Has television creatively surpassed cinema?

I honestly want to vomit every time I hear this narrative being pushed. People are really comparing the soulless conglomerate that is Hollywood to slightly less rigid world of network TV via think group made by dozens of writers and directors while completely forgetting the power afforded to the independent auteur. People are choosing their pop albums over pop singles and ignoring the ever growing, ever more accessible world of independent cinema. Louis CK's Horace and Pete is the most intimate television program I can name, and its intimacy is admittedly just borrowed from the work of Mike Leigh and the stage play aesthetic with superficial structural limitations of television programming. That's really all television is: having to tell your story episodically instead of the freedom to tell it however you want to. Also, if your show is successfully you make 10 more seasons until it sucks. The same can be said about movies in the age of the billion dollar franchise, but there's not a rich well of independent television that compares to independent film. You need more resources, thus have less control, over 10 hours of television as opposed to 90 minutes of film. That's just how it's going to work in most cases.

Is television better than it ever has been? That's subjective, but I think we can all agree that it's shifted to be more like film at least in regards to the ones getting critical praise.

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I wouldn't say surpassed but *some* are certainly moving into the space and creating 10+ 1 hour chapters that gel into what's traditionally accepted as 'film' territory.

Netflix comes to mind as a good example (well, some of the shows anyway). I have doubts as to whether a show like Stranger Things would have been 'better' (subjective of course) as a 90 minute film but it certainly has equivalent cinematography, production value, talent. story etc.

I think some stories (particularly those based on intricate & complex novels) are better suited to longer format treatment as the tale can better take its time to develop. I think basically every Stephen King work falls into this category as the 90 minute format hasn't really worked for anything other than novellas or short stories (with the possible exception of The Shining). Amazon's treatment of Michael Connelly's 'Bosch' is another. Too much material in too little time wouldn't have suited the character or the stories.

Some films are trashy, blatant, pop culture bores - same as television. I suppose I'm saying, in a round about way, that the format should suit the material now that the options are more readily available.

I think it's certainly become cinematic. I used to be a movie snob and wouldnt touch tv with a barge pole. When actors made the switch to movies I'd scoff and think they're career was dead. That snottiness has certainly changed, but I do think her quote is a bit much. Film makers make what they love. It's a bit of a rude putdown to say the clever people are now making tv, but I might be taking it out of context.

I've always preferred TV anyway, though I don't get the hype over how great it's supposed to be these days. For my money TV is infinitely inferior to the 90s, and most of the really hyped-up stuff is as dreary as all get out.

What do you think was better in 90s, Iank? I didnt get hooked on tv until around Lost and Prison Break which I thought started off really well. And what hyped stuff do you find yawn worthy?

I just cant get over how much money goes into thetop tier shows these days. Coming back in my next life as a producer.

The 90s were a fantastic time for US television, with The X Files, Buffy, Babylon 5, the various Star Treks, Picket Fences, The Practice, and an endless stream of great comedies like Friends, Seinfeld, Roseanne, Frasier, Newsradio et al (some of which carried over into the early 2000s.)
There's not much around these days I like. Person of Interest was great, but that's done now, and I like Elementary, but I struggle to find much else. All the Game of Thrones, Walking Dead etc stuff I just find very dull, while the sit-com appears to be all but extinct, murdered by cheapo reality TV garbage.

Out of those I only saw Seinfeld and Roseanne and coincidentally a Seinfeld rerun was on last night. Still makes me laugh.

I agree about TWD. I drift off into snoozeville while my husband watches it. Not even the gore entertains me any more - I'm zombied out. I started going cold on GoT but my interest reawoke with the latest episode. I just find the production values so stunning.

Yeah, what we're seeing today is often differentiated from old hat "television" by being called "prestige television". Those products are so different as to warrant the same division as "television" and "cinema" imo. Everything is serialized and narrative driven, often based on other material like a novel, a graphic novel, or an old movie. Everything is LOST now basically, with bigger budgets since shows are more attractive in the age of streaming services.

