TV vs Film

I will blame the infrequency of my blogs in recent months on work commitments. By work, I do not mean the vulgar necessity of exchanging one's waking hours for money (if only there were a way to trade slumber time for cash...hey, I can but dream). In this instance, ‘work’ refers to my gruelling schedule of watching quality scripted television series. There simply are not enough hours in the day, even if you try watching two series at once. And yes it can be done: large screen for your main series, iPad for the secondary. Result: headaches, eyestrain and a fusion between plots where in my mind, ‘Breaking Bad’ elided with ‘Borgen’ to create a compelling, if confusing, narrative of a female chemistry teacher balancing the demands of Danish coalition politics and large scale methamphetamine production.

So why am I telling you about my TV viewing habits? What has struck me in the last year is how many superb TV series I've seen and how few decent feature films. This leads to a more general puzzle: why are modern films so bad and contemporary TV series so good? And tellingly, I doubt anyone would disagree with the premise of that question unless they worked for a major film studio promoting their summer bilgebuster.

Now maybe you are a huge fan of the Iron Man franchise and believe that these movies, based on a children's comic in which a billionaire playboy puts on a special suit that allows him to fly and fire lasers from his hands, represents the peak of dramatic achievement. Or perhaps you really believe the decision to make three films of The Hobbit was an artistic choice. If you do, seek professional help. No, stay with me and I'll see if I can persuade you of the errors of your ways.

Tempting though it is to start reeling off a long list of superb TV series, followed by a string of underwhelming films, this does not get to the heart of the disparity between these two genres. For simplicity's sake, let's focus on American films and TV, which are both commercial enterprises. Bringing the BBC into a debate about media in any form becomes a separate article or even a book; no one really knows why the BBC does what it does, including its senior management. Pondering its machinations is much like debating the weather in the UK, a never-ending yet ultimately pointless exercise. So for sanity's sake, we’ll stay in the U.S.A.

There are three powerful drivers, I would say, for the surge in standards in scripted, long form TV and the corresponding collapse in feature film quality, which started up to twenty years ago and intensified in the past decade:

1. CGI (computer generated imagery)

A modern blockbuster film is usually saturated with CGI from start to finish, whereas even the most effects-heavy TV series such as ‘Battlestar Galactica’ or ‘Game of Thrones’ have a high percentage of scenes without any significant CGI. Blockbuster film-makers can conjure any number of monsters, robots, explosions, catastrophes and variations of digital mayhem into existence to excite and terrify audiences. But like addicts who need increasing doses of the same fix, audiences are less and less impressed, so film-makers pile more CGI on top of more CGI until films are nothing but extended effects sequences, interspersed with irrelevant padding. Characters, dialogue and even plot are filler before the shooting and explosions, the equivalent of the air-conditioning engineer in an adult movie arriving at the blonde starlet’s house to explain he must service her equipment.

Even the most high budget HBO series cannot pursue the same strategy, so CGI is used for specific sequences that can't be done with props, prosthetics or actors. The effects are at the service of the story, whereas in many films, the CGI is the story. A modern 3D cinema experience is closer to a theme-park ride than actually watching a film.

Unfortunately for the cinema-goer who isn't a thirteen year old boy obsessed with watching robots and superheroes throwing things at one another and blowing up buildings, film-makers have forgotten Hitchcock's lesson in ‘Psycho’. There is nothing scarier than a young woman trapped in a house with a madman with a knife. Or they could watch Spielgberg's ‘Duel’ to remember that you can create a thrilling sequence with one car and one truck, no computers.

There are of course exceptions. ‘Skyfall’ was in many ways a traditional film, with the final showdown being a back-to-basics confrontation that had Dame Judy firing a pistol. The only weak part of an otherwise brilliant film was, in my opinion, the silly underground sequence where Bond was attacked by a CGI tube train. That cursed CGI again. Nonetheless, one ‘Skyfall’ does not make a summer of quality film-making.

2. Long termism and short termism

Both TV networks and film studios are, when you strip away the fluff, businesses that must turn a profit regularly to survive. So why do the same business imperatives produce such differing content and why has the balance in quality shifted so sharply away from film to scripted TV?

