An unexpected and enviable problem has emerged in the US: the existence of an excess of quality television series sometimes known as ‘peak TV’. The year 2015 beat the previous record with the transmission of more than four hundred titles. It is no wonder, then, that the special issue of Entertainment Weekly dated 18 September of that year, which provides a preview of the autumn television season, was the largest in the history of the magazine. Ten years ago the British scholar John Ellis divided the history of television in Europe into three stages in terms of access to content: first, scarcity (the initial situation of a single state broadcaster); secondly, availability (competition in the public system with one or two private channels); and finally plenty (the multichannel cable system).1 In North America it seems evident that viewers currently live in a time of overwhelming abundance that may not be sustainable.Unlike the European preference, still, for public service, the blossoming of American television has been carried out in an ecology in which public TV is almost non-existent. As is well known, PBS, the modest state service, has little of its own production and continues to rely on co-productions with the UK such as the flagship Downton Abbey (Carnival/Masterpiece, ITV/PBS (2010–15)). Moreover, while new platforms have captured the interest of critics and juries, recent seasons have seen innovations not only in minority digital platforms or cable (the already canonical HBO and AMC), but even in the traditional generalist networks that are still attracting mass audiences. On the one hand there is press favourite Transparent (Amazon, 2014) the multi-award-winning series on a transgender father-mother. But on the other there are How to Get Away with Murder (ShondaLand/ABC, 2014–), set in a law firm, and Empire (Imagine/Fox, 2015–), centred on the commercial conflicts of a hip-hop music company. The last two have African-American protagonists, a phenomenon previously little seen on US television.With their multiple perspectives and ambiguous characters, these dramas are evidently examples of what Jason Mittell has called in his influential book ‘complex’ television. More specifically Mittell identifies two forms of textual complexity when it comes to plotting: the centripetal, which delves into the disturbing psychology of these often unsympathetic characters;2 and the centrifugal, which spreads out from those individuals to cover the collective frameworks in which they are immersed.