ENGL 3815 Survey of Popular
Culture
Fall 2013
PH 321
Dr. David Lavery
The “TV is Better Than
the Movies” Meme
As an admitted one-time (TV)antipathist, my first
conscious encounter with the now proliferating “Television is
better than the movies” meme[1] (hereafter TViBttM) was
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“TV Saves the World,” a 1995 article by
Bruce Fretts in Entertainment Weekly which
offered, two years before Buffy the Vampire
Slayer debuted, four years before The
Sopranos defined “not TV” for HBO, and
twelve years before the exquisite Mad Men
graced our living rooms on the unlikeliest of
basic cable channels, ten solid reasons for
television’s superiority, nine of which remain
still timely[2]:
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1. Women thrive on TV.
2. We care more about TV characters.
3. TV does better with drama.
4. In TV, the writer rules.
5. TV is more fun to talk about.
6. TV deals with mature themes more
maturely.
7. TV is more convenient.
8. TV does better with less money.
9. On TV, you can change the channel.
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I found it impossible to argue then with any one of these
contentions, and now, after fifteen years of admiring such brilliant
women as Edie Falco (The Sopranos, Nurse Jackie), Connie Britton
(Friday Night Lights), and Mary McDonnell (Battlestar Galactica); of
being enthralled with characters like Rory Gilmore (Gilmore Girls),
Sam Tyler (Life on Mars), and Dexter Morgan (Dexter); of getting
dramatic with Big Love, The Good Wife, and Being Human; of
“reading” (and viewing) the work of ruling scribes like David Milch
(Deadwood), Aaron Sorkin (West Wing), and Steven Moffat (Doctor
Who); of talking, online and off, about LOST and Buffy the Vampire
Slayer and Northern Exposure; of coming to maturity with ER and Oz
and Six Feet Under, television remains more convenient and
continues to do more with less, while the choice of channels has
increased exponentially.
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In the bibliography (on the right) you will find ten
different examinations of the meme, all of which
count as evidence that the proposition is being taken
seriously. (Take note that half of the ten specimens
appeared in 2010, while four are from the second
half of the century’s first decade.)
Admitting that he once considered television as
“low-budget dreck,” Steven Axelrod has come to feel
quite differently. Harkening back to Mad Men creator
Matthew Weiner’s “battle cry” in an Emmy Award
acceptance speech—“The difference between me and
the rest of you is that I have complete creative
freedom”—he writes:
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The quality of work that such unfettered inspiration produced
over the last decade—from The Sopranos, Six feet Under and The
Wire to Weeds, Dexter and Treme—has made most of the films
produced in this era look puny and venal by comparison.
Axelrod finds it impossible that any careful observer could
conclude otherwise: “We are living through a golden age of television
right now—a mass medium that triumphed precisely because it chose
to narrow the appeal of its shows, even as movie studios seek to
reach the largest possible audience with the most possible explosions
and the broadest narrative gestures.” Television, he is convinced, is
the true heir to great literature: “we await the next season of Mad
Men just as we anticipate the new Jonathan Franzen novel or the
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or the American readers lined up on the dock for the next installment of Little Dorritt.
The novel isn’t dead—it’s alive and dangerously robust, and television of all things, that
‘great wasteland’ that gave us Hee Haw and The Dukes of Hazzard, proves that
extraordinary fact beyond the shadow of a doubt.”
For Edward Jay Epstein the answer to his title’s questions (“Why Has TV Replaced
Movies as Elite Entertainment?”) is to be found in large part in the cinema’s inclination
toward crass subject matter. “Once upon a time,” Epstein writes,
over a generation ago, The television set was commonly called the “boob tube”
and looked down on by elites as a purveyors of mind-numbing entertainment.
Movie theaters, on the other hand, were considered a venue for, if not art, more
sophisticated dramas and comedies. Not any more. The multiplexes are now
primarily a venue for comic-book inspired action and fantasy movies, whereas
television, especially the pay and cable channels, is increasingly becoming a venue
for character-driven adult programs, such as The Wire, Mad Men, and Boardwalk
Empire.
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Like Axelrod (and like myself), Marshall Fine acknowledges that he was once “a movie
chauvinist and believed that anything TV did well, it did accidentally,” but full
immersion in both media has turned his head. “In any given week,” Fine writes, “I see
between two and six movie—and I'm lucky if there's one that I'm willing to
recommend to other people. Or even one every two or three weeks.” The experience
of television is decidedly different: “in any given week, there's a minimum of one series
a night—and often more—that I make an appointment to watch.” He sings the praises
of that moment when “[a]pparently some networks finally decided, hey, maybe we can
draw an audience with programming that doesn't insult viewers' intelligence. It's no
more of a risk than something stupid.” He rejoices in particular at the wonderful series
now being generated on basic cable channels like AMC, FX, and TNT: “shows [that] help
improve my mood and my faith in the creative impulse each week, just by being on.”
