Right Now: Movies Vs. TV?

tv is still nominally free. so.

i bet this gets a ton of votes and not much discussion

tv, btw

for me right now it's tv, mostly just because as a parent of a young child I rarely have enough time to watch an entire movie.

define your terms

youtube

if it doesn't get discussion it'll be because we've had this discussion so much already (although that hasn't stopped us before). will be fun to have it put to a vote, though.

define your terms

If you have to ask, you don't think much of either.

as you know, post-1975 counts as "today" with a fossil like me, sonny

― Literal Facepalms (Dr Morbius), Friday, March 16, 2012 10:15 AM (4 days ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

everyone else has a smaller window for "right now" fyi

TV: bigger budgets, varying episodic structures, a willingness to try new forms of distribution, loosening of formal (conventional) constraints, better talent, steady paycheck and tolerable working conditions for writers/directors.

("Hollywood") movies: smaller budgets, corporate intervention, calcification of conventions, obsession w./ genre and remake, rampant abuse of talent.

World/"Indie" movies: Mixed bag, ehh?

World/"Indie" movies: Mixed bag, ehh?

This means you're not counting "Two and a Half Men" as TV, I guess. 95% of everything is shit.

The best movies being theatrically exhibited anywhere in America are inaccessible to most of our posters. And then when they become available on home media, most don't seek them out. Comfort food tastes best.

I got rid of cable last June and bought an antenna that essentially gets nothing. So film.

Alternate, rejected poll: Movie critics vs. TV critics.

I know which group I trust more often.

I haven't read a TV critic regularly in 20 years.

MZS has basically crossed over imo.

The best movies being theatrically exhibited anywhere in America are inaccessible to most of our posters.

if a tree falls in new york, nyc douchebags will swear up and down that your life is not worth living if you weren't close enough to hear it

he was the last one I read! (Newark Star-Ledger, early '90s)

xp

The short version of the common wisdom is this, right?

TV: Where critics and (reasonably sizeable) mass audiences can find common ground
Movies: Where critics and mass audiences repeatedly engage in ritualistic bad faith in two-hour chunks

tv and reasonably sizeable mass audiences can find common ground w/ shows like mad men because there are about 5 shows like that, total

And last year there was maybe one movie in the top 30 that critics could be bothered with and it involved women hershey squirting in sinks.

Sorry, I forgot the new M:I was pretty warmly received too.

her name is barbara hershey and apparently i need to see answers to nothing

TV: bigger budgets

("Hollywood") movies: smaller budgets

Really?

TV in a walk, although I absolutely agree that almost all of it is shit.

almost all of everything is shit

i think he means bigger/smaller budgets than 10 or 20 years earlier

tv: more time to develop characters/arcs

http://www.phoenixmasonry.org/masonicmuseum/images/the%20new%20ark.jpg

As I've said before, in many cases the 'movies vs. TV' argument often boils down to a 'short stories vs. novels' argument.

i want to say TV but last night i sat down to watch some and the best thing i could find was a late showing of "the Devil's Advocate", which really isretty damning all around

the breaking bad thread is basically pissing me off because it's reminded me that there just isn't anything close to as good as that show

i mean the other options were like Watson & Oliver and fucking Little Britain fml

movies vs tv vs sports cmon now

Definitely TV. I get less and less excited about new films every day, but have been thrilled by the rise of the HBO-style TV series over the last decade.

all 5 of them

I know it's supposed to be a TV golden age and all but are there really that many classic shows around?

I hate to burst the bubble re Mad Men, but advertising drones are not that complicated. 90 minutes is plenty of time to know everything about them.

there is also Local Garda's point that even when you decide to watch a movie on TV it just takes.... time, it's like your whole evening. TV feels looser in that respect

Morbs OTM

As I've said before, in many cases the 'movies vs. TV' argument often boils down to a 'short stories vs. novels' argument.

― Soggy Cheeseburgers (Deric W. Haircare), Tuesday, March 20, 2012 11:39 AM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

well i definitely like the sustained longterm narrative aspect, but c'mon the written word is not subject to the overwhelming majority of factors at play here

not that I have ever seen Mad Men, but it does seem enough like "The Problems of Beautiful Rich People Part 1,833,928,188,721,645" for me to have avoided it

i could give a damn about Mad Men, but art is not a wikipedia entry, the point is not to sit down and stare at the screen for a little while and then go "ok, i know all i need to know about that, bye"

there is also Local Garda's point that even when you decide to watch a movie on TV it just takes.... time, it's like your whole evening. TV feels looser in that respect

my attention span is shrinking down to the point where tv feels this way too

I only watch gifs now

sometimes even gifs can be frustrating, like when you have to wait 30 seconds for the joke

sd, prince consort of bayoneting straw men

budgets for gifs have skyrocketed since the success of 'haters gon hate'

TV has plenty of corporate intervention, by the way, at every level, even on the high concept shows that are apparently standing in for "all of TV" on this thread

what else is on TV besides those shows?

