Such movies proliferated because no event in this century has captured the American imagination like 9/11 and its ambiguous aftermath, the War On Terror. Plus, violence easily lends itself to the camera, and even in this postmodern age, the public loves narratives with clearly demarcated heroes and villains. Give or take a few dozen volumes of geopolitical context, these are easy stories to tell.

This stuff is not sexy or easy to visualize

That feels especially true by comparison now that filmmakers are attempting to depict the next time Lower Manhattan collapsed upon itself and sent ripples to the farthest reaches of the Earth. The global financial crisis of 2008 cost Americans $19.2 trillion in household wealth, and 8.8 million people lost their jobs. Its practical impact on the life of most US citizens was far more catastrophic than that of 9/11. Yet few people understand how or why it happened, and (perhaps relatedly) rather than explosions, its principal drama involved lots of complicated math. This stuff is not easy to visualize and only sexy insofar as money in unimaginable quantities is always sexy. Still, such a momentous occasion demands a film adaptation or three, and almost a decade out from the Wall Street meltdown, they’re all hitting at once.

Most imminently, ABC’s two-part miniseries Madoff airs this Wednesday and Thursday. Richard Dreyfuss stars as Bernie Madoff, the three-time NASDAQ chair who went to prison at age 71 for running a Ponzi scheme regarded as the biggest financial fraud in American history. For decades, Madoff convinced marks rich and poor they were buying into an exclusive private hedge fund. Rather than investing their money, he funneled it to previous clients, who believed the payments to be steady returns on prudent financial management. When his ruse was revealed in December 2008, 65 billion imaginary dollars went poof.

Madoff, based on Bryan Ross’ 2009 book The Madoff Chronicles, is the first of two TV movies about the same white-collar crook. The second — The Wizard Of Lies, adapted from Diane Henriques’ book of the same name — stars Robert De Niro and will air on HBO later this year. The latter movie will surely err on the side of prestige; in the meantime we get the network primetime version. That might sound like a slight, but with this subject matter, straightforward storytelling is a plus. Yes, everything unfolds with the anti-nuance of your average network crime drama, but most of us plebes need Madoff’s blunt play-by-play narration to understand the mechanics of his con.

Dreyfuss plays Madoff with a combination of grandfatherly tenderness and brazen sleaze. He’s magnanimous when treated like the benevolent king he believes himself to be. When crossed, he doubles down on rodent hubris, slinging lines like “I’m a rainmaker. I make it rain!” He’s as offputting as any unrepentant blowhard, but many of his monologues contain kernels of truth.

For instance: “I’m just a dirty little fish swimming around in a dirty pond,” Madoff exclaims, incredulous that he’s become a national pariah. “The biggest banks in the world sell their customers assets they know are toxic, and the ratings board gives them a rubber stamp of approval, and the politicians then tell the public that Wall Street is gonna police itself. Ha! And then they all get bailed out… And they call me a fraud?!” Never has “Everybody’s doing it!” been sufficient grounds for destroying people’s lives, but it’s hard to argue with Madoff’s assessment of the big picture.

That larger context of corruption is the subject of another recent Great Recession postmortem by, of all people, Anchorman/Talladega Nights director Adam McKay. His Oscar-nominated film The Big Short, repurposed from Michael Lewis’ book of the same name, aims to explain how the economy bottomed out by zeroing in on the handful of experts who saw it coming years in advance. (How? “They looked.”)

Christian Bale, Steve Carell, Ryan Gosling, and Brad Pitt play fictionalized versions of real people who recognized the banking industry was propped up on a rotten foundation of overvalued bonds built from shoddy mortgage loans. Their tangentially overlapping storylines are collaged together with assorted American ephemera via quick cuts and vibrant music; McKay skips across scenes and soundtracks as if toggling between browser tabs. Many characters break the fourth wall, particularly a trio of unbilled celebrities who show up to explain key economic jargon in layman’s terms. It’s Ocean’s 11 as told from the perspective of a few morally dubious security guards, and it somehow renders this stuff both comprehensible and fun — at least until the tidal wave of the reality of the situation finally washes over everything, leaving you to shake your fist at the lot of them along with Madoff.