I havent seen it called prestige television. Just the golden years of television. I prefer the latter for myself, and maybe people like iank regard the 90s as golden years of tv. Just comes down to personal preference, I think.

Also, with actors making the jump from big screen to shows, is it possible it's due to 6 months of steady work each year? Makes sense to me. Long time to be away from family, though.

With all due respect, your argument is quite frankly nonsense. Tell me, how many TV shows have you seen from other countries? You talk about independent cinema but how many TV shows have you seen which do not get financial backing from big production companies or enormous worldwide distribution that something like Game of Thrones gets?

Television and cinema are 2 completely different art-forms with different goals and they both have their merits. Whilst cinema is mostly about creating an experience, television is more about developing characters and events. Given that most films are generally only a couple of hours long, it is possible for cinema to take more risks and challenge the audience in ways that a tv show frankly cannot because of its extended runtime. But at the same time, television offers the possibilities of exploring ideas and developing characters to a much greater depth, which is why all the greatest documentaries have all been released as television shows.

I'm perfectly content with someone who argues that the Wire is better than Citizen Kane or the Sopranos is better than the Godfather. It's all about preference. There is no right or wrong here. The fact that you're denigrating an entire art-form to be inferior to another seems fundamentally flawed to me. There is a reason why Claude Lanzmann's Shoah was released initially as a 9 episode TV show rather than in cinema, there is a reason why Ingmar Bergman released the complete versions of both Fanny and Alexander and Scenes from a Marriage, 2 of his greatest achievements, on television. It's because television offers the possibility of creating extended features that cannot be ordinarily released in a cinema. And someone like Alfred Hitchcock has often been derided for abandoning film to work for television later in his career but the fact is, the show "Alfred Hitchcock presents" has some of Hitchcock's finest work as a director. Of course, I personally have more affection for cinema but it is certainly true that television has come of age and has become a much more respectable medium than it was previously regarded.

Most independent film directors simply do not have the money to cast oscar winning actresses like Jane Campion so people like her have 2 options, they must work in mainstream hollywood films or mainstream television shows. I know which one I'd choose right now.

^Jane Campion is a writer-director, not an actress. Her work so far doesn't appear to be particularly mainstream anyway.

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None of the niche foreign television like Trier's The Kingdom is what's being labeled prestige television and masturbated about in think pieces m8.

In animation TV had always been relatively dominant. Now in Japan about 340 animated television series are airing per year compared to only 80 animated movies. Considering each TV show is around 5 times longer than a 2 hour movie, it's equivalent to about 1,700 animated movies are being shown on TV each year in Japan or about 20 times the number of movies. As a result most great works of animation are TV shows.

In fact Miyazaki said he makes movies because he too perfectionist to make longer TV shows since each minute has to be perfectly done. Although Miyazaki did some TV shows in the 1970s before he did movies. Same with Takahata, the two greatest masters of animation. Miyazaki even said that Takahata's masterpiece was a TV show he made in the 70s and not his world famous movies.

Technically speaking TV and movies are the same atform, which is film. It's just released in different ways: in 2 hour slices or in longer serialized slices. It's like novels and novellas: both are in the same medium as literature but one is a longer format than the other.

Interestingly, in an inversion of live action, in terms of animation I have seem much more artistically challenging animated TV shows than animated movies, since the latter's bigger budget means also lower freedom to experiment since it's audience must also be bigger. For example, Masaki Yuasa, Kunihiko Ikuhara, Hideaki Anno, Yutaka Izubuchi and Akiyuki Shimbo all work on TV and their TV work has been consistently and artistically superior to their movies.

the only thing that is making tv being watched more is the absence of heavyweight hollywood superstars, long are gone the days of having al pacino, robert de niro, clint eastwood, gene hackman, etc

You're right but the ambitions are different. Both are trying to captivate the audience in different ways.

Strange comment based on the fact that De Niro has recently starred in an HBO movie.

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