True Detective hasn’t felt like True Detective for a while. It’s been a decade since the first season of the neo-noir phenomenon launched a new era of A-list stars making the pilgrimage over to TV. But in the years since Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson pondered whether time was a flat circle, True Detective lost the power it used to hold over pop culture. Even a back-to-basics reset with the third Mahershala Ali-led season, which returned the show to its sweaty Southern noir roots, couldn’t bring back the phenomenon.

True Detective is due a massive reset. Instead of the relentless heat of the American South, it needs the unforgiving chill of the Alaskan winter. Instead of a male detective duo, it needs two leading women. And instead of a coy dance around its more surreal elements, it needs to go full supernatural. All of these elements work together to make True Detective Season 4, subtitled Night Country, the most thrilling and invigorating season of the show since its first.

Echo doesn’t look like your usual Marvel streaming show, and that’s no accident. In all its marketing, the studio makes one thing clear: Echo is different. It’s serious, for one thing, with a TV-MA rating and a brutal, grounded tone. It’s also not just another cog in the machinery of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, instead launching a subdivision of the MCU titled “Spotlight” for stories that make sense on their own even if you’re not caught up on the franchise.

This new approach to MCU storytelling led to some obvious comparisons to another “serious” Disney show spun out of a mega-franchise: Andor. Both shows focus on a non-superpowered antihero, and both shows take a more serious tone than most of what’s come before. But according to Echo’s executive producer, Richie Palmer, the comparison is only half accurate.