xp tbh all I remember about you is that you like two and a half men

still all this tv renaissance stuff is like, people naming a dozen shows. I am sure there were at least 20 movies I didn’t see this year that I would have enjoyed very much, it’s hard to figure out which 20 those would be, but still. whereas the tv renaissance is like, people talking about *the same shows* cause really outside of those shows tv is horrible, the worst it has ever been.

― iatee, Tuesday, December 13, 2011 1:02 AM (19 minutes ago) Bookmark Permalink

maybe you don’t realize this because you don’t watch tv but tv shows come in “seasons” where they come back year after year, so the reason people talk about the same shows is because the same shows stay on tv for multiple years

oh shit I was zinged bad

seasons, gotta write that one down

y’all

2 1/2 men was not in my top 50 shows fwiw

sorry for being unnecessarily sarcastic but that was a pretty silly point. people keep talking about the same tv shows because new episodes come out with new things happening so there’s new stuff to talk about.

“new” things “new” stuff

tv turned into sweary soap opera so slowly i never even noticed

i always forget about tv show, that i watch them, i usually enjoy one episode and forget to ever watch it again. i mean there are exceptions but

movies are art but tv is more fun to argue abt on the internet

well most movies arent art really but at least a couple a year seem to manage it

movies usually only waste 2 hours of yr time

tv is incapable of beauty is really the problem, some shows tell interesting stories tho like

i like long movies i do get the appeal of #sustainednarrative, also the way that you can argue w/ppl abt w/e this weeks spinning top is, did it fall or not blah blah blah

i think movies are better at showing you worlds, like ‘margin call’, despite the reduced time is probably more ‘informative’ but tv can be better at ‘telling’, letting oyu live inside the world it creates

i liked buffy

i voted tv but i am blind to/suspicious of cinematic beauty tbh so i think i’m just missing the thing Lamp’s talking about

I think the problem w/ sustainednarrative tv is that there are usually so many writers involved that someone ends up fucking it up along the way, it’s a lot easier for a movie to be perfect than a tv series

this is like the novels v poetry debate that kept rearing its head when i was in grad school, except novels and poetry are better than tv and movies.

nah modern novels are about as bad as modern movies

or about as good

haha now i get why the movie partisans are all mad at you

i actually kind of agree that movies are theoretically better at being beautiful and perfect than tv shows but i honestly can’t remember the last time i saw a movie that was actually beautiful or perfect

xpost lol

novels are tv in this analogy anyway. movies are poetry.

what does ‘modern novels are abt as bad as modern movies’ mean

proportionally about as likely to make you feel/think something amazing

which isn’t really true, novels are better than movies in that sense. i don’t really want to drag novels/poetry into this tbh

i liked middlemarch

sorry it just seemed similar to me. the thing people say about novels is that they’re character driven but baggy and imperfect and poetry is about the pure beauty of language or whatever. that argument is annoying.

xp <3

by “people” i basically mean “this one professor”

novels are also stuff girls like/write, whereas poetry is the important stuff dudes like/write

obviously that’s not actually true it’s just the stuff that creeps into the argument

stuff

i actually kind of agree that movies are theoretically better at being beautiful and perfect than tv shows but i honestly can’t remember the last time i saw a movie that was actually beautiful or perfect

― n/a, Monday, December 12, 2011 9:49 PM (9 minutes ago) Bookmark Permalink

yeah this is how i feel.

i also think its interesting the way both are/were (pre internet/vhs/whatever) communal experiences, but in different ways. tv shows and the water cooler and movies and everybody alone together in the dark. i mean i’m drawn more to that, the dark room, the whirring projector, the laughter or sobbing or gasps of the rest of the audience kindof piercing into the isolation of the cinemagoer. the way tv shows force you to stay with them to keep coming back, they pull on your time, whereas a movie burrows into your brain in a different way. its singular maybe because its a single thing. i think of that shot in texas chainsaw massacre where hes spinning around with his chainsaw or the red coat in don’t look now or i’m not sure, but just the way the images burn without needing to increasingly reveal themselves.

man we need to get some mcluhan in here

voted movies, if you want a long and engaging story w/ a complex plot and multidimensional characters go read a book

peace

TV would be my answer for most of the reasons already mentioned and also because I really love good comedy—most of the good stuff is on TV; there is very rarely a truly funny movie out, for whatever reason. I find a lot of incidental everyday stuff funny (Peep Show, etc) which would not suit the movie format.

the everyday world is also all around you though i mean

like right there

and also over there

eh mcluhan

also with tv you can pretend it’s going to go on forever and conquer death etc.

also ad breaks

well most movies arent art really but at least a couple a year seem to manage it

“a couple,” or 40 or 50 I saw this year

(that admittedly mostly don’t play in huge swaths of America, but u know discs/downloads etc)

u would consider 40–50 movies from this last year “art”?

it could be so. i don’t know if i’ve ever even seen that many new movies in the year. seems like a huge number tho

I’d say about 600 feature films were exhibited for a week or more in NYC this year.

for sure, but that means that something like 6% of movies are art

film as an art form exists outside of those 600 feature films

tv does not exist outside of tv

tho it can be show outside of tv

I think it can be summed up like this for me: I love my favorite movies more than I love most good TV series (w/probably the exception of, like, Larry Sanders or Kids In The Hall...which, incidentally, I remember Morbs also adoring!), but I think there might be more television that I love than movies that I love. And I daresay that the television I love has been far more impactful on a number of levels.

i stuck a noodle up my nose

tv’s got the bewbs

lol aspie rube shut-ins

for sure, but that means that something like 6% of movies are art

Do you really think TV can claim a better average?

