The Golden Age of Television
Derek keeps pestering me to write about how the last decade was the Golden Age of Television. It’s not that I don’t agree with him. It’s that I wasn’t sure that was enough of an angle and I wondered if it had been said already. I’m not sure. I know that most people, when referring to the Golden Age of Television, are referring to the 40′s and 50′s and not to the last 10 years. But certainly many people I know talk about the last 10 years of television as something very special. I just didn’t think it needed discussing.
But, this summer, after seeing the umpteenth studio film that ran well over two hours, I realized that it’s not just that it’s the Golden Age of television but that we seem to have, concurrently, lost our way with film. Or at least, we’ve forgotten how to edit. And while it’s a gross exaggeration, I would posit that I go to the movies a great great deal, that I love movies, and that I am coming at this from a pretty experienced perspective. I might exempt documentaries from this broad generalization. But basically I feel okay stating that the craft of making a major studio picture is not nearly as taut and rigorous as it used to be. Or, maybe more accurately, as it needs to be or should be.
Certainly comparing film to television, it seems hard to argue that the quality of both network and cable television has increased fairly dramatically over the last 10 years. And we’ve been blessed with some of the best episodic long-form storytelling in the history of the form. Again, I imagine better critics have written about this phenomena, people like Ken Tucker at Entertainment Weekly. But it may bear repeating that with the creation and popularity of The Sopranos on HBO in 1999 we’ve seen an unprecedented run of truly beautiful television. Complicated, unflinching, epic, layered storytelling. Beginning with The Sopranos we’ve seen 6 Feet Under, Deadwood, The Wire on HBO. That then spilled over into Showtime. They created Dexter, Weeds. Then, all of a sudden, the cable networks got into the act. Battlestar Galactica on Syfy, Mad Men on AMC, Nip/Tuck on FX. Even on the big networks you’ve got hit comedies like The Office and 30 Rock that are actually funny and, amazingly, don’t have a laugh track. You’ve got Lost on ABC. So many shows that you can’t even keep up with all of them. I haven’t seen Breaking Bad yet but I’ve heard it’s incredible.
Somehow we’ve got cable television shows like The Sopranos, 6 Feet Under, The Wire and Battlestar Galactica, and soon, Lost, who are all showing how to embrace the form, weave a compelling tale, and then bow out gracefully. The Wire was five seasons and out. BSG was four seasons and out. Sopranos was 7 seasons. These great shows leave with dignity and and grace and don’t stick around wearing out their welcome. (Not so fast, ER, and South Park, we don’t ever want you to leave. You can stay.)
Meanwhile, and maybe it’s just this summer that is really annoying me, you can’t seem to find a movie that truly respects the form. I don’t understand how popcorn blockbusters are all north of 140 minutes. There are few movies that truly merit that kind of in-depth inspection. It’s the exception, not the rule. In general, based on our collective attention spans, and based on the arc of these kinds of stories, I’d argue that movies, in general, should be 100 minutes long. That’s how long. Not 140. Not 150. 100 minutes.
But, and before you whip out your spreadsheets and start tabulating average run time of films or even telling me that they were longer in the 40s, I’ll freely admit that it’s based on merely on the personal experience of someone that sees a lot more movies than you. First of all, why do films like Transformers have to be 2.5 hours long? I don’t get it. There’s nothing to the story but a series of special effects set pieces. Don’t 12 year old boys get antsy after awhile? It seems counter-intuitive to save your longest films for kids with ADD, all hopped up on sugar and goofballs.
I know (or I think I know) the real explanation. That when you spend a couple million bucks on one scene you’re sure as shit going to get that scene into the final cut. But maybe that’s my point. No record should be 14 songs and no popcorn blockbuster should be north of 2 hours and as much as I loved loved loved The Dark Knight and saw it three times in theaters, I can tell you that they could have cut the Two Face storyline somehow, despite whatever protestation Chris Nolan might offer me, and the movie would have been better. Too long, bros. Too fucking long.
And the final straw was a few weeks ago when I saw Julie & Julia with my mom. This is a Nora Ephron movie. I expected adherence to convention. I expected self-satisfied spurious modern women with voice-overs. And I got all that. But I also got a movie that is, incredibly, 140 minutes long. Are you kidding me? Julie & Julia? So now even the rom-coms and the light and airy Nora Ephron movies need to be over two hours long? We’ve lost our way, friends.
You know the form is suffering when you can walk out and immediately offer editorial notes to the director. Memo to Nolan: We didn’t need Aaron Eckhart in The Dark Night, as much as I love him. Memo to Ephron: I know it was based on her book, but creating a moral equivalency between Meryl Streep and Amy Adams was near-infruriating. We should’ve just turned the movie into a Julia Child biopic or, at a bare minimum, severely restricted the presence of the Adams character.
If there are huge arcs that are that obviously in need of editing, immediately upon exiting the theatre, then you know something is up.
The DVDs I rent these days are all TV shows that I can watch in sequential sittings over the course of a few weeks. And the contrast between these shows that manage to weave all these elements together and then stop on a dime at the end of their respective storylines, and the flab and indulgence present in even the most mass appeal cinema is a striking contrast.
So say we all.
