile ground for Mussolini’s rise.
The architecture of the night and an underground New York now swept up by gentrification: Black Rabbit (on Netflix) brings together many hot-button themes in its settings, but above all, between the austerity of the Seagram Building and the nostalgia of East Village clubs, it tells the dream of creating beauty from ruins — architectural ones included.
It all started with a cult video game, the first in history to be adapted for television with such meticulous attention to detail, from architecture to interior design. The Last of Us is a masterclass in apocalyptic design—watching it truly feels like playing a video game.
Paradise, like Beef, is a series about architecture and power. An urban planning genius is commissioned to design a city carved into a mountain—a safe haven for a group of super-rich to be saved when the end of the world comes.