“It’s an eight-hour movie”: why are directors so ashamed to admit they’re making TV shows?
There’s no denying that the ongoing ‘Golden Age’ of television has made episodic storytelling more cinematic than ever before, but an increasing number of directors seem to bristle at the mere suggestion they’re making a TV show.
If it has a number of individual episodes that connect together to tell an overarching narrative populated by an ensemble cast of characters and several subplots that interweave to underpin and enhance the main storyline, then it’s a TV show. If it runs for multiple years, then it’s definitely a TV show. The small screen has become a haven for creators and filmmakers alike, even if many of them are bizarrely averse to calling it what it is.
As tends to be the case with TV’s many modern overindulgences, the root of the problem stretches back to Game of Thrones. Showrunners David Benioff and DB Weiss once described the grand saga as “a 73-hour movie,” which, for all intents and purposes, is a ridiculous thing to say. The point they’re trying to make is obvious, but the show’s popularity seems to have emboldened everyone else that copping to the fact television is being made is something to be avoided at all costs.
Each episode feeds into the next, and each season feeds into the next, which all combine to tell one story in its entirety from beginning to end. That, in microcosm, is TV. Of course, in cinema, one scene feeds into the next and serves much the same function, but the unstoppable rise of streaming has blurred the lines between the two mediums to such a point that many creatives have stopped trying to distinguish them.
Jonathan Nolan referred to the first season of Westworld as “a ten-hour movie.” And yet, he went awfully quiet on that front when the sci-fi series spawned another three seasons and 24 episodes. That, dear reader, would make it a TV show. For whatever reason, though, it’s become maddeningly difficult for creatives – and even actors – in a position of power to admit it.
Writers Alfred Gough and Miles Millar referred to Netflix’s Wednesday as “an eight-hour Tim Burton movie”. Burton only directed half of those eight episodes, which is doing a disservice to Gandja Monteiro and James Marshall, who helmed two apiece. By calling the show an eight-hour film reflective of one person’s sensibilities, either the other directors were forced to emulate Burton’s style while sacrificing their own, or they were happy to cede the credit despite putting in the graft.
Ali Selim branded Marvel’s Secret Invasion as “a six-hour movie unto itself”, which it wasn’t. The entire franchise is episodic by its very nature of the way the various film and TV chapters slot into a single story, which technically made the showcase for Samuel L Jackson an episodic story within an episodic story as part of a shared universe, which is nowhere close to being a film, really. It was also crap, but that’s not the point.
Ironically, Shawn Levy hit the nail squarely on the head when hyping up the fifth and final season of Stranger Things. He called the fantasy favourite “as big as any of the biggest movies that we see,” which he’s entitled to do. However, it’s not going to play in cinemas, and none of its episodes will exist as standalone stories unburdened from what comes before or after, so it’s never going to be anything other than TV.
The filmmaker described it to Variety as “major, major, cinematic storytelling that happens to be called a TV series,” which is a puzzling way to put it at best. It can’t be cinematic storytelling if it’s not going to play in cinemas, neither is it comparative to a movie when it’s quite literally divided into episodic chapters that everybody knew from the beginning were going to be viewed on either a home television or a mobile device.
The best shows of the current era, including The Sopranos, Breaking Bad, The Wire, Succession, and Mad Men, to name just a small few, were proud to be TV shows and never pretended to be otherwise. They had filler episodes and the occasional middling episode and never claimed to be anything except a TV show because that’s what they were.
The party line of “it’s not a TV show, it’s a six/eight/ten/delete where applicable-hour movie” has grown nauseating, and it’s disparaging to those who’ve worked in television their entire careers for the current crop to suggest they’re doing something daring, different, or better. Perhaps the best counterargument of all comes from Eric Kripke, who created the long-running supernatural before spearheading The Boys.
It would have been easy for him to claim his anarchic comic book adaptation was cut from the feature-length cloth when it ticks so many of the boxes associated with the modern ‘TV shows as movies’ spiel, but as a small screen veteran, what did he have to say on the matter? “Anyone who says, ‘Well, what I’m really making is a ten-hour movie’. Fuck you, no, you’re not. Make a TV show. You’re in the entertainment business.”
