[atombender]

As the other comments say, that's probably just the choice of lenses. The effect that's much worse is the vignette effect added for reasons I can't fathom.

I took some screengrabs of The Serpent Queen on Starz, here: https://imgur.com/a/pAfcZg1.

It's actually an excellent show, with good production values and plenty of good cinematography, but the overuse of digital vignetting drives down my enjoyment. Sometimes it's used to darken an overexposed sky (an ancient trick; Kubrick's opening scene in Barry Lyndon famously uses it, and it looked bad then, too), but it's evidently also an attempt to add depth and to highlight the characters in the center of the screen in post rather than during filming; it's just lazy filmmaking, and I see it constantly.

I don't like the use of anamorphic lenses since I find the corner distortions distracting, and I generally dislike the use of super widescreen aspect ratio that a lot of filmmakers use (4:3 is often a much more natural format, especially for less epic dramas), but at least this is an artifact of the technology used and one that goes back half a century or more.