- sports. i like sports
- news. i like news (sometimes)
- cheaters
- monster garage (RIP)

no contest

well i definitely like the sustained longterm narrative aspect, but c'mon the written word is not subject to the overwhelming majority of factors at play here

I dunno, all of those mentions of Subway in the last Franzen novel were odd. Not to mention the coupons in the back.

If you think about it, movies are also on TV

woah

apart from marquee serial drama and the alleged comedy renaissance we're in, tv has lots of stuff that i totally love

-- off-brand cop procedurals
-- game shows
-- car rebuilding shows
-- the soup

most reality tv drives me up a wall tho, and cheaters was vile, come on

-- b.d. wong

-- mike judge

The Soup vs Apichatpong Weerasethakul

Is that on the Food Network?

The Soup vs Apichatpong Weerasethakul

omg did this happen?

No joke, I think The Soup is one of the most important cultural objects currently being produced.

I think AW would be down with The Soup.

xpost

Like, we really need a forum that regularly points out how awful and nihilistic that particular aspect of our culture is without being humorless and didactic about it.

The ending of Syndromes and a Century is basically a clip of the week.

deric otm

i think he means bigger/smaller budgets than 10 or 20 years earlier

― some dude, Tuesday, March 20, 2012 8:31 AM (1 hour ago)

yup.

i think that increased TV budgets +/- tend to result in better talent/production values, whereas (already) inflated studio movie budgets +/- tend to result in Transformers 2.

^

bigger tv money means more episodes, bigger movie money means less script

dunno guys, there have been loads of crappy big budget shows in the last few years. Spielberg seems to have been responsible for a lot of them

narrowing your definitions right on schedule, Godfrey Daniel

You know what would be rad? The resurgence of movie serials. I would totally go see a quality series in the theater every week.

number none otm, i was gonna say that big budget stuff like Terra Nova, The Cape, etc. has started to resemble bad megaplex fare more and more

I guess The Pacific cost something approaching Avatar levels to produce?

You know what would be rad? The resurgence of movie serials. I would totally go see a quality series in the theater every week.

― Soggy Cheeseburgers (Deric W. Haircare), Tuesday, March 20, 2012 9:48 AM (2 minutes ago)

limited run series are the best of all worlds

I don't really have any trenchant analysis, but for my buck:

Ratio of good (studio system) movies to bad (studio system) movies < ratio of good (studio system) television shows to bad (studio systems) television.

If we expand to include All Movies Everywhere vs. All Small Screen Media (TV, computer, youtube, et al.) I think I'd go with movies.

i don't think ratio of all existing good and bad matters nearly as much as which one you actually have to pay $$ for each lousy thing you choose to watch

like my cable bill isn't any higher if i turn into a total idiot for a day and decide to watch "Ice Loves Coco" or "Californication"

minute to minute, i actually think there's more good movies in a year than tv.

also movies (though this is rare) seem to be less beholden to an advancing "plot" built around characters and events. TV shows dont go for pure mood very often, or if they do it cant last very long before stuff has to start happening so people tune in next week. i like that a movie ends when it ends.

right now, this very very second? tv.

ryan, i can't name a single movie that isn't built around characters or plot. i don't exactly understand your point.

"quality" TV has refined a formula for interminably stretching plot over the duration of a boxed set, i kinda hate season-long story arcs, TV drama was better when the eps were more thoroughly self-contained unless they were feeling extravagant and ran a two-parter, voted movies forever

perhaps it would be better to say that a movie can go for pure "formalism"? Like an Uncle Boonmee or the creation sequence in Tree of Life or even David Lynch--granted these movies dont go into Brakhage territory but they have a looser relationship to what I'm calling plot as a mechanism to keep you watching since they only need to keep you watching a few hours. I'm not good at articulating what I'm trying to say here!

Nah, I realized I was being a little disingenous. I think that a two hour experience is easier to sustain w/o a profoundly visible structure than a 6-25 hour series. But (excepting Brakhage and Warhol and ilk) there are not tons of exceptions of successful, effective movies that don't have some strong sense of structure/unity.

this thread is turning into 'lou1s j@gger talks about art rock'

that is an excellent display name

i hear about the great tv that people watch just as i do the films but it seems like (relative to expectations) more of a hassle to seek it out. tv that is as available as tv should be (i.e. the kinda thing tracer was referring to), with a few exceptions, seems to be largely shite.

nv also otm.

tracer's experience doesn't ring true to mine but then i live in america and pay for almost every premium channel i can get

the premium channels over here basically just get you..... more movies

(and more sports)

Paying for sports. Brrrr.

