In a Jakarta hospital room, an elderly woman named Bi Siti, barely conscious, fixed her gaze on a young woman called Arumi and began to murmur broken words: “anak… anak… anakmu…” — child… child… your child… — before her condition turned critical and she died, taking a long-hidden secret with her. The scene, from the Indonesian sinetron Terlanjur Mencintaimu, unfolded on the same Wednesday that television across several continents was absorbed in the unearthing of old truths, the weight of unfinished stories, and the way a single revelation can reshape an entire narrative world.

Viewed from São Paulo, the tenth anniversary of Stranger Things landed with a mixture of nostalgia and critical scrutiny. The Netflix series, which first aired its tale of Hawkins, Indiana, in 2016, concluded its run at the end of 2025 with a finale that saw Eleven sacrifice herself and a closing twist suggesting the true antagonist was not a monster but the science of wormholes themselves — a rupture threatening to dissolve the boundary between dimensions. Yet the final season, for all its global viewership, failed to secure nominations in the major Emmy categories; the Television Academy recognised only its visual effects, makeup, and behind-the-scenes crafts, leaving the actors and the Duffer brothers outside the main races ahead of the September ceremony.

In London, the machinery of a different kind of return was grinding into motion. Filming has begun on HBO’s new Harry Potter series, a decade-long commitment to adapt each of J.K. Rowling’s seven books into a full season. A first image of Dominic McLaughlin in round glasses and Hogwarts robes circulated this week, a deliberate echo of an iconography known to billions. The production has cast Janet McTeer as Professor McGonagall, Paapa Essiedu as Severus Snape, and John Lithgow as Albus Dumbledore, while the original film actors have signalled they will not return — Daniel Radcliffe called a cameo “strange” and Emma Watson’s old wish to play McGonagall remains, for now, a piece of fan lore. Showrunner Francesca Gardiner and director Mark Mylod are promising a more expansive exploration of the source material, restoring details long excised from the films.

In Mexico City, the second season of Nadie nos va a extrañar picks up after the suicide of a friend, Memo, with the surviving teenagers deciding to continue their homework-selling business as a way of honouring his memory, only to face a rival group and the ordinary cruelties of adolescence. A new song by Julieta Venegas, “Sentimiento raro”, anchors the trailer. Meanwhile, German daily soap Unter uns spent its latest episode, available early on RTL+, navigating a funeral: Ferhat’s mother has died, and amid the grief, suspicions swirl that Patrizia is hiding something, while Esma’s disappearance the night before the burial tightens the pressure on a family already close to breaking.

What links these disparate productions is not genre or scale but a shared dramatic instinct: the past is never truly past. A deathbed whisper in Jakarta, a wormhole theory in Hawkins, a boy wizard’s return to the page, a friend’s suicide in a Mexican high school, a secret at a German graveside — each insists that what has been buried will, sooner or later, demand to be heard. The first photograph of the new Harry Potter, a boy in a wizard’s robe staring into a future that must carry the weight of a global cultural memory, offers as good an image as any of the week’s television: a promise that the old stories are not finished, only waiting for their next teller.