TV, or not TV

Recently, in an Email correspondence an old friend wrote that he thought “much of TV today is like movies.”

In the midst of writing this post, an article appeared in the January 22nd edition of the NYTimes. Reporting from the Sundance Film Festival, Brooks Barnes wrote that “television [is becoming] a force [at the festival]. Independent filmmakers are flocking to TV.” 

My friend’s comment capped a stretch in which several other friends commented about the serials they had watched or were watching (Happy Valley, The Honorable Woman, Red Riding...always Breaking Bad). I asked these friends if they still read. Most answered that these days they watch TV series, either renting or streaming, hardly read much anymore or go to the movies.

“Like the rest of moviedom, the independent-film world is grappling with the incursion of television as a creative and financial force.”

Back on October 24, 2013, in one of my first posts, I likened the screens on contemporary digital devices (laptops to smartphones, tablets to phablets) to the nickelodeon and its place in the evolution of the cinema at the beginning of the 20th century.

“…analysts estimate that digital and video-on-demand services are replacing art houses as the primary outlet for more than 90 percent of independent films.”

At Sundance, the hipeoisie now refer to independent filmmakers who are migrating to TV as “serial storytellers.”

Back in Victorian England, before the advent of film, wasn’t Charles Dickens a “serial storyteller?”

When I began writing this post, my intent was to address certain aesthetic issues apropos film versus TV.

I remain a narrative film devotee. I favor the cadences of movie storytelling; like dramatic compression; appreciate beginnings, middles, and ends, though not necessarily in that order.

I personally don’t watch much TV; find the beats not to my liking. Nor am I partial to the way TV keeps viewers hanging on, primarily focused on getting them to tune in next time. Seems forced. I often tire of the prolonged story.

Of course that approach is changing with the evolving practice of releasing a show’s complete season in one swoop, allowing viewers to binge watch. Suppliers say they’re giving 21st century consumers “what they want, when and where they want it.” Bundled billing statements arrive like clockwork. You don’t have to do a thing.

Narrative movies operate on a deep rhythmic level, musical and poetic. TV seems more novelistic, a novel that too often tells me more than I need or want to know; telling and often showing the obvious.

Though on the surface movies and TV seem similar, using moving images to tell a story, on a syntactical level I think the two mediums are very different. Along the way TV has acquired a more polished film look, but I don’t feel TV possesses a true film sense.

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