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Mark Harris, author of the impressively researched Pictures at a
Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood (2008),
concludes that “[t]he kindest thing you can say about [Summer
2010’s] movies is that they were creatively unnecessary; not one of
them exists because the people behind them believed that they had
a great story to tell.” He is especially tough on television series
transformed into movies:
SATC 2 transformed four once mildly likable characters into
rancid, obliviously overentitled grotesques, and thus proved
that the movies have now sunk so low that they can't even
replicate decent TV. (Forget decent TV: They can't even
replicate MacGruber.)
In an important road marker for the advance of the meme under our
consideration, Harris states emphatically: “Four or five years ago, it
was a jaunty provocation to claim that ''TV is better than the movies.
. . . Today, it's just a fact.”
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In a suggestive reflection in a regional American newspaper (The Louisville Courier
Journal), Tamara Ikenberg acknowledges that the TViBttM makes her almost nostalgic:
“Remember when people would brag about not watching TV or not even owning one of those
brain-dissolving objects? Well, it's nothing to brag about anymore. Ignore TV and you're
ignoring some of the best acting, writing and directing on any screen.” Serious actors know
television is superior. She quotes TV Guide editor Tim Molloy: “Actors really want to have a
character arc they can really explore and play with. In a movie, really every single scene has
to count and you might only get one brief scene to get across who somebody is. . . . Michael
Corleone (The Godfather saga) is one of the most famous characters in cinema and we've
spent what? Nine hours with him? We feel like we know him so well, but we haven't spent that
much time with him at all. We've probably spent about 35 hours with Don Draper (of Mad
Men) so far and I'm still figuring him out.”
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Steven Johnson’s often brilliant book Everything Bad
is Good for You is not just about film and television of
course, but it makes important contributions to the
TViBttM meme. While charting just how complex
television narratives have become in the age of LOST,
Johnson argues that the movies are now a bit jealous of a
medium they once feared (at the inception of the smallscreen era) would replace them:
[F]ilm has historically confronted a ceiling that has
reined in its complexity, because its narratives are
limited to two to three hours. The television dramas
we examined tell stories that unfold over multiple
seasons, each with more than a dozen episodes. The
temporal scale for a successful television drama can
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Be more than a hundred hours, which gives the
storylines time to complexify, and gives the audience
time to become familiar with the many characters
and their multiple interactions. . . .[3] By this
standard, your average two-hour Hollywood film is
the equivalent of a television pilot or the opening
training sequence of a video game: there are only so
many threads and subtleties you can
introduce in that time frame. It's no accident that the
most complex blockbuster of our era—the Lord of the
Rings trilogy—lasts more than ten hours in its uncut
DVD version. . . . [T]he most crucial ingredient is
also the simplest one: time. (131)
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In a comparison of the Academy Award winning 2006 film Crash
(Paul Haggis, 2006) and the reality television show Black. White. (FX
2006), Time’s TV critic Poniewozik offers an unusual version of the
TViBttM meme. Poniewozik suggests that the movie, for him an
“exaggerated image” of racial issues in America “that lets the
audience off the hook, because we can feel easily superior,” could
stillhave learned a lot from the deeply flawed television series.
Even the New York Times film critic has his doubts about his
chosen medium’s claim to supremacy. While ready to contend that
movies still occupy an Olympian position in the pop-culture
landscape. They are bigger than television, grander than video
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games, more important than viral Internet videos—even if those
things can often be more interesting, more profitable or more
fun. Movie stars are coveted for magazine covers and talk-show
guest spots; the premier movie awards show is a red-letter date
on the global television calendar; movie advertisements festoon
billboards, buses and Web pages. Movies are everywhere!
Everyone loves movies!
A. O. Scott nevertheless admits that, over the last decade, “How
many films have approached the moral complexity and sociological
density of The Sopranos or The Wire? Engaged recent American
history with the verve and insight of Mad Men? Turned indeterminacy
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and ambiguity into high entertainment with the
conviction of Lost? Addressed modern families
with the sharp humor and sly warmth of
Modern Family? Look at Glee, and then try to
think of any big-screen teen comedy or
musical—or, for that matter, movie set in
Ohio—that manages to be so madly satirical
with so little mean-spiritedness.” Rhetorical
questions, right?