These kinds of stories are not new; Madoff and The Big Short just approach them from a fresh angle. The focus in financial stories tends to be the salacious misbehavior of a few gluttonous rogues. Gordon Gekko’s greed in Wall Street was aspirational. Jordan Belfort’s rise, fall, and rebound in The Wolf Of Wall Street was supposed to reflect 2008’s bloat, burst, and bailout the same way M*A*S*H used the Korean War to comment on Vietnam. But as seen through Martin Scorsese’s camera, Leo DiCaprio’s self-destructive rampage couldn’t help but be glamorous.

These latest based-on-a-true-stories are not so drunk on excess. They comb through recent history in disbelief, condemning the short-sighted avarice that fueled the economy’s collapse. Madoff‘s title character is a slithering villain, not a sympathetic antihero. When The Big Short‘s various protagonists try to convince their peers of the danger hidden in plain sight, they’re aghast to encounter indifference at every turn. Madoff and The Big Short each allude to unspeakable damage in real people’s lives, and their view of the future is even bleaker: both films imply that although we should have learned our lesson by now, it’s only a matter of time before this happens again.

What to make, then, of Billions, Showtime’s addictive new series about a billionaire hedge fund manager (Homeland‘s Damian Lewis) and the US attorney obsessed with taking him down (Paul Giamatti)? Lewis plays Bobby Axelrod, a magnetic 9/11 survivor who runs his firm in suburban Connecticut, miles away from Wall Street. Beloved in his community but under surveillance from police and press, Lewis openly pines for a bygone era when no one would try to egg his limousine. “When did it become a crime to succeed in this country?” he asks a reporter. With society still making sense of 2008’s wreckage, have we already gone back to romanticizing well-heeled white men and their fuck-you money?

Not exactly. Lewis plays Axelrod with a contagious bravado Homeland‘s Nicholas Brody never afforded him. He relishes leveraging his net worth to sabotage rivals, settle old scores, and buy obscenely luxurious beachfront property. But so far Billions is positioning “Axe” as the clear bad guy and Giamatti’s Chuck Rhoades as the fundamentally good man charged with nabbing him. Like Bale’s character in The Big Short, Axelrod is into Metallica, but rather than marking him as an iconoclast, Axe’s Master Of Puppets T-shirt seems to be a not-so-subtle message about his penchant for malevolent string-pulling. If that didn’t get the point across, there’s plenty more concrete evidence that Axe is engaging in dirty business, whereas Rhoades is routinely framed as a man of conviction whose intense self-scrutiny happens to manifest itself in a BDSM fetish. (He’s also, as seen in the most recent episode, the kind of stickler who would force a man to pick up dog poop with his hands when he leaves home without a bag.)

a worldwide embrace of mercenary self-interest

Still, even in an era of widespread contempt for the one percent, and even on a show where Axelrod is clearly in the wrong, it’s not so easy to render these conflicts in black and white. If the legacy of 9/11 was an extremely polarized political environment, the lasting effect of the financial meltdown appears to be much of the world embracing the kind of mercenary self-interest that brought down Wall Street in the first place. Just like in post-apocalyptic fiction, it’s every man, woman, and child for himself.

That sort of moral murkiness is all over The Big Short, in which the main characters end up ambivalently rooting for a market collapse that will get them real paid, and it finds its way into Billions too. In the pilot, Rhoades’ wife Wendy (Mad Men‘s Maggie Siff) accuses him of advancing the public good only when it’s good for him, and we learn that, in an increasingly juicy conflict of interest for Chuck, Wendy has been employed as Axelrod’s in-house psychiatrist for 15 years. This kind of shading ups the intrigue in many ways, but it also makes for a much less cathartic viewing experience than those 9/11 and War On Terror movies. When both the crooks and the people chasing the crooks are out for themselves, there’s so much less incentive for fist-pumping. It’s why The Big Short ended not with a triumphant roar but a sigh.

