The article’s core assertion is based on two main points. First, television’s longform narratives allows stories to be explored in far more depth, particularly with regard to character. And second, the pace of television production means there’s a lot less opportunity for ignorant executives to interfere and tinker, as the weekly schedule must be maintained, so material dealing with timely or controversial subjects doesn’t get thought to death, or watered down by nervous corporate types. (His example: Munich is about a decades-old terrorist incident; Sleeper Cell is about right now.)
Quotes supporting the thesis are included in the article, from Joss Whedon, Denis Leary, Frank Spotnitz, and others.
The article’s writer makes what I think is a reasonably solid case in support of his argument. It’s certainly true, for example, that for me the two-part finale of Battlestar Galactica’s first season, “Kobol’s Last Gleaming,” was the most emotionally satisfying, thematically provocative, and immediately compelling piece of narrative in all of 2005, in any medium. (Naturally, others will disagree. That’s just my opinion, given what I saw and read.) And there is certainly a lot of other television work that can be legitimately called excellent, from Veronica Mars to Deadwood, while at the same time our multiplexes seem ever-increasingly clogged with inconsequential tripe.
However.
I don’t know if I can buy the writer’s ultimate conclusion, namely, the statement I used for the thread’s subject. As I said, I think his case is a rational one, and I have no reason to think he’s arguing in bad faith or doesn’t believe in his own position, but that doesn’t mean I have to accept it for myself. There are a number of reasons for my feeling about this.
First is the effect of the respective timescales on storytelling style. A film compresses its narrative into two hours (plus or minus), and doesn’t have the luxury of burning entire scenes for limited effect. A truly well-made movie, like Brokeback Mountain, has not one wasted line of dialogue, or cut, or frame. With two hours to flesh out and capture the lives of half a dozen characters, there isn’t the time to spend on even a brief moment if it doesn’t support the themes of the overall film. By comparison, even an excellent TV show, like the aforementioned Galactica, can shift into a lower gear for part or all of an episode (e.g. season two’s “Final Cut,” which throttles back the plot for a somewhat languid exploration of the show’s world). A movie has two hours; a single year of a television show has something like ten to twenty hours of storytelling time, depending on how many shows there are in the season and minus commercials and credits. The narrative economies are different.
Second is the difference in accumulated detail. Brokeback Mountain stands alone, self-contained, using only audience expectations and cultural references to establish its context and pursue its effects. Galactica’s “Kobol’s Last Gleaming,” by contrast, relies on the preceding eleven episodes (not to mention three hours of miniseries) for its impact. With that context, Galactica’s finale achieves greatness; without it, it’s merely good.
Third, film is highly inconsistent about the influence of individual creators, while television is almost invariably the work of committees. The Wild Bunch is unquestionably the work of Sam Peckinpah more than anyone else, but Finding Nemo required the input of dozens of people. Television, on the other hand, has virtually nothing to compare to the first example (James Burke’s shows and their ilk might come closest), while even a great series closely identified with a single creator, like Whedon’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer, still needs a team of writers to pull it off week after week. (Short-form British series are excepted here, to some degree.) The simple fact that it’s far more possible for a film than a television series to (mostly) reflect the efforts and sensibilities of an individual makes any attempt to compare the media inapt, I think.
Fourth, there’s frequently some dishonesty in how the two media are compared, some of which appears in the linked article. Specifically, I’m referring to how the mediocrities of one are set against the gems of the other. If you’re going to claim that television is better because it has great series like Rescue Me, you can’t bolster your case by pointing to inoffensive cinematic pablum like The Family Stone, as does Leary in the article. Likewise, it’s ridiculous to say that film is superior because it gives us a transcendant Twilight Samurai while the boob tube is cluttered with gratingly stupid reality shows and sitcoms. A fair argument puts the best of one against the best of the other, and for the reasons set out above, I don’t think it’s reasonable to do so.
Which is what all of these issues comes down to: the two media are simply different, and trying to set one against the other is an exercise in futility. If you’re limited to the timescale of a film, there’s no way even the very best two hours of (say) The Sopranos, standing alone, can come close to measuring up to a spectacularly brilliant classic like The Passion of Joan of Arc. On the other hand, it seems remarkably unfair to pit even a truly great film like The Battle of Algiers against, for example, the best thirty hours of Homicide: Life on the Street. As rich, detailed, and rewarding as is the former, it cannot help but pale next to the sheer scope of the latter.
What I’m left with, it seems to me, is a sidestepping of what strikes me as the pointless debate over which one is the superior art form. Instead, I’ll point to the underlying implication of the argument, which is that for many years there’s been an unspoken assumption in the culture at large that television is inferior in general, and that nothing of merit is ever produced by the medium (or that the rare exceptions somehow prove the rule). My position is that television, over the decades, has slowly matured, leaving behind its roots in vaudeville and talking-radio formats, and has, in the last few years, flowered into a legitimate artistic medium in its own right, completely aside from any comparisons to existing media, whether it’s film or anything else.
Film is a powerful medium, and there are individual works that achieve greatness.
Television is a powerful medium, and there are individual works that achieve greatness.
I welcome your thoughts.