A slow news day has made me go back to the archives for this little nugget, which I still think is the most insightful analysis of the TV vs Cinema debate, which just keeps raging on, with no sign of stopping, as Netflix continues its dominance and streaming platforms such as Apple TV+ and Disney+ go live this month.
In a fascinating interview with the Los Angeles Times, “Fargo” and “No Country For Old Men” directors Joel Coen spoke his total disinterest in creating a TV series. He and his brother seem to be cinematic creatures through and through and it seems like it will stay that way until their very final film.
The key assertion from the interview stemmed from Joel asserting that movies and TV cannot be compared due to the ambiguous nature of a TV series' evolution from season-to-season:
“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,” Joel 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.”
That, in essence, is the difference between television and movies. It's quite simple, really.
In the last 5 years, we've seen Steven Soderbergh, David Lynch, David Fincher, Martin Scorsese, Jane Campion, Cary Fukunaga, Woody Allen, Baz Luhrmann, 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 just 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.