With 60 million international subscribers and a programme-making budget of about $3bn, Netflix is steamrolling most of the received wisdom about how we make and watch television. Already riding high on the success of prestigious hits like House of Cards and Daredevil, Netflix is expecting to bust new barriers with Sense8, whose 12 episodes became available to view today.
The big news is that Sense8 marks the TV debut of Andy and Lana Wachowski, the enigmatic creators of the blockbusting Matrix movies, though riding a little less high of late following equivocal reactions to Cloud Atlas and Jupiter Ascending. The multiple storylines and global reach of Sense8 inevitably bring to mind the similarly expansive structure of Cloud Atlas, though the show’s serial format does at least ensure that the urge to sprawl is kept under some kind of control.
The Post-it Note description of Sense8 is that it concerns eight individuals dotted around the world – San Francisco, Mumbai, Seoul, London, Berlin etc – who share some kind of biological or telepathic bond.
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