We're still not quite to the point where lazy writers end articles with "I enjoy watching Mad Men once in awhile, but most nights I'd rather cool it in front of premium station broadcasting sporting event live."

it's what rupert murdoch built his empire on

TV definitely - the best TV comedy can do way more than most comedy movies, for a start. Also you can watch TV at your own pace with boxsets and whatever so you can mainline like 5 episodes of Breaking Bad or just one to fit around your schedule. Though I still love the anticipation of a good film.
(I would still never get actual TV while I'm in the US, though, and I dunno if I could go back to watching one episode a week of something great)

last night of 2011 baseball regular season ground the rest of American TV into dust.

(glad I had a laptop to watch on)

fwiw, Vulture (via MZS) calls The Wire the winner: http://www.vulture.com/2012/03/drama-derby-finals-the-wire-vs-the-sopranos.html

Oops, wrong(ish) thread.

1. Movies don't have reality shows (ok, here was The Real Cancun$

2. If Luck were a movie, I'd've gotten to see it through to the end.

Television now encompasses hundreds of cable channels, filled with thousands upon thousands of hours of purest sludge, within which float many dozens of watchable shows and a few choice ones.

The movies now encompass a couple of Hollywood big budget films most weeks, and a few more chunks of Hollywood filler, together with a whole world full of indie flicks, foreign films, documentaries, animations and other short subjects of varying interest or pretention.

The average film merely hovers around the vicinity of mediocrity; the average television program is like being drenched in lukewarm spit.

Well a least it's warm.

Movies should be better.
TV could be worse.

If sports counts as tv I vote tv, otherwise it's movies

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

And we have a winnaaaaaaaaahhhh!

You made the right choice.

Two episodes into The Wire, and, yes, you have made the right choice.

TV is not better than movies, so stop saying so.

The TV-is-better argument is, above all, an attempt to narrow the range of what sophisticated viewers feel obligated to watch. Yes, such polemics sometimes serve other purposes. (Shaming Hollywood studios out of making another board-game-inspired blow-’em-up and turning to taut, Breaking Bad–style thrillers instead, for instance.) But generally the TV-is-better argument is a way of saying, “I don’t have to keep up with the movies anymore, and neither do you.”

http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2013/07/stop_saying_that_tv_is_better_than_movies_these_days.single.html

How many board game inspired movies are there? Other than battleship.

from last October; you get the idea

http://games.yahoo.com/blogs/unplugged/hollywood-still-rolling-dice-board-game-movies-191329569.html

Amazing

“I don’t have to keep up with the movies anymore, and neither do you.”

this is otm, no one should "keep up with the movies"

or TV.

well if it's a good show they should, otherwise no

and this is different from a good film, how?

Not reading the whole thread, did anyone ever explain what "better" is supposed to mean in this context? If so, please show your work.

And when it comes to quality, TV remains, for the most part, a great simplifier. Ask nearly any professional critic—not to mention many amateur ones—for the best TV shows of the last decade or so, and you will get a very familiar list, starting with The Sopranos and ending, probably, with Breaking Bad, or maybe, say, Homeland or The Americans. You will almost certainly have heard of every show. You are not likely to encounter the sometimes bewildering variety that a collection of film critics is likely to present you with.

... So while the best movies come from an intimidating diversity of sources, and present a similarly wide range of aesthetic approaches and aims, the best TV shows tend to come from three or four American cable networks and frequently follow a familiar model. (It’s like The Godfather, only in modern-day New Jersey—or in the advertising world, or the New Mexico meth market, or in Hollywood …)

This is pretty much true. It seems the parameters for what constitutes "good TV" are far more uniform than what people regard as "good movies."

There is no single movie that will appeal to everyone with an interest in movies. There are at least a few shows that are basically universally acclaimed.

Or else, I'm following way too many contrarian movie assholes on Twitter.

yeah, "good movies" for most Americans is the best of "films within the purview of Ben Mankiewicz."

at least I'm not on Twitter, right?

Noting that this all basically applies only to dramas, not comedies, where all bets are off as usual.

there should be a Movie Assholes podcast

maybe there's not enough tv shows for people to start all the social positioning about "taste" yet.

yeah, "good movies" for most Americans is the best of "films within the purview of Ben Mankiewicz"

Not exactly fair. "Good TV" for most Americans is NCIS.

