The advent of television was one of the greatest gifts to cinema. It diversified the medium, allowed for dense story arcs, larger casts of characters, live audiences, and TV challenged filmmakers to come up with smaller-scale storylines with creative restrictions. Television has grown into something much more than a commercial machine, but a form of cinema in its own right, particularly in the last ten years.
As a Lost fan, the greatest thing television provides is dense narratives. There’s a reason many thick novels, especially those by Stephen King, are adapted into television mini-series. They can cover more characters, more subplots, and more narrative arcs. Each season of Lost layers meaning and significance to events and characters in previous seasons, sometimes brilliantly so. Shows like Lost, Battlestar Galactica, Avatar: the Last Airbender, and The Sopranos, among others—all shows that aren’t just episodic, but each episode contains a piece to the whole, grander story. Shows like these are nearly impossible to adapt to film simply because there is too much integral information that would have to be chopped for the sake of a realistic runtime. These shows have drama, emotion, poignancy, relevance, and high entertainment value—everything and more we could hope from a great movie.
Not only did TV contribute to the storytelling meaning, but it made directors of both TV and feature films to adapt and grow as showmen. Cecil B. DeMille wrote epics filmed in scope to provide a cinema experience worth going out to the theaters for. Basically it’s about giving the audience its money’s worth. I would argue that without television, William Wyler might not have bothered to make a movie as ambitious as his Ben Hur remake in 1959. Perhaps David Lean would not have aspired as high in terms of the scale of his movies had TV not have been a competitor for the theater-going public.
In addition it taught filmmakers to pull the reins in. Stories had to be told with creative restrictions, of which many would actually criticize the nature of television for. But limitations and guidelines are from what creativity is born. For example, when George Lucas and Steven Spielberg (who, incidentally, started out directing television) began prepping Raiders of the Lost Ark, Lucas, with his producer hat on, noticed that Spielberg had been storyboarding the movie as if it were a David Lean epic. Lucas, who had only gotten a modest budget from Paramount, urged him to scale back. What he said to Spielberg was, “do it like a TV show”—as in down and dirty, cheap, real, and like an old fashioned serial. The minimalism paid off. One can see a huge difference between Raiders of the Lost Ark, and the most recent Indiana Jones movies, which had a considerably higher, “movie-sized” budget. Minimalist filmmaking has become an art thanks to television, one can point to Steven Spielberg’s first film as well, Duel. Duel was a movie made for television, and shot in twelve days. It was so good, it received a limited theatrical release, and a cult following. It is one of the most elemental stories ever—a giant fucking semi-truck tries to exact revenge on the tight-ass who cut him off. It’s brilliant, Hitchcockian, and completely small-scale and all the better for it. All thanks to the restrictions of filmmaking for television.
It’s clear that TV, while perhaps hard for Hollywood to adjust to and exploit its full potential, has over time become a great competitor for cinema-going. This will not change. Shows are already getting better in terms of production value and its ability to use the medium to its advantage in telling a large story. Teleplays have inspired the art of dialogue, and further linked cinema with the stage. Anthology shows have given ideas for filmmakers to flesh out for feature films (M. Night Shyamalan has professed his desire to make “feature length Twilight Zone episodes”).
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