(For the record I think of the best of both mediums as essential, w/ different strengths.)

tv = less letters so it wins

I think the problem w/ sustainednarrative tv is that there are usually so many writers involved that someone ends up fucking it up along the way, it’s a lot easier for a movie to be perfect than a tv series

not all shows work like this, not all shows have to work like this. actually can you clarify that you’re not assuming that a show’s story is tossed around from one writer to the next episode by episode without any leadership or communication, cause i’m not sure

serialized television getting better will happen as long as shows keep getting more centralized leadership from talented writers (ie louie, the semi-auteurs of HBO). but having a room filled with talented writers backing the author up and providing salient perspectives and filling in the empty spaces and writing glorious dialogue where the author might be better at story = potential greater than most glorious films. rarely reached tho

also wtf, why is television less capable of achieving moments of beauty? it has happened much less with television but it’s a young and slowly growing medium

no it’s not

and i agree that tv isn’t in a renaissance at all, ppl just have too low expectations for it. if breaking bad is the best drama on television we’re definitely not in a renaissance. i think tv has to outgrow its current format fully for that to happen

tv will not outgrow its current format it will just stop being “”tv“” and start being media that gets put on the internet in various formats

iatee can you try explaining why television is inherently incapable of cinematic-level beauty

it’s not inherently incapable it’s just even less likely due to the way it makes $

xp so why exactly will internetized tv fail to continue growing? piracy?

ya i agree, but the way it makes $ is evolving

piracy, long-term problems w/ making money through traditional tv commercials, people being increasingly unwilling to pay for cable due to the way we consume media

movies are pirated too, i don’t think it’s as damaging as you think it is. advertising doesn’t need to be a part of tv’s future — premium cable networks are still getting by fine without it. i’m an optimist but i think tv will get a successful itunes treatment before it fails and dies. and subscriber cable will still support networks.

er, cable networks i mean. ABC and them will do what they do and not necessarily have a major impact on the evolution of cable.

hollywood will have problems too but people are willing to pay for ‘the moviegoing experience’, the ‘tv experience’ can be pirated. premium cable networks still depend on having a huge base of people w/ large cable packages who ‘watch tv’, I don’t think that will exist in the same sense in 20 years.

I would love to see Louie become a more prevalent model for future shows. Made on the cheap by one central dude with complete creative control. I feel like we’ll see a lot more of this as subscription fees for various services increasingly supplant advertising dollars (there’s a pretty direct causal link explaining the disproportionately high level of quality of HBO’s original programming, f’rinstance). That day can’t come soon enough, by christ.

fwiw, i get more pleasure out of watching episodes of breaking bad and parks and recreation than i do out of watching most movies. 10 years ago, i would have said the same thing about the sopranos, 5 years before that i would’ve said the same thing about the x files and 5 years before that twin peaks and the early episodes of the simpsons. TV has gotten better over the past ten years, i agree, but even before that in the “dark ages” there were TV shows i liked way more than most movies ... so it’s a long way of saying that yeah the tv renaissance is kinda overblown.

besides, even most good tv shows lose steam after the third season. it’s cliche, but it’s true and even more true nowadays.

and i don’t even ask for “art” in either movies or TV shows ... i just ask to be entertained!

the thing is that a ‘tv show’ fundamentally just doesnt seem that concerned w/imagery or the way it looks &c &c and in order to be successful you can be so ugly and formulaic, no one watches ‘seinfeld’ for the way it looked but its about as good a sitcom as you can make. even shows that had real visual style and grace like ‘the sopranos’, some of their best episodes are still about dialogue, character, plot and some of their weakest episodes were the most cinematic. (whats the one w/carmela in paris called?)

you could make like non-narrative tv that addressed the role of the camera but then would it really be a ‘tv show’? its not even that tv is junk food or a narrower format or w/e its just... its not concerned w/images and the senses the way film can be, its sorta a hybrid medium that has its own strengths but its limited too i guess

xp can’t really pirate a big-screen football game w friends, families are never going to crowd around the computer screen to watch their shows, etc. daytime talk shows, late night shows, soaps, sports, maybe even the crap reality shows on Bravo, i don’t think these things will ever be fully relegated to the internet. and if they do, they’ll find a way to strive there. there’s no reason a netflix model can’t basically replace cable as long as it costs as much as cable. if/when free ad-based sites like hulu either die out or become entirely subscription-based, that model would make sense. and piracy hasn’t killed netflix, etc

basically, there are a million things that can happen. tv’s survival and continued evolution (haven’t even mentioned the internet’s capability to foster low-budget indies) is more likely than its death imo

TV has sports.