Yeah, that's not getting me there, especially from a writer who in the very next paragraph says with an apparently straight face, Take today’s Emmy nominations, which, though there were, as always, a few surprises and snubs, generally rewarded the prestige dramas—House of Cards, American Horror Story, Game of Thrones, Mad Men, Breaking Bad, Homeland—that most people regard as the best stuff on TV. Compare that to any year’s Oscar nominations, which encompass multiple filmmaking styles and span the studio and indie world and still rarely scratch the surface of what critics and serious moviegoers consider the best of the year.

Yes, let's all sit back and consider the implications of Oscar making a habit of rewarding prestige dramas, what a world, etc. (Not to mention that until they expanded the BP nominee list from 5 to "up to 10," there wasn't quite so much style- and studio-spanning going on.)

i'd rather watch NCIS or Monk than most of the beautifully crafted 13 ep plot arc acclaimed tasteful shit tbh

'Find the Writer's Fatal Flaw' will always be the ILX way to nuke entire article premises, right?

It works for critiquing movies.

He also manages to conflate "critics polls" with "best" and then imply that even better stuff is coming during Morbs's favorite time of year, Oscar Season. That's when the real quality shows up, and among such an embarrassment of riches already!

if TV was better than the movies in some kind of objective (?) way, it's not like Morbs would ever know it, much less admit it.

It's not about the medium, it's about the era. To wit: TV then > movies now

well having cable is a bitch when you're rent-poor. xp

FIP and DIPS are far superior to ERA.

TV is more about RBI

yes. only context makes it look good.

going out to the movies regularly feels more prohibitively expensive than having cable, in my own experience as a broke american. i still get to see most of the movies i want to see, just 6-18 months after they're brand new.

If you're talking about American studio productions, television. Otherwise it's clearly movies.

As he points out tho, there is no such thing as "independent television," at least not in a way you can seek it out. (Acknowledging that YouTube does not make lists/discussions like these.)

There very well could be "independent television" in the near-future - produce a short run, stream it first-run on your own site, then sell it to Netflix for future streaming, make a few bucks on the side with Blu Rays for the super fans.

also this is a giant argument about nothing - who gives a fuck what other people follow? Why do you care about all the dastardly television fans of ILX, Morbs?

"who gives a fuck what other people follow?"

oh, c'mon

what if it's HITLER

it's impossible to get into 'a movie' the same way one gets into 'a tv show' imo. by that vague metric, i have never seen a movie that even comes close to being as good as something like THE SOPRANOS

what's "gets into"? Making you wanna be a nmade man for months and years on end?

i've never really seen a movie like the Sopranos, but i've never seen a tv show like Vertigo or The Tree of Life or Andrei Rublev. nor do i think what those films do can be done in a "tv show" as we understand it now.

yeah i was thinking about it earlier, for obvious reasons TV shows are much more formally constrained than films, and if there's auteurship in TV it general resides with writers rather than directors.

oh, c'mon

It's about caring deeply that fans of the other exist and haven't picked your team and then a strawman that there are rogues out there telling you not to bother with movies. Why is any of that worth caring about?

maybe im misunderstanding him, but i think Morbs' target isn't so much TV but the proud "middlebrow-ism" of the "tv is better than movies" arguments.

I am a dr. morbius whisperer.

xxxxp i dunno, kinda? also, developing and exploring many multiple different facets of its characters and locations, actual progression through time, having more than a single or couple of fixed storylines, always having the capacity to surprise with the next ep, having you reconsider things you've seen in the series sometimes real-time months or years earlier, etc? i said it was a vague metric

i firmly believe episodic tv is a flat out better medium fwiw

I think you can easily say that there's been a clear increase in quality tv series over the past decade. I also have a sense that there's been a corresponding decrease in quality films in that same time period, but I know that's a more controversial claim.

the film market is wildly diffuse--i think when people have this discussion it invariably boils down to middlebrow prestige TV versus middlebrow Movies. (like "Lincoln" vs "Breaking Bad" or whatever). which is an overly restricted argument to bother having.

i mean, there's like 4-5 "quality tv series" at any one time? how many "quality movies" are there out right now? can we add up all the hours and see which has more? it's just silly.

starting with The Sopranos and ending, probably, with Breaking Bad, or maybe, say, Homeland or The Americans.

haha, no

A couple of days ago Vince Gilligan (Breaking Bad showrunner and writer) did an interview for some Australian show in which he basically said hes so glad hes in TV right now and that the movie biz is fucked and devoid of any creativity. I'm going from memory here but his explanation was that these days studios, producers and whomever have become completely unwilling to roll the dice on most scripts that aren't superhero based action blockbusters so fewer movies are being made and of those movies that are being made huge amounts of money are being thrown at them to make sure they succeed at the box office. Unfortunately these movies are all aimed at teenage boys so there aren't m/any movies for adults anymore. Now cable channels are putting out original content and imposing little creative restriction on the makers/writers, adult eyes have moved from the big screen to the small screen.

