TV isn’t superior, simply convenient
We hear all the time how we are in the midst of a golden age of television. It’s become a cliche to say that television is better than the movies.
I watch more television than I used to. Most of that may be due to my somewhat belated acceptance of time-shifting technology. In the ’90s, I couldn’t imagine why anyone would want a TiVo machine; now most of what I watch comes via my DVR or is streamed from Netflix through Apple TV.
We have a growing list of shows we capture and play back — Sundance’s Rectified, AMC’s Breaking Bad, Mad Men and The Killing; HBO’s The Newsroom and Boardwalk Empire; and BBC America’s Broadchurch. FX’s Sons of Anarchy, Justified and Louie complete the core curric-
ulum. We record The Daily Show but only watch it sometimes. We’ve followed True Blood from the beginning — though I’m not sure why. Some shows we watch I can’t make a case for — AMC’s Hell on Wheels is erratic, but I enjoy Common and Anson Mount. BBC America’s Copper is beautifully shot (mostly on highly artificial sound stages) and features some terrible acting, but we watch anyway.
On Netflix, we watched Jane Campion’s Top of the Lake (which fell apart at the end) and are currently consuming House of Cards and Orange Is the New Black (which I liked a lot better before someone pointed out that its star, Taylor Schilling, bears an uncanny resemblance to Jared Leto). We gave up about halfway through the new season of Arrested Development. We dropped Showtime a couple of years ago and escaped the final season of Dexter, but we plan to catch up on Homeland and Nurse Jackie on DVD.
Aside from ESPN and the occasional ballgame and the cable news channels I can’t avoid at the gym, that’s the extent of my television viewing. I’ve never watched an episode of a reality series, Modern Family, Duck Dynasty, NCIS or The Big Bang Theory. I suspect I’m missing some good stuff, but I also remember a few years ago, after we’d be assured by trusted sources that the show was “really good,” being stunned by the insipidness of 24. It didn’t take. Neither did Game of Thrones, which seems to have a lot of nudity and torture scenes.
Part of the reason I’ve never developed a real TV habit has to do with my job. There are always movies to watch, stacks of DVDs to be gotten through and books to read. (For the past year or so I’ve made it a point to write about books once a month or so.) Recently I’ve been previewing films playing at this year’s Hot Springs Documentary Film Festival. We try to go out once or twice a week. Time is finite. We all have to make decisions about how we will spend ours. Television is not a priority.
So I don’t know if I’m well positioned to make the case that TV is better than movies, though there are creative possibilities inherent in episodic television that movies don’t offer. I can understand why a show like Breaking Bad can be more engaging and satisfying than any movie. I think I understand why television — at least the best television — is getting better while movies, in general, are getting worse.
It all has to do with the audience.
... If you think about what a would-be popular mainstream Hollywood movie is, you might realize that, before anything else, it’s a product. It has a budget and people make decisions based on how best to maximize the return on their money. Certain actors are hired because they are perceived to add value. While there are plenty of people involved in a movie who mean to make as good a film as they can and are dedicated to finding the right light and performing with nuance and sensitivity, in the end a movie is a business bet.
The economics of movie-making are such that Hollywood has essentially abandoned the adult audience that, through the mid-1970s, was its key demographic in favor of a younger, less sophisticated cohort with more of an appetite for effects-driven spectacle than human drama. While over the next few months we’ll see the release of any number of awards-seeking prestige dramas, it has become financially prudent for the studios to bet more and more on a few gigantic productions, generally action movies or 3-D science fiction stories. (The word “gamble” gets thrown about in stories about film production, but very few movies lose money by the time DVD sales and ancillary revenues are factored in. It might take years, but eventually most movies make money.)
Additionally, most Hollywood blockbusters, which are more about onscreen flash and bang than anything to do with the way people actually contend with the world, are further denatured by needing to be palatable to foreign markets as well.
While there are plenty of low-budget independent films being made — the cost of filmmaking tools has fallen to the point that is possible to finance a movie with a personal credit card using equipment from box stores — very few catch the public’s attention. When people talk about how bad movies have gotten, they’re generally talking about mainstream cineplex fodder. If your idea of “the movies” is limited to the films supported by studio marketing budgets, it’s no wonder you think movies are awful. Hollywood is increasingly relying on sequels, reboots and remakes because there is a higher degree of predictability. No one wants to spend a lot of money on a movie no one has seen before.
At the same time, lots of indie projects, documentaries and foreign films fly under the radar.
Film criticism is disappearing from popular media and the reviewers left behind are going the way of sportswriters: Nothing really matters unless it’s shouted on TV. Social media and Internet aggregators are making individual voices obsolete. There is a great wealth of cinema out there, buried beneath the Hollywood leviathans. No wonder grown-ups don’t go to the movies anymore.
... Meanwhile, television — especially cable channels which have more latitude with adult subject matter and aren’t as reliant on ratings as networks — can offer a place for stories the movies don’t tell anymore. In telling those stories, they attract actors who are looking for serious roles. Spending dozens of hours watching or, from an actor’s point of view, inhabiting a character is likely to make the character seem deeper than the typical action movie protagonist (although Shakespeare created dozens of characters as indelible as Tony Soprano or Walter White).
Also, while film criticism is an after-the-fact proposition, an ongoing TV series lends itself to day-after analysis and recapping (during the last couple of seasons of Breaking Bad I anticipated Onion AV Club writer Donna Bowman’s morning-after reviews as much as the episodes themselves).
The prolonged duration of a series allows time for a kind of community to build around it. While I’m as skeptical of gimmicks like AMC’s “two-screen experience” as I am of cinematic add-ons like 3-D and Smell-O-Vision, the truth is that good (and awful) television shows hang around for years while only a few movies seem to have a shelf life of more than a few weeks. We didn’t pick up on Breaking Bad until the second season (and we didn’t watch the first season until earlier this year when we found it on Netflix).
So it’s not really a question of television being better. There are lots of really awful TV programs and some of the most-watched television is the worst. (We will save the rant about how American Idol and its imitators are killing pop music for another time.)
There are a lot of good movies out there you probably won’t hear much about. Television isn’t better, it’s more convenient.