Zetna Fuentes

The long-take opening of Cursed (2020) is a useful place to look at Zetna Fuentes’s priorities. A sustained shot in a fantasy series can become an invitation to inspect the scenery; her emphasis is on the character experiencing it. She directed the pilot and second episode and served as executive producer, helping establish how this Arthurian world would look and feel. The interest lies in making its heightened elements sit within a believable setting, rather than continually announcing the magic.

Much of her career has been spent directing within established programmes, moving from daytime soaps to primetime episodic television. Pilot direction gives her a different responsibility, including on Bosch: Legacy (2022) and Black Cake (2023), where she also took executive producer roles. Here a director helps decide the habits that later episodes will follow. It is a useful distinction when judging her work: fitting an existing series well and giving a new one its shape are separate achievements.

We recommend Pluribus (2025), Vince Gilligan’s science-fiction series, on which she directed episode four. We were unsettled by its compulsory happiness, because Rhea Seehorn gives resistance to it such a stubborn human presence. The premise could easily leave the people serving as examples in a debate; Seehorn keeps a person at the centre of the questions. Fuentes’s preference for finding a character’s point of view in the script makes sense in that company.

The reservation is pace: Pluribus sometimes keeps us waiting longer than its ideas warrant. Our review did not single out Fuentes, so we would not assign either that slowness or the programme’s success to her episode. Her pilot work offers a better place to judge choices made before a programme has settled into a routine. Start with Pluribus for the firmer recommendation, then try the opening episodes of Cursed to see her establishing a series herself.