The Television is Mightier than the Film Projector?
Written by John Rozewicki   
Monday, 07 August 2006

Movie Lust

I love going to the theatre to watch a movie. There's not too many other situations that can cause me to become as excited while spending only $10. It's the waiting that really gets me; the feeling of sitting in the theatre waiting for the movie to start. I constantly check my watch while nervously twitching my foot. This causes the very loving people I attend movies with to grab my leg so I'll stop making noise and shaking their seat.

Television Love

As much as I love going to the theatre I find myself staying home more often and watching television. Television isn't what it used to be. No longer does the watching of television require the annoyance of commercials. Most of the television I watch comes on DVD. However, the excitement when watching television isn't with the waiting. It is with the knowledge that there's 17.2 hours of content to watch, and I'm only an hour in. It wasn't always this way. I used to hate television. I could never seem to clear the specific hours each week when the interesting-looking shows aired. And even if I could, at the time there weren't any real compelling shows on television.

Changes

It changed for me about 6 years ago with the show Gilmore Girls. This was one of those touching family shows on the WB network, but the difference was that this WB show actually contained some decent comedy. The scripts were long, tight, and delivered at breakneck speed. That is actually one of the more common criticisms of the show; nobody talks that fast. But I beg to differ, I talk that fast and so do most of my friends. Speed of delivery aside, it was the show that pulled me in. I was hooked from the first minute I saw and for a long time it was the only show I would watch on television. Nothing could match it for quality. The characters were interesting, the humor was quirky and dark, and the character dynamics were over-the-top but understandable. The show was well-produced. The actors who have worked on WB series' will tell you that the shooting schedule is closer to how movies are done. The shoots are just as rigorous but with one important difference, the pace has to be kept up for 8 solid months out of the year.

Peak Performance

Last year my television watching hit a peak. It's not that I have more time to spend. I was the busiest I had ever been, but I also watched more television than I ever had before. I followed 4 series last year on the major networks; Gilmore Girls, Grey's Anatomy, Lost, and Veronica Mars. All of them were interesting, stable, funny, well-produced shows. I don't buy this 'golden age' garbage. Television was ridiculously horrible until a few years ago, but people watched because they didn't have many other options for video entertainment. It wasn't lack of talent or creativity that kept television down for so many years it was lack of budget. Television studios could simply not match the dollar-per-minute ratio of the film studios at a time when such production was very expensive.

Why Television is Better Now

Advances in digital video production have been the reason for the surge in television quality over the past 8 years. Television studios don't need as many film prints laying around, and many don't have need of film at all if they make use of digital video cameras. Digital editing means less money spent on the physical labor of cutting together video allowing more time to be spent on the creative portions. Television will never be able to match the dollar-per-minute ratio of film, but we're at the point now where they don't need to. There are diminishing returns to video production. The economics for television have finally evened out enough for television studios to create something very close to film for a fraction of the per-minute budget.
When television's bad; nothing's worse. When television's good; nothing's better.
This adage has never been more applicable than right now. Now that television quality is finally able to compete with film we are going to see more and more just how good television can be.

Better than Film?

I hesitate to say that television is better than film. Television and film are different formats. Film is better at telling specific stories or stories that are told in a more experimental way. Not every story needs 17 hours to tell, but the longer format of television allows more intricate stories to be played out and better character development. Lost is an excellent example. It is one of the first times outside of lengthy novels that we've gotten to intimately know a cast of 10 or 12 characters. They're all so developed that each of them feels like a main character. We really do feel like we know these people.

Cred Confusion

It's foolish to say that across the board one format is better than the other, but it is my opinion that nothing beats good television. As a video production student I feel conflicted. Film gets all the credit, but television is a more rewarding experience for me in every way. I feel like I should really want to work in the movie industry, but I'm unable to feel that way when such stellar programming is available on television.
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