Sense8 Embodied A Bolder, Better Era Of Netflix Storytelling
Before Netflix became the hub of reality shows and streaming slop, it was the home of bold genre TV.
Between 2015 and 2016, Netflix premiered three attention-grabbing genre shows: Sense8, The OA, and Stranger Things. Of the three, Sense8 seemed the most likely to become a hit. Created by the Wachowskis and Babylon 5’s J. Michael Straczynski, it echoed the scope and spirituality of Cloud Atlas while embracing the goofy sincerity of Jupiter Ascending. As the Wachowskis’ first TV project, it represented the type of creative innovation that Netflix could champion with its deep well of Silicon Valley cash. Then after just two seasons, it got canceled.
The OA was similarly experimental; a confidently peculiar mystery drama that likely wouldn’t have been greenlit at a traditional network. And like Sense8, it ended abruptly after season 2. Meanwhile Stranger Things went on to become Netflix’s flagship show — easily the most conventional and derivative of the three, capitalizing on 1980s nostalgia for Dungeons and Dragons, The Goonies and Stephen King.
Pragmatically speaking, The OA and Sense8’s demise can be pinned on subpar ratings. However it’s hard to avoid seeing their cancellation as a turning point for Netflix’s programming, as the platform shifted further away from interesting original projects, and began to prioritize reality TV, adaptations like Wednesday and Sandman, and banal blockbusters like Red Notice. Sense8 emerged during a brief window when Netflix was more open to new ideas, and we should probably be thankful for what we got.
Part action thriller, part New Age sci-fi/fantasy, part queer melodrama, Sense8 was both corny and invigorating — a descriptor that could honestly cover most of the Wachowskis’ filmography. Starring an international cast, its sprawling narrative revolved around eight strangers who spontaneously form a psychic bond. These eight "sensates" come from completely different backgrounds, but their unique relationship forces them to reevaluate their lives, pooling their skills to escape a villainous organization that wants to hunt them down.
Sense8’s premise wasn’t notably out-there compared to genre shows like Orphan Black, Dollhouse, or Fringe, but in execution it felt notably radical. In part that was down to the Wachowskis’ directorial prowess and budget, facilitating an ambitious, globe-trotting conceit. Mostly though, the show’s appeal lay in its passionate, sentimental emotionality.
Designed to represent a diverse range of worldviews, Sense8’s main cast included a Kenyan bus driver, a South Korean heiress, an Icelandic DJ and an American trans hacktivist. Edited together in dreamlike montages that skipped from location to location, their connection forces them to witness, empathize with, and collectively solve problems that they otherwise wouldn’t have encountered.
Sexuality played a major role here — both in the way that Sense8 foregrounded queer characters, and in its bold depiction of sexual attraction and pleasure, blurring the lines of relationships and identities among the main cast. Famously it included more than one telepathic orgy sequence, complicating the typical audience expectation for monogamous love stories.
Among its fans, Sense8’s approach to sexuality and romance was deeply moving, exploring a malleable collective relationship whose participants started out with clearly defined identities, which shifted as they began to experience the world through each other’s minds and bodies. However this vision wasn’t without flaw, even if you bought into the show’s rather kooky view of human empathy.
Sense8 was queer storytelling at its boldest and most compelling.
If you’re familiar with the Wachowskis’ wider filmography, Sense8’s shortcomings probably weren’t a surprise. Like Cloud Atlas, where actors like Halle Berry and Hugo Weaving embodied different ethnicities through whiteface and yellowface makeup, Sense8’s attitude to race and identity led to some problematic places. Most of the sensates, for example, were purposefully written to reflect certain genre-savvy archetypes — or, to put it more critically, stereotypes. This wasn’t a big deal when introducing a white male cop with a dark past, but other choices were built on shakier ground. The show's gay Mexican lead echoed the intense mood swings of a telenovela, while the Indian sensate’s role centered on a Bollywood-influenced love triangle. Both were beloved characters, but as detractors pointed out, the show sometimes seemed to take its white leads more seriously.
Despite these issues, Sense8 gained a cult following, in large part due to its impact as a genre-defying queer drama. It offered something that genuinely wasn’t available elsewhere, and while Netflix did release a feature-length epilogue to wrap up the story’s loose ends, its premature cancellation still felt like a betrayal. In retrospect, this was also a harbinger of things to come. After the platform’s early success with House of Cards and Orange is the New Black, the next wave of Netflix originals (Sense8, The OA, The Get Down, Mindhunter…) signaled a desire to promote ambitious storytelling and visionary creators. But that attitude soon faded away, overlapping with a much-criticized trend where shows with diverse casts and queer leads repeatedly got canceled after one or two seasons.
Over the next few years, the streamer’s programming became more conventional. Its big-name genre projects veered toward workmanlike adaptations of established IP, and in 2025 it’s hard to imagine Netflix greenlighting something as weird as Sense8. That era is definitively over, both for the Wachowskis (who returned to the Matrix franchise) and for Netflix, where Stranger Things will belatedly conclude its fifth and final season this year.
