Joel Coen: “TV Shows Have Beginning, a Middle, a Middle, a Middle, Until the Whole Things Dies of Exhaustion"

Whenever the TV vs Cinema debate gets ignited, I always refer back to a memorable Team Deakins podcast interview. In 2020, Roger Deakins had director Joel Coen, one half of the Coen Brothers, on as a guest. It turned out to be an essential discussion about all things cinema, especially if you’re a Coen-head like myself.

The topics ranged from Coen’s dislike of Orson Welles as a filmmaker, always having final cut, and went into detail about “The Tragedy Of Macbeth.” The 90-minute discussion is well worth a listen. However, what I was most fascinated by was Coen’s take on the art of TV making, more precisely, the fundamental problem of creating a long-form TV series vs moviemaking:

“The thing about TV series that I don’t understand and I think is hard for both of us to get our minds around is, you know, feature films have a beginning, a middle and an end,” Coen said. “But open-ended stories have a beginning and a middle — and then they’re beaten to death until they’re exhausted and die. They don’t actually have an end. And thinking about that in the context of a story is rather alien to the way we imagine these things.”

“As writers… long-form was never something we could get our heads around,” Coen said. “It’s a different paradigm. Not to be shitty about it, but you can look at stories that they have a beginning, middle, and end. But so much of television has a beginning, a middle, a middle, a middle, a middle, until the whole thing dies of exhaustion. It’s beaten to death and then you find a way of ending it. That’s how a lot of long-form television works, so it’s a hard thing to get your head around.”

That, in essence, is the difference between television and movies. It's quite simple, really. 

In the last 5 years, we've had Steven Soderbergh, David Lynch, David Fincher, Martin Scorsese, Jane Campion, Woody Allen, Alfonso Cuaron, Noah Baumbach, Spike Lee, and many more making the jump to the small screen. Why? Because the middle-ground to make the kind of films they used to make on the big screen fell out. You know, the oft-mentioned mid-budget movie, which has always been more interested in character-oriented drama than CGI-dominated nonsense. And for that, we should be grateful TV picked up the slack. 

And yet, there is a negative to TV's takeover; the adult-driven 2-hour movie is an art form. You can herald the artistic merits of serialized television all you want, but there is something exciting about watching a 2-hour drama and not having the thought of setting aside committed time to binge-watch it.

Also, as Joel mentioned, many shows which start off strong end up losing steam in their succeeding seasons; that's just part of the game. Rarely has a critically-acclaimed TV series had its last season be its best season. You don’t believe me? I can count on just one hand the times a show has ended with a bang. Why? Because most producers and networks want their shows to continue raking in the big bucks, sacrificing quality over quantity.