Feature - Big Screen versus Small Screen Part 1

I hate television. I hate it as much as eating peanuts. But I can't stop eating peanuts. Orson Welles

Of course Orson Welles never watched Game of Thrones on a 50" flat-screen. Had he watched television in 2017, he might have found more to love.

I was having one of those classic pub chats with a friend a couple of months ago - you know, about something utterly trivial that really, really matters. He commented that while he still quite enjoyed going to the cinema, it didn't provide him with the kind of enthralling moments he got from an extended TV drama series. Moments based on long-term investment in characters and the gradual unspooling of plots, so that they land with much greater impact. He made a very good point. 

We're living through the so-called 'Golden Age of TV' after all, at least in terms of output from the US. (The UK has had pretty good TV game for decades. Just saying.) It's the era of Netflix and Amazon Prime and of box-sets that don't actually require a box. There are manifold reasons for staying at home rather than being cordially fleeced down the local multiplex. American cable TV, unshackled by the restrictions on content faced by network shows, has been producing high-end drama for most of two decades now. And the networks have responded by asserting their own creative powers, treating whatever code they must adhere to as a challenge rather than a restriction. It's a good time for armchair entertainment. 

I totally accept what my friend was saying. Five seasons of The Wire introduced me not just to cops and criminals, but to an entire city; I learned about Baltimore's blue-collar workers, its politics, its school system, its press, and how they all interacted with the police and the drug dealers who formed the plot's core. As drama goes, this was huge, complex and immersive. Then take Breaking Bad. Less sprawling and more tightly focused than The Wire, it convinced me over multiple seasons that a high-school chemistry teacher could evolve into a villain of Macbeth-type proportions, because it had room to do so. No film has space to convey such a vast character arc in a way that the audience will believe.

The examples keep springing to mind. AMC's The Walking Dead knots my guts more efficiently than a battalion of undead Boy Scouts could ever do. And it's not as a result of the zombie horror. (I'm almost fully desensitized to that by now.) It's due to the fact that I've come to love the characters who have endured this long, and cringe anytime I think another of them is going to be cruelly claimed by the Apocalypse. It took several years' worth of watching to get me to that point, but now I'm invested up to my eyebrows.

And let me return to Game of Thrones for a final example. There's a crucial point in the series - an event steeped in red, that created an internet sensation and had many fans vowing never to watch the show again, a promise they kept for an entire seven days. If you're a Thrones watcher, possibly even if you're not, you know the one I'm talking about. And the point is this - that yes, a film can deliver a shock. Sometimes it can seriously pull the rug from under its audience. But only a multi-season TV show can deliver the kind of how-could-they-do-that gut-punch that leaves viewers reeling. Or reunite characters after what might literally be years, so that fans weep with relief. Or do a plot reveal that confirms or confounds a theory those same fans have nursed forever. 

Movie franchises can do a little bit of that stuff, for sure. James Bond's Skyfall trades on a relationship between Daniel Craig's 007 and Judi Dench's M that has been cultivated over several films. The central confrontation in Captain America: Civil War matters to fans because they have witnessed the deepening of Cap's friendship with Ironman/Tony Stark over multiple films and now see it being horribly jeopardised. And there was a joy in being reunited with Trainspotting's Renton, Spud and co back in January, two decades after we assumed we'd seen the last of them. Even the newly arrived Blade Runner 2049 will plunge fans back into a dystopian vision they thought they'd never revisit. 

But face it - film can only give us brief moments of that immersion. How can it compete in terms of drama with a medium that lets us hang out with characters for say forty, fifty hours or even more? What has it still to offer that's distinctive? Have I just talked myself out of my first love? 

Of course I haven't. I'm planning over the next few weeks on viewing Breathe, The Death of Stalin, Battle of the Sexes...  one-off film experiences to which I'm thoroughly looking forward.  

But it's going to take a whole other article to pinpoint what, in this era of turbo-charged TV drama, I still love about the cinema experience in its own right. Believe me there's a lot.

(To be continued...)