Billions may veer in a more cynical direction someday too, but for now the show seems to be hoping disenchanted Americans will root against a robber baron. There’s a scene in the second episode that implies as much: looking back on one of his favorite childhood movies, Rhoades rhapsodizes about the law enforcement “super posse” that forms to chase down Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. When his right-hand man replies, “I didn’t root for the super posse. I rooted for Butch and Sundance,” Rhoades widens his eyes and smiles. “Of course you did,” Rhoades says. “We all did. But that’s not who we are anymore.”

The idea of installing a repertory cast into new roles each season recalls American Horror Story, but American Crime actually isn’t the new crime anthology from the makers of AHS. That’s FX’s forthcoming American Crime Story: The People v. O.J. Simpson, which distinguishes itself by its movie-star talent — Cuba Gooding Jr., John Travolta, Jordana Brewster, Nathan Lane — and by dramatizing the most famous criminal trial in American history. Yet when American Crime Story premieres early next month, viewers programming their DVRs could be forgiven for confusing it with American Crime.

anthology series haven’t been this numerous since the early days of TV

Those same DVRs might still be stuffed with episodes of Noah Hawley’s Coen brothers reboot Fargo, which recently concluded a wildly entertaining second season involving the collision of sharp Minnesota cops, an untamed North Dakota crime dynasty, ruthless corporate Kansas City mobsters, a bumbling young married couple in over their heads, and the occasional UFO. Hawley’s show shares tendencies with HBO’s True Detective, another eerie, gruesome, star-studded anthology, which, although fictitious, has filled both thematically dense seasons with the kind of minute details and sense of place that characterizes true crime. But Fargo overlaps just as much with a verifiably true story that has been dominating social media since its release on December 18th: Netflix’s Making A Murderer, a documentary miniseries involving violent crime, questionable police work, and I-can’t-believe-it’s-not-parody Upper Midwest accents in smalltown Wisconsin. Making A Murderer was preceded last year by another hit true-crime doc, HBO’s miniseries The Jinx, which contributed to Dr. Robert Durst’s arrest on murder charges. And Serial, the podcast that became a sensation in 2014 investigating a teenager’s controversial murder conviction, will be adapted for TV by Phil Lord and Chris Miller.

Crime anthologies haven’t been this numerous since the early days of TV, when the genre transitioned from print and radio to the small screen. Back in the 1950s and ’60s, televised anthologies proliferated. Westerns, sci-fi, history, mystery — anything that could be classified as genre entertainment had its own Tales or Theatre or Playhouse. Usually a new cast told a fresh story each week, often derived from true incidents. That practice continued when NBC’s Police Story resurrected the archetype in the ‘70s and again with ABC’s FBI: The Untold Stories in the ’90s. But anthologies were already a relic by then, and even relatively recent titles like ‘90s horror shows Are You Afraid of the Dark? and Tales From the Crypt have now been off the air for decades.

So why are true crime and “true crime” anthologies suddenly stacking up almost as fast as bodies in Sioux Falls circa 1979? Partially because another bygone storytelling method, the miniseries, has returned to prominence, often under the guise of “limited series” (technically there’s a difference, though practically they function about the same). As prestige TV retreats from Sopranos-style obliqueness toward tightly constructed narratives with crowd-pleasing conclusions, limited series have become the medium’s exciting new frontier. The crime and mystery genres, with their focused storylines and promise of resolution, happen to adapt seamlessly to the format.

In retrospect, the rise of limited series was inevitable. Even as TV’s auteurist golden age won the medium a respect previously reserved for cinema, the advent of weekly episode recaps, live-tweeting, and seemingly infinite choice increased the pressure to reward viewers’ investment. No show had ever ramped up viewer engagement like Lost, but after its finale left viewers feeling stranded and several other hits overstayed their welcome, showrunners began catering to an increasingly loud demand for resolution. As Andy Greenwald put it at Grantland, “It’s a very contemporary notion, this idea that prestige TV series all have one core story to tell. It’s the sort of framework that makes sense for expertly constructed diving bells like Breaking Bad … but not something as intentionally digressive as Mad Men.”