In the best written, most provocative
of the pieces under consideration—an essay
adorned with a wonderful illustration showing a
movie theatre crowd gathered to watch on the
big screen before them an episode of The
Sopranos—James Wolcott suggests that
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TViBttM can be summed up elegantly in the maxim: “TV promises so
much less, yet gives so much more.” Television superiority is a
“simple” matter of epistemology:
television syncs to the synaptic speed of our minds, our ability to
process information and achieve pattern recognition. Series such
as 24, the C.S.I. shows, Bones, and Numb3rs lay down an
acoustic strip under the alphabet-soup techno-jargon that
correlates to a mental hum, as if the shows were thinking along
with us (whereas so many movies are thinking for us, bringing
the word down from on high).
Like Axelrod, Wolcott is convinced the secret lies, too, in the creativity
television fosters: “TV is less hierarchical than Hollywood, more
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willing to share. The intimacy of television offers an ideal frame for
the sort of teamwork at which Hollywood once excelled. . . .” Like
almost all these commentators, Wolcott singles out television’s
luxurious excess of time:
Charles McGrath observed in The New York Times Magazine
(October 22, 1995). “To think of a character in recent American
fiction who actually evolves this way—who ages and changes
before our eyes—you may have to go back to Harry Angstrom, in
Updike’s ‘Rabbit’ novels. In so many contemporary books, you get
just a few days or weeks in the lives of the characters, or a year
or two at most. There isn’t room enough for a whole lot to
happen.” Movies are more like one-night stands. Either you get
off or you don’t, then it’s on to the next.
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“Are there two hours of television in the last few years,” Steven
Zeitchik writes in a thoughtful LA Times comparison and contrast of
film and television, the only one of our ten that takes the side of the
movies, “that achieved, on the screen and in our minds, what The
Hurt Locker or Slumdog Millionaire did?” I will let Entertainment
Weekly’s Dennis Franich respond: “That’s a good question, and my
answer is ‘Yes, The Pacific episodes 7 & 8, and any two episodes of
Breaking Bad.’” (In another essay relevant to consideration of
TViBttM, Franich goes on to insist, idiosyncratically, that the real test
would be to compare the two media at their worst.)
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Before the 1990s the TViBttM meme was unthinkable. Now, for all but
the most cine-chauvinistic (we’re talking about you Roger Ebert), it
has become common sense. Will the meme endure? A decade from
now will the pro television argument still persuade? Given that it is
difficult to say in 2011 what television, the original “new platform,”
will become in the age of convergence culture, prognostication is
difficult, but it seems likely that memetic historians will one day
conclude that 1995 to the present was TViBttM’s golden age.
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Bibliography
Axelrod, Steven. “Why TV Is Better Than the Movies.” Salon 20 July 2010.
Epstein, Edward Jay. “Role Reversal: Why TV Is Replacing Movies As Elite
Entertainment?” The Hollywood Economist: The Reality Behind the Movies
October 2010.
Fine, Marshall. “Breaking Bad, Saving Grace: Why TV Is Better than Movies.”
Huffington Post 24 February 24 2009.
Franich, Darren. “Is a bad TV show better than a bad movie?” Entertainment
Weekly 1 September 2010.
Fretts, Bruce. "TV Saves the World!" Entertainment Weekly 20 October 1995.
Harris, Mark “What's wrong with this summer's movies?” Entertainment
Weekly 11 June 2010.
Ikenberg, Tamara “Why TV is better than the movies: Great shows find smallscreen homes.” Louisville Courier-Journal 17 September 2010.
Johnson, Steven. Everything Bad is Good for You: How Today’s Popular
Culture is Actually Making Us Smarter. New York: Riverhead Books, 2005.
Poniewozik, James. “Why TV Is Better Than the Movies.” Time 8 March 2006.
Scott, A. O. “Are Films Bad, or Is TV Just Better?” NY Times 8 September
2010.
Wolcott, James. “Little Big Screen.” Vanity Fair October 2008.
Zeitchik, Steven. “Is television really the new cinema? Or is that just
something TV people like to say?” Los Angeles Times 31 August 2010.
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Notes
The online Urban Dictionary offers some good entries on “memes.”
Here’s a pertinent one:
an idea, belief or belief system, or pattern of behavior that spreads
throughout a culture either vertically by cultural inheritance (as by
parents to children) or horizontally by cultural acquisition (as by
peers, information media, and entertainment media)
[2] Now no longer relevant: “James Burrows Does TV. Burrows, of
course, wrote for/created The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Taxi, Cheers,
Frasier, and Friends.
[3] Video games are likewise the object of duration envy: “the average
video game takes about forty hours to play, the complexity of the
puzzles and objectives growing steadily over time as the game
progresses” (131).
[1]
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