this post was submitted on 19 Feb 2024
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Imagine actually thinking this
Why not? All screen media is divided into the era before Breaking Bad and the era after Breaking Bad.
Movies are obsolete. Period.
They're like troubadours, after the spread of the printing press. They used to be the state-of-the-art in storytelling, but they have become nothing more than a silly novelty, from a bygone era.
No lol. The Shield, if anything, but that's still irrelevant to your argument.
Film and TV serials are two completely different mediums. Do you think that The Wall should've been a painting? Or that The Weeping Woman would be best as a 9 part Netflix special?
I personally don't think you're wrong, but I also feel like Hollywood execs are no longer interested in the type of stories that make good movies. Movies are tight, self contained stories delivered in a couple of hours. Most of the good ones (Critically acclaimed) don't get that many sequels. Those are infinite cash cows, which is what execs prefer.
Premium series are infinitely expandable and are readily able to adapt larger narrative works. They're potentially endless wells of money. Seems like the industry wants to move in that direction.
But The Wall is a painting…and a music album…and a live stage performance…and a theater play…
Different, yes. But not as different as your example of a painting vs a TV series.
The modern scripted series IS the evolution of and replacement for the obsolete, way-too-short traditional movie. My analogy of the troubadour being replaced by the printing press is simply correct. We were only saddled with pathetically short movies, because people had to physically go to the theater, and still have time to get home and cook dinner.
Those days are over, and good riddance to them. The paradigm has shifted. There is no longer any reason to fuck around with arbitrarily far-too-brief motion pictures. Of course, there will always be people who cannot let go of the past, and insist that the limitations of obsolete media are somehow features, rather than bugs. Lots of people still unironically insist that black-and-white photography is somehow better, more serious, more artsy.
That's just nonsense. The page has turned. Technology has moved forward. Longer IS objectively better than shorter. Color IS objectively better than black and white. More IS better than less. Every child knows all of this. We only begin to deny facts like these, when we grow old enough to become insecure, and in need of things to brag about, show how "sophisticated" we are, etc.
We don't have to accept the limitations of yesteryear, unless we insist on it, for reasons of hipsterism.
I'm not sure I completely agree with your premise, but you're articulating your point well and I value your passion towards the topic.
Many discussions need to be spread over multiple comments on a post instead of being crammed into an over-long single post that still doesn't capture the point of view of the author as they intend.
Furthermore, often times people come back and edit their single comments into massive pages long diatribes and people just TLDR it, when they should have been part of a multi comment back and forth between the poster and their audience, and I think you're doing the latter well.
Haaaaaaang on....
That's fair enough.
I will admit that I'm over-egging the whole concept. However, I truly believe in the basic concept of what I'm saying. I think it's fair to say that at least a huge percentage of motion pictures have been more harmed by their limited scope than they were helped by it.
Note, as I mentioned in another comment, that directors themselves have ALWAYS chafed under the length restrictions of traditional cinema. They're always reined in by the moneyed interests, but if they had their way, even Syd Field's supposedly gospel paradigm of the three-act structure would be thrown out, in most cases.
And I can't disagree with the directors. The greatness of cinema has never been tied inherently to the runtime of a traditional movie. The things that are inspirational and beautiful about cinema all exist, whether the piece is a 45 minutes episode of a series, a 110 minute standard feature, or an epic 5 hour director's cut. The things that really define filmmaking are the photography itself, composition and lighting, acting and screenwriting, the subtle magic of the editor, the subtle-to-not-so-subtle magic of effects artists.
I genuinely believe the balance between all these factors is difficult enough, without having to fight about which scenes get cut, in order to fit in a singular feature length time constraint. Certainly, that shouldn't be seen as some kind of end-all, be-all, defining feature of motion picture art. I was being pushy and pithy about it earlier, but I really do believe that movies are only the length they are, because people only had a few hours to spend going to and from the theater.
I think so many directors of the past, if they'd had their choice in the matter, would ALWAYS have preferred to make a high quality series, rather than a limited movie. Especially if they didn't have to choose an objectively inferior picture quality and aspect ratio, as early television was lumbered with.
I think the final point is related to that, too. I think we're all still laboring under the prejudices of the early era of TV. Television was cheesy. Television was ugly. Television was cheap. Those attitudes are hard to shake off, even after we've all seen the current apex of the "small screen," and what it's capable of showing.
I really am not much of a movie fan, but the serialisation of everything is already so tiring.
I liked watching "a man called Otto" and have a think about it afterwards. I don't want a mini series of Otto providing unnecessary backstory or sideplots, coupled with intense social media discussion and memefication.
Stand alone movies are still a very good medium, see Oppenheimer. Just because Marvel and DC basically serialise everything doesn't mean the medium doesn't hold validity.
Serialization doesn't mean eternal serialization. Mini series exist. I'm currently watching the 80s Shogun adaptation. That thing aired originally as a 5 part mini (VHS) covering each of the 5 volumes of the original book, but TV syndication usually broke it into 30 minutes chunks (it does have some nice natural points of fade to black every that often). The version I have is 3 blu-rays but the whole thing paces like a 10 hour movie. Who cares, it's the same story, it has a start and an end, and several breakpoints you can choose. Even the concept of perpetual TV presence with endless seasons is stupid and makes no sense in a world of video on demand. It continues to exist because production pipelines are still designed to work in seasons. But the important part should be to tell a story and tell it well in the time frame it takes.
Frankly, that sounds like a you problem. Good storytelling is not at all tiring to me. You find complex stories to be challenging and exhausting, for some reason. I'm not making any specific judgments on that point. It just is what it is.
For the rest of us, the obsolete traditional movie medium is just too simplistic. Even Oppenheimer is a perfect example. The actual story of the Manhattan Project is FAR too complex and complicated to tell in a single sitting, to the point that I don't even have any interest in seeing some ludicrously compressed, dumbed-down film version of it. No matter how hard they tried to make it good, it'll inevitably just boil down to "hat man make big bomb."
I'm just not interested in that.
It would undeniably be better as a series. As would everything worth making, which was my original premise.