Although A-list cast members have become something of a streaming staple in the years since the show’s 2015 debut, one of Netflix‘s best psychological thrillers brought together a truly astounding lineup for a masterclass in acting. Movie stars have always cropped up on TV shows on occasion, much like TV stars have sometimes managed to parlay their small-screen success into movie stardom. However, there was once a traditional industry-wide understanding that movies carried more prestige.
This was always an oversimplification, but it was one that had already started to die out as early as the 2000s thanks to the Second Golden Age of Television. Everything from The Wire to Breaking Bad to Sex and the City, Band of Brothers, and HBO’s iconic fantasy epic Game of Thrones brought cinematic scale and ambition to the small screen, thus decimating any perceived hierarchy between the two mediums.
Put simply, TV was no longer the cheaper little brother of movies in anyone’s mind, especially not by the time blockbuster hits like The Walking Dead were wowing critics in the 2010s. This opened the door for streaming services to invest more and more money in casting actors who typically would only have been seen on the big screen, which, paradoxically, made their shows seem more unmissable than ever. One of the earliest examples of this approach came in Netflix’s criminally underrated Bloodline.
Netflix’s Bloodline Has An Incredible Cast
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Bloodline‘s incredible lineup included future star of HBO’s Lanterns Kyle Chandler, Linda Cardellini, Andrea Riseborough, Sam Shepard, Chloë Sevigny, Sissy Spacek, and John Leguizamo, as well as The Outsider‘s Ben Mendelsohn, and the show gave this astounding cast suitably dramatic material to sink their teeth into. Loosely inspired by Dostoevsky’s iconic novel Crime and Punishment, Netflix’s tense psychological thriller pitted members of the wealthy Rayburn family against each other as their dark secrets came to light through a twisty, dark plot.
This storyline might sound more than a little familiar to some readers in 2026. After all, 2019’s Knives Out explored a murder mystery in a rich, morally bankrupt family, while the entire sprawling Yellowstone franchise updated Dynasty and Dallas‘s popular formula by following another amoral, uber-rich family’s legally questionable attempts to hold onto their ill-gotten gains.
Similarly, Death of a Unicorn, the Ready Or Not movies, and The Fall of the House of Usher put supernatural spins on the popular idea of a rich family finally getting their karmic comeuppance, while Netflix’s Ripley, Saltburn, and the Oscar winner Parasite applied this premise to the same psychological thriller genre as Bloodline. HBO’s Succession could even be summarized with the exact same synopsis as Bloodline.
Bloodline’s Amazing Lineup Predicted The A-List Shows of the 2020s
However, it is important to note that the twisty, unpredictable, and amoral family drama of Bloodline predated all of these Eat the Rich hits, and the Netflix show’s incredible cast gave every one of these later titles a run for their money. With layered performances from all of its main players, Bloodline was a truly daring mystery where the viewer’s sympathies were constantly in flux.
While the same year’s Scream: The Series offered teen viewers a more straightforward plot full of clear heroes and villains, Bloodline told a morally knotty story where no one was remotely innocent, but viewers still felt compelled to root for some of the Rayburn family members over others. This was helped by Bloodline‘s starry cast, another element of its execution that proved prescient.
Only two years later, HBO’s Big Little Lies amassed one of the starriest casts in TV history when Reese Witherspoon, Nicole Kidman, Alexander Skarsgård, Adam Scott, Zoë Kravitz, and Laura Dern all starred in the series, with Meryl Streep joining in season 2. Four years later, Only Murders in the Building brought together an even starrier lineup, but Bloodline was the underrated Netflix series that predicted this trend six years earlier.
Bloodline
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