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Genre Anthology

A show which has no regular characters or actors (but usually many recurring), with the possible exception of a host or narrator who introduces/closes/comments on shows. Stories tend to limit themselves to a single genre but the earlier anthology shows were more likely to cover several genres than later ones.

A favored format for Horror and suspense, probably because the absence of continuity allows characters to be killed off unpredictably without violating Status Quo Is God.

Compare/contrast to Thematic Series.

Anime/Manga examples include:

Comic Book examples include:

  • Action Comics
  • Detective Comics was not quite the first genre anthology in comic books, but it was the first successful single-genre anthology comic, laying the groundwork for the format that would be most popular through The Golden Age of Comic Books.
  • Historically, most British comics have tended to be anthologies. They would contain multiple strips per issue and replace one strip with another fairly often. Whilst comics like The Beano, The Dandy, or 2000AD technically avert this trope by having some strips that have lasted decades, it's played straighter with titles like TV Comic, which chopped and changed according to what was on TV at the time.
  • All of the EC Comics series were these covering a few genres, with each issue featuring four stories. The genres covered were primarily horror, science fiction, crime and war. When The Comics Code Authority came clamping down and forced the cancellation of many titles the publisher got desperate and branched out into tamer fare. Bizarre new books started like Psychoanalysis, which focused on patients visiting a psychiatrist, M.D., which showcase the day-to-day lives of doctors and EXTRA!, which followed reporters in their investigations. Needless to say, the new books weren't successful and EC closed down soon after.
  • Showcase was a DC comics anthology from the 1950s notable for introducing the Silver Age incarnations of The Flash, Green Lantern, and The Atom and other noteworthy characters like Rip Hunter, The Creeper and the Challengers of the Unknown as well as featuring the very first comic adaptation of a James Bond film.
  • Most Marvel Comics titles published in the 1950s were Speculative Fiction, crime, or horror anthologies. Several books such as Uncanny Tales, World of Mystery, World of Suspense, World of Fantasy, Mystery, and Menace didn't make it past the end of the decade. Other titles were better remembered due to later spinning off or being rebranded as superhero titles the following decade when the genre was successfully revived. These include:
  • Marvel Fanfare (Superhero)
  • House of Mystery, which started out as a Horror comic, switched genres to Speculative Fiction and mystery fiction in the mid-50's due to backlash against horror comics and the introduction of the Comics Code, added in Superhero fiction during the Silver Age, and returned to a horror setting in the 70's.

Television examples include:

Literature examples include:

Too many to count. The genre anthology predated the horror and sci-fi genres. The first publication venues for either of them was genre magazines, and the first hardcovers those stories would grace were collected together as a series of unrelated short stories.

Radio examples include:

Film examples include:

Web Original examples include:

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http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/GenreAnthology