I do not believe any movie producer or studio head deliberately sets out to make bad films; it is more that a quality script or brilliant story makes less difference to the financial success of a blockbuster than ever before. Mark Kermode goes into this phenomenon in detail in his excellent book, ‘The Good, The Bad and the Multiplex’. Big films rarely fail financially as they are released simultaneously, with a huge marketing blitz. Even if they are dire, there’s no chance for word of mouth to spread. And with Hollywood making more of its money overseas, sophisticated films may actually do worse than basic, Michael Bay bilge. Think McDonalds film-making. Think of the merchandising. Within six months to a year, it’s all over, no matter how long it took to make. That’s a short-term financial fix.

TV series, conversely, have to play the long game. Their makers can live with low audience figures and weak box set sales if they believe the series will build its audience over time. Both ‘Mad Men’ and ‘The Wire’ were slow burners, that could have been axed part way, yet the end results are not only creative triumphs but in the end, good for business. When you are locked into runs of ten or twenty-two episodes, word of mouth is crucial. Programme makers need good reviews and positive feedback. They have to look after their audiences and they have to repeat the trick with every episode.

This difference in life-cycle, where a scripted series may last in some cases for eight to ten years, means quality is essential in TV. In films it’s an optional extra.

3. The HBO mindset

Lack of CGI and an eye for box set sales do not tell the whole story. HBO has changed television and now many other networks have followed its lead. They started making programmes that would never be broadcast on any TV network, whether private or public and it all started with a series called ‘Oz.’

As an insomniac TV addict in the days before iPlayer and hard disk recorders, I trawled a lot of late night television. There were always hidden gems lurking in the schedule from midnight onwards, whether it was a weird Czech art house film with lots of nudity or a 1970s sci-fi classic, and I could add another film to my VHS collection. What I rarely did was record TV programmes, apart from the likes of ‘GBH’; there simply weren’t as many great shows around apart from that now-dying breed, the funny UK sitcom.

Then one evening, I watched an episode of ‘Oz’, shown on C4 in the middle of the night, and was stunned by what played out on screen. Set in a high security prison, ‘Oz’ went for the jugular and never let go. Its characters included neo-Nazi gang leaders, mobsters, drug dealers, a drunk driver who had killed a child and prison warders playing God. A conventional broadcast series might have avoided topics like racial violence and sex in prison, including male rape; in ‘Oz’ there were no limits. To cap it all, the action was narrated by a paralysed black actor in the role of the Shakespearean chorus. This was HBO’s first foray into long form scripted TV and I had never seen anything like it.

After ‘Oz’ came ‘The Sopranos’ and much more. Where HBO trail-blazed, other networks followed with show concepts that would have been unthinkable before. HBO’s model as a subscription service meant it did not need to worry about the outrage a show such as ‘Oz’ would have prompted on a normal network. Nor would the BBC or even C4 have dared make anything so extreme; there would be questions in Parliament about their public charters. At last, programme-makers could break free of chilling effect of the 'moral majority', who never were the majority and whose morals did not extend to respecting other people's right to make up their own minds. Witness the absurd media circus following Chris Morris's 'Brass Eye' special on chid abuse, where politicians and commentators lined up to denounce something they had not watched. 

This outpouring of creativity unleashed by the HBO approach has reversed the old calculus, instead of fearing complexity, taboo subjects, morally ambiguous characters and challenging plotlines, TV has embraced them. Major film studios, however, continue to run scared of any form of risk taking, including original screenplays. Nearly all big budget releases are either adaptations of comics, best-selling novels or reboots of existing film franchises, that were themselves based on comics e.g. Batman, Spiderman and now Superman. Most big budget films present a narrow, socially regressive world view which right wing shock jocks could happily endorse: women need protection by strong men, billionaire philanthropists are better  than state spending, the government is conspiring against its citizens and society's saviours are freedom fighters not bound by legal conventions. For a supposedly liberal place, the subtext of most films reads like the manifesto for the militia movement. 

When Stephen Soderbergh tried to finance a film about Liberace, with Michael Douglas and Matt Damon attached to the project, he was told the project was 'too gay' for mainstream audiences. HBO then produced it as a TV movie, which is now on general release in cinemas. This is the perfect embodiment of the HBO mindset: creative risk-taking is actually better business than playing it safe. 

So I suppose we should all be grateful that we do live in a Golden Age of TV, whilst searching in vain for a film that isn’t targeted at teenagers with ADD.