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In the 40’s and 50’s TV was home to schlock. The antics of Mr. Ed and Lucy entertained kids with juvenile predictable humor, and this did not change through the 70’s and 80’s with shows like Three’s Company, The A-Team, etc. Now, though, the quality of TV shows is often better than that found on the big screen. In their article at Guardian Unlimited, ‘Move Over Hollywood’, John Patterson and Gareth McLean describe the new TV that is giving audiences a reason to stay home, or put another way, less of a reason to go to the movies. With shows like ‘The Sopranos’, ‘Deadwood’, and ‘Six Feet Under’ TV has grown out of its hokey past and become the new home of quality writing, compelling drama, and edgy suspense thrillers.
Patterson and McLean write:
“James Woods, the star of the new legal drama Shark, is part of this year’s mass migration to the small, well, smaller screen. His main reason: better material. “I’ve been lamenting the horrible state of the movie industry the past few years,” he told the LA Times in March. “When I was young, everyone pooh-poohed television, and now every time I turn [it] on, I see some extraordinarily interesting series.'”
Also from their article: “One of the main fields of conflict between television and movies has always been technology, and the quality of the sound and image. When TV first put Hollywood on notice in the 50s, the suddenly beleaguered studios responded with the razzle-dazzle of CinemaScope and TechniColor to retain their audiences. The foot-wide, oval-shaped, black-and-white TV screen of 1952 was no match for a movie screen the size of a warehouse wall in vibrant colour. Although TVs grew larger and were able to project colour from the late 50s, the technological gap between TV and movies still persists, but it’s narrowing all the time.”
And: “As Bogdanovich says, “Better movies would help.” Today, we are offered a fast-food McMovie experience that is dismayingly TV-like, the screens often clotted with big-screen TV show remakes and product placement.
Meanwhile, television has become infinitely more cinematic, just as audiences have progressively become more cine-literate. Gone are the all-over lighting and static cameras of the old made-for-TV movie, to be replaced, often, by superbly kinetic and inventive film-making, shot on film, often in wide-screen formats and on location, using big budgets (Lost’s opener, for example, cost a record-breaking $10m), special effects and hit-parade soundtracks.”
With box office performance increasingly shaky, piracy concerns in the digital age, and declining interest in the movie theater experience, Hollywood may have yet another problem to contend with: high quality TV that keeps people home.
