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.
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.