Dan from Tifaux is back with us today with yet another way in which TV is superior to film: it has the time to be.
The brevity and economy of film is one of its assets. Although, if you ask me, movies are getting way too long these days. (But you didn’t. So nevermind.) It’s a delicate and thoughtful process to trim out what isn’t necessary in a film to create the most powerful piece of art possible. Ask TiFaux Kyle — he’s famous for this stuff. I won’t go on this tangent because I don’t know exactly what I’m talking about.
But what I’m getting at is this — in a movie you’ve got two hours to make your point. And, generally, you hit or you miss and the characters work or they don’t. However, the nature of television means that not only do you have more time to develop relationships with characters, but they have more potential to develop and grow.
Think of Jim and Pam on The Office — the will-they-won’t they tension on that show could never have built up and paid off if you’d only known about them for two hours. Not only did you have dozens of episodes to build upon, but you had the weeks in between to analyze and speculate about how things would pan out.
Furthermore, the plotlines have the potential to be richer. While the miniseries of Battlestar Galactica laid a great foundation, the series has taken the potential of the concept and run with it. The depth of the mythologies of TV series is something that is distinct to the medium — whether it’s knowing all about Gaius Baltar and his misdeeds or knowing why Meredith Grey has become the basketcase she is today.
Heck, think about packing all the twists and turns of Lost into a feature film (or a book for that matter).
August 6th, 2008 at 5:54 pm
I agree with you, although I think time is also the downfall of TV in many cases - there’s always the pressure to keep a successful TV series on the air (particularly in the US market), which leads to wandering plots and a lack of direction.
August 6th, 2008 at 11:06 pm
I’m not sure this is about TV vs Film. It’s serial fiction vs standalone fiction. Lost couldn’t be a novel, but it could easily be a comic. And serial fiction is possible in cinema, most obviously in the film serials of the pre-1950s, but a lot of film franchises of today have strong serial elements (Harry Potter, to pick an obvious example).
A lot of TV drama avoids character development anyway, because once our hero overcomes his or her flaws, there isn’t much drama. Even with Gaius Baltar I think it’s debatable how much real development there is, certainly in the first 2 seasons. A lot of the time the benefit of serialisation is not that characters develop & grow, but that you can throw the same characters into different situations. In such cases the only inherent advantage with TV is that you can do this faster.
There are of course exceptions, which is where serialised fiction has something that film doesn’t, but right along with them come all those terrible jumping the shark moments where suddenly many hours of invested time are completely pissed away.
But even in the case of successful, non-trivial character development over the course of many TV episodes, is there any objective sense in which that is better than character development in a film? I’m not entirely sure that the argument doesn’t ultimately reduce to the question “Do you like your favourite TV series more than your favourite film?”. And my dad’s car IS faster than your dad’s car…
August 6th, 2008 at 11:28 pm
Another thing worth noting is that the very thing that gives TV the ability to do serial storytelling, the speed of production, also makes it much harder for it to match cinema in terms of cinematography & design.