Newer digital TVs with a good sound system kind of makes going to a theatre not as big as big a deal as it once was.

the thing is that a ‘tv show’ fundamentally just doesnt seem that concerned w/imagery or the way it looks

this is a trend based in a history of ad-based, network-meddled-with television, not an inherent fundamental truth. a tv show isn’t a sentient thing, and if a showrunner/head writer wants and has the capability to concern the show w imagery, no reason why not. i would if i could! also not buying that there aren’t shows right now that achieve beautiful imagery. even the x-files was pretty capable of it at points.

people already watch stuff on their ipads / the internet is easier than ever to connect to someone’s tv screen. owning a large tv screen, computer screen or projector or whatever =/= “tv”

xp to lamp

its limits are 100% commercial I think, something is a tv show because it is X minutes long (w/ or w/o commercials)—beyond that there is nothing really that defines tv as an art form when I watch a daily show clip on youtube it’s not ‘watching tv’ but if I watch the whole episode it is.

xp to my last post: i’m no film historian but i imagine you might be able to say the same thing about film in the 20s/30s, before studio productions were overtaken by (at least the concept of) the auteur

voted tv just to enrage morbs like everyone else

its limits are 100% commercial I think, something is a tv show because it is X minutes long (w/ or w/o commercials)—beyond that there is nothing really that defines tv as an art form when I watch a daily show clip on youtube it’s not ‘watching tv’ but if I watch the whole episode it is.

true, but this seems like arguing the difference between a short story and a novella and a novel and a flash fiction.

television is a medium that includes serialized stories, mini-series, made-for-tv movies, etc. not to mention a million other bits of non-fictional media. so maybe the comparison between “tv” and movies doesn’t work unless you specify what kind of tv. all i know is that film is basically always 90–120 minutes, while television offers the possibility of every single other narrative length/scope, and that is necessary.

cmon bro nothing is sadder than when ‘breaking bad’ tries to get cinematic or visually inventive its just like jeez tell yr stories, this is so embarrassing grandpa

also film was p much always visual tv is abt words but it cant actually use words as effectively as books

i know i basically said that too upthread, but tv just uses words differently. also words are better than images.

sure thats why books are better than movies but cmon

haha wait are you granting my five-year-old “argument” that words are better than images? i am really embarrassed that i still think that, but i do. maybe there’s something wrong with my eyes.

I think the fact that tv doesn’t have the image-thing going for it is mostly due to realities of cost and the production schedule. but again, just like the fixed time, it proves to be an artform that can only be defined by the limits of a budget.

it doesn’t have to be like that tho? i think i am alone here in seeing serial tv drama as a very young thing. not in terms of years alive but actual development.

for the record i think that breaking bad is an overrated show and i agree that its visuals are not very great

the sopranos had plenty of both and time and money in its later seasons its just intrinsic in the way a tv show communicates its purpose like i sd the most ‘cinematic’ episodes of the sopranos were not nec its most ‘successful’ or enjoyable, tv tells stories and presents its ideas diff than film

does every beautiful image in film exists because of a high budget tho? or even most of them? it’s a subjective thing of course. not sure why this is such a huge deal either, didn’t know beautiful images are the only judge of a film

above: ya your last part is what i’m getting at, agree. but that doesn’t mean television in incapable of ‘cinematic’ beauty. maybe just indicative that the good cinematographers are in film or that tv suffers too much from serialization, which could possibly be rooted out eventually (like it was in novels).

no Lamp’s right what’s good about tv is not the cinematic beauty stuff.

an artform that can only be defined by the limits of a budget.

how cynical and rong is this? i mean, apply this to Taxi

to clarify my second part so it makes sense — i think weeding out ad-based broadcasts = less importance given to serialization = dramas running more fluidly with episode lines blurred and more like chapters in a book that finds chapters arbitrary. i think there might come a point where seasons of television are released all at once rather than week-by-week, which would make tv dramas more novelistic in scope and cinematic in presentation.

how cynical and rong is this? i mean, apply this to Taxi

how long were episodes of taxi? how much time did they have to make new episodes? that’s all I meant.

ernest dickerson and agnieszka holland directed several episodes of the wire (which most certainly had some “cinematic” style). neither is ingmar bergman or martin scorsese, but juice and europaaa, europa were solid movies!

Newer digital TVs with a good sound system kind of makes going to a theatre not as big as big a deal as it once was.

I love seeing things in cinemas because it can be so joyous to surrender to being part of ~an audience~

I hear the director of Bridesmaids is thinking about doing some slumming in tv yo

I heard that about the star, too.

want to cosign lamp’s points abt movies doing imagery etc better and tv doing plot, character etc better.

Why this could ever be a point in favour of movies escapes me.

bridesmaids is tv xxpost