TeaThere is a curious mutation spreading around the entertainment industry here, changing forms and tinkering with the times. It seems that TV series keep turning into movies. They’re probably not patient zero, but Game of Thrones showrunners are undoubtedly the superspreaders for this current wave, having ignited controversy in 2017 by describing their show as a “73-hour movie.” Soon, the TV landscape was swarming with the series being rebranded as separate yet equally heavy length films. The idiom was reinvented often enough for TV critics to reach the status of “ban of all existence” and to inspire an outcry and piece of murmur in the New Yorker. Now, to quote a show that recently ignited a powder keg of debate on the difference between cinema and television, “It’s happening again.”
Miles Miller and Alfred Gough, co-creators of the upcoming Addams Family reboot for Netflix, uttered the magic words in an interview with Vanity Fair earlier this week, stating that “the show’s ambition is to make it an eight-hour timbre. It was a Burton film.” (Burton is on board as executive producer and director for four of the eight episodes.) He has dusted off the old soundbite during a period of increased criticism for it, says The Boys’ head Eric Kripke has recently thrown down the gauntlet. Matter. Of TV directors who claim they envisioned their series as a movie, they said: “Fuck you! No you are not! Make a TV show. You’re in the entertainment business.” In Olivier Assayas’ new mini-series redefining his 1996 showbiz satire Irma Vape, the show’s director invokes the “eight-hour movie” adage in an interview within the show as that pokes fun at the inevitability of the phrase. Speaking with me at Cannes earlier this year, he confirmed that he doesn’t share the mindset, and that this line shares the caricature’s soup in the pronunciation of the rest of the series. Is.
Understanding the reason for all the fuss that arises from a factual form of speech requires an awareness of the meanings and biases cryptically coded in the TV-to-movie axis. When TV producers compare their work to a film, they are inviting associations established based on admiration for ’00s classics such as The Sopranos or The Wire, emphasizing their “cinematic” qualities. Are: Ambition of scale, long storytelling, technical sophistication with cameras. When the authors made this comparison, it was scanned as insight; Coming from the directors’ mouths, it feels like image control, a broad assurance that the series in question is good enough to stand out compared to the big boys of the silver screen. It is a way of pre-emptively categorizing the joint, and a way to overcome the perceived lack of viewing TV as inseparable from the character of the medium.
And so one begins to see the condescension in this thinking that alienates anyone who has invested in the respect and admiration for TV. Even if the “X-hour movie” line weren’t used as an excuse to plot plot-by-episode episodes with apparent disregard for the subtle art of pacing, it would still be fundamentally wrong. Using an entire season to tell a broad story divided into segments doesn’t make cinema fit the mold of TV, but the definition of TV itself. Writers who subscribe to that flawed philosophy have not rejected serialization, just resolved to scuttle it. Every great TV show has found a way to tell stories contained within the space of an episode that nonetheless folds into a larger narrative structure. Streaming allows us to eliminate the time between installments, and has been taken as implied permission by many to skip the building blocks of art.
The quasi-meme of “X-Hour Movie” betrays a delusional idea about dignity and creative legitimacy, as inferior-complex directors seem to take them more seriously if they do much of their own with cinema. will be taken. (Note that the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s franchise managers are hesitant to bill their product like a TV show, even though they force serial storytelling and eliminate the polished grandeur of cinema.) Equivalent to a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy, that TV will not grow in stature until its creators proudly wear their format. Everyone would do well to adopt qualities unique to their chosen field as work to be done with profit, not to overcome limitations. Until they do, there’s an ingenious way to expose the absurdity of TVs wrapping themselves in film clothes: The next time you hear someone giving wind of the show’s prestige like this, its Instead picture the most embarrassing, amateurish, contemptuous movie ever made. seen. (I like to go with The Ogilovs in Big Balloon Adventure.) Let this example take a lesson—that words have meaning, that form can’t be synonymous with quality, and that there are worse things than TV.
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