It’s as if TV series had finally shrugged off their inferiority complex. As if the fact that they could never match the big screen’s visual power no longer induced them to not even try. Boardwalk Empire‘s 80-minute pilot, which was directed by Martin Scorcese, is effectively a feature film in its own right. In recent years a spurt of “cinematic” TV series has suddenly emerged. Anyone who has seen, say, Boardwalk Empire or Mad Men will have been taken aback by their cinematic quality.
TV used to be the undisputed preserve of screenwriters (see Aaron Sorkin’s West Wing or J. J. Abrams’ Lost for instance). For a long time TV’s main advantage over cinema, namely its ability to show character development, was considered enough to redeem sloppy cinematography. Directors and other crew members were selected for their efficiency and ability to churn out around 20 episodes a year. Yet the next step seemed obvious: to take on its bigger brother at its own game.
It all started with The Sopranos, when the series’ creator, David Chase, brought on a bunch of people from independent cinema with absolutely no conception of how to make TV and set them loose on set. The result is a beautiful series which set a new benchmark for small-screen quality. Something that started on fee-paying cable television started to creep into mainstream channels once the business realized that there was a demand for a small number of high-quality TV series.
Within the confines of this niche, directors have come to be considered on par with screenwriters, and it shows. The executive producer of Mad Men, Scott Hornbacher, describes how he only enforces two rules on set: no hand-held camera and no steadycam. The result is an admirably shot product, which unashamedly exploits and constantly references classical Hollywood style.
For all this, it would be silly to ask whether TV will replace cinema. TV simply cannot match the amount of funds poured into each minute of cinema. For all its grandeur, Boardwalk Empire‘s pilot only cost $18 million. I say only because Shutter Island, Scorcese’s latest feature film, cost more than four times that amount. If you do the math, that’s about $36,000 extra per minute of film. And anyway, you don’t need to do the math to know that cinema and TV are fundamentally different media.
Still, though TV series will never match cinema in terms of cinematography, it is nice to see that the idea that they shouldn’t bother with it has been dispelled.