So, like ive always said, tv rules.

xp I've never watched Homeland, but I'd rank The Americans among the best shows on tv right now.

something that really surprises me about tv is how many people 50 and up tell me they love the big bang theory

i mean, really?

my parents. i will watch with them for kaley cuoco's shoulders.

Middle-aged people and their youngish children have always been the target for shitty sitcoms, I think - 18-35-year olds weren't watching According to Jim or Home Improvement.

No, but tween girls were.

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-lG3dnmilpB8/TahFv_J4Y3I/AAAAAAAAE2M/gAP5oeJgjo4/s400/Tiger.jpg

nm, you covered that with "youngish children"

I'm not convinced that there's quite as much "Great TV" consensus as some have argued here.

i firmly believe episodic tv is a flat out better medium fwiw

better for what?

again, using "the movie biz" as a representative for the medium of cinema is disingenuous or dumb.

When it comes to stories that are "serious" or "quality" or "adult" I think that TV these days hits a better balance between that and a more poppy sensibility. Those kinds of movies often get way too lazy. It's like arty filmmakers have come to expect that you've already paid for your ticket and you're going to sit there for 2 hours and watch what they're showing you no matter what. But the more poppy movies are too often aimed at brain-dead 10 year old boys. TV writers are used to having to fight to keep the viewer's attention and as a result I think they have a better command of dramatic craft in some ways. It would be interesting to see netflix statistics for critically acclaimed period dramas on TV vs. movies and see which discs get returned more quickly.

sunny, let me know when these adventurous cable execs discover their Pedro Costa or Carlos Reygadas.

Rectify / Ray McKinnon brings 'em a little closer, anyway.

Oh Morbs, I'm talking Hollywood here.

challops: novels continue to kick the ass of both these media

I loved Gravity and all, but this was lol:

@johnaugust
Wow, Gravity is as amazing as everyone says. It's like Cuarón saw TV was winning and said nope: MOVIES.

oh god

challops: novels continue to kick the ass of both these media

― Guayaquil (eephus!), Thursday, October 10, 2013 1:35 PM (5 hours ago)

there's no way this is true

It's like Cuarón saw TV was winning and said nope: MOVIES.

That is a noxious quote and yet is there a piece of television that has stuck with me more than Children of Men since I saw Children of Men? No. Wait, maybe Archer.

As for novels, they suit the times -- this is now a text-driven culture in a way the culture of my childhood was not, and novels know how to exploit that.

Novels are cheap to make and distribute and they don't require that everybody read them at the same time (not that current episodic TV _requires_ this, exactly, but it seems a part of the form.)

The median TV show probably more enjoyable than the median novel but we're not talking about the median, right?

Back-of-envelope ranking: median pop record > median movie > median TV show > median novel >>>> median stand-up comic

for me to poop on

It’s been something to watch, this televisionification of the left. Open a window on social media during prime time, and you’ll find young journalists talking about TV under Twitter avatars of themselves in MSNBC makeup. Fifteen years ago, these people might have attended media reform congresses discussing how corporate TV pacifies and controls people, and how those facts flow from the nature of the medium. Today, they’re more likely to status-update themselves on their favorite corporate cable channel, as if this were something to brag about.

http://www.salon.com/2014/05/05/stephen_colbert_wont_save_us_game_of_thrones_is_not_that_good_this_golden_age_of_tv_is_a_big_sham/

TESTIFY

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/05/why-nobody-writes-about-popular-tv-shows/361872/

i think there has obviously been a change in people's behavior (my elders in academia sure aren't reveling in their netflix binges) but the media picture of it seems distorted by interest in those few 'quality' shows and its own need to generate crit-clicks.

otm

The overpraise of television was the final rearguard action of a reactionary commentariat desperate to co-sign on a tidy, fallacious social-cultural narrative. 21st century insanity is truly visible through the preeminent art of the last century, cinema, and that of today, memes.

— 𝕿𝖗𝖔𝖚𝖇𝖑𝖊 𝕰𝖛𝖊𝖗𝖞 𝕯𝖆𝖞 (@NickPinkerton) August 1, 2018

luv2disparage a tidy, fallcious socio-cultural narrative and then immediately call cinema 'the preeminent art of the last century' with no apparent irony

p much all of Pinkerton's tweets are tongue poking all the way thru cheek