In that environment, limited series make a lot of sense. It’s easier to stick the landing on a single-season arc than to shepherd a narrative through years of twists. Movie stars looking to experiment with TV roles are more willing to sign on for a short-term project. And rather than face the challenge of keeping beloved characters from stagnating, showrunners benefit from a fresh influx of personalities each year, reality TV style. HitFix‘s Alan Sepinwall saw the possibilities back when True Detective was becoming the pop cultural inferno that lit the fuse on this anthology miniseries trend: “If [Rust Cohle and Marty Hart] are thoroughly used up by the end of eight episodes… it won’t matter, because no one will have to figure out how to get Carrie Mathison back into the CIA or keep the Sons of Anarchy out of prison yet again.”

Limited series offer upside for viewers, too. In an oft-discussed speech last August, FX president Jon Landgraf lamented what he called “peak TV,” an era bloated with so much quality scripted programming even professional TV critics can’t keep up. With subscription platforms Netflix, Amazon, and Hulu entering the fray and networks abandoning the ancient concept of a fall premiere season to launch new shows year-round, about 400 scripted series competed for eyeballs in 2015. For culture consumers inundated with options — and, like, trying to maintain a life outside of television — a story that wraps up in 10 episodes is enticing. You could binge-watch an entire season of Fargo in one lazy weekend day; you’re not committing to 60 intricate Shakespearian hours of The Wire (though let me be the 4,910th fanatical David Simon disciple to insist you totally should).

Limited series present a formal sweet spot between a feature film and a traditional episodic show that makes them TV’s closest equivalent to a paperback novel. So police work, a subject that lends itself to pulp fiction, has proven ideal for this format. The one-and-done nature of crime stories made them a mainstay of TV’s procedural industrial complex — a crime happens, it’s investigated, it’s solved, and Mariska Hargitay is on to the next one. As American Crime creator John Ridley explained to Variety, the current wave of crime anthologies blasts open new possibilities for that formula: “We wanted to take incidents that sometimes in other shows tend to be week-to-week and episodic and not just use them merely as plot points, but really see how they play out with family, how they have a cascade effect over time, and with the community as well.”

In other words, these nouveau crime anthologies crossbreed the instant gratification of a procedural with the depth of prestige TV, a needed creative shakeup that could theoretically appeal to fans from both sides of the procedural / prestige divide. Naturally, the TV business is investing in this untapped space between HBO and NCIS, and anthologies in other pulpy genres are forthcoming.

But considering it pioneered the modern limited anthology series, it’s surprising the success of American Horror Story hasn’t spawned other horror anthologies. That looks set to change with Sy Fy’s creepypasta series Channel Zero and Lifetime’s Shakespeare-gone-horror anthology A Midsummer’s Nightmare. And in other fantastical realms, ABC is digging deeper into its Once Upon A Time lane with True Love, a post-feminist fairy tale series, and HBO is remaking the Israeli anthology House of Wishes, in which people get to relive defining moments of their lives. Hannibal‘s Bryan Fuller is rebooting Steven Spielberg’s 1980s sci-fi / fantasy anthology Amazing Stories for NBC in the old-fashioned weekly anthology style. And although no one has actually announced plans for a Twilight Zone revival, how stoked would you be?

Historically, closed-ended shows have been a passing craze. Anthologies went extinct because viewers preferred characters that could age, soap-opera style, into old friends (or nemeses) and networks wanted to invest in shows they could keep promoting for the long haul. But the current anthology boom isn’t just recycling the past, it’s an exciting new storytelling model all its own, one responsible for some of today’s most flavorful popcorn entertainment. Bemoan the decline of arthouse TV if you must, but as these anthologies continually remind us, there are far worse crimes than populism.