Welcome to the Viral Future of Cinema (Television)

When Paramount Studios announced that the president of Fox Broadcasting, Gail Berman, was taking over the creative reins at Paramount's film studios, the news was greeted cynically across Hollywood as a coup by television wannabes, more evidence of stifling interference by conglomerates, or as a supreme corporate miscalculation about how the cultures of television production and film production fundamentally differ. In responding to the question "Can a creature of television run a film studio," no less a source than Variety editor Peter Bart publicly educated "Gail" in patronizing terms by recalling Brandon Tartikoff's TV takeover thirteen years earlier:

Make modestly budgeted versions of TV shows such as The Addams Family. Use TV talent to shoot quickies like All I Want for Christmas. Most important, don't get caught up in the chase for big stars and glitzy projects. . . . Television and film are both entertainment, but they're profoundly different. . . . He lasted only 15 months in his new job.¹

While Bart delivered his cautionary tale, spurred by anxieties about declining creative quality, other film-to-TV crossovers, such as superproducer Jerry Bruckheimer (maker of the hit series CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, Without a Trace, and Cold Case), more perceptively explained the shift in terms of the differing production contexts of the two media: "The daily pressure is much greater in TV because you have to respond every morning to success or failure."² Another film-to-TV hybrid, Imagine's Brian Grazer (producer of the commercial and critical successes 24 and Arrested Development) furthered the analysis:

The TV business is more brutally direct because there's a time sensitive element to it. . . . In TV, big agents have no problem saying to a network executive, "If you don't pick up our show, we'll move it to CBS. . . . In movies, a lot of time the conversation ends with "let's think about it."³

Such talk undercuts conventional wisdom about the film-versus-TV cultural hierarchy. Industry experts may attribute the declining quality of films to business practices imported from television, but television regularly produces work that is better and more interesting. Since the late 1980s (when David Lynch, Michael Mann, Ridley Scott, Spike Lee, Penelope Spheeris, Steven Spielberg, Barry Levinson, and Oliver Stone established a cross-sector precedent), many directors, screenwriters, and cinematographers have asserted that television offers comparable or greater opportunities than the movie studios (as the recent work of James Cameron, Robert Zwick, James L. Brooks, Robert Altman, Quentin Tarantino, and Jerry Bruckheimer suggests).⁴ Certainly the Grazer/Bruckheimer series 24, Arrested Development, CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, and Cold Case offer far more challenging exercises in cinematography, editing, dramatic structure, and narrative form than the endless, big-budget blockbuster and flat comic-book features that are mindlessly cranked out by the major movie studios. Even Laura Ziskin's Tarzan for the WB Network was as nuanced as her Spider-Man "franchise" films for Columbia. The cold, hard facts are these: television executives must come up with well over 1,147 hours of primetime entertainment each year, while most studios turn out about fifteen films in the same period.⁵ Program development, as a result, is a manic cauldron of experimentation, nightly competition, serial failure, perpetual brainstorming/regrouping, and systematic overproduction. Thus, far more projects are actually developed and produced in television, including pilots, than are ever broadcast or released. Big-budget feature filmmaking, by contrast, involves glacial content development, managerial caution, "development hell," lethargic production schedules, rote market mimicry, and industrial inertia. As a result, despite the inevitable schlock, the content on television is regularly edgier, more cinematic, and more compelling. Yet academic film scholars seldom acknowledge the change. Just like Peter Bart, we have largely gotten it wrong.

My work focuses on how a set of wide-ranging forces—the subcultures of production workers, conglomeration, branding, repurposing, convergence, and shifting economic and labor relations—have altered the object of media and film scholarship.⁶ The changes have been so extensive that it is almost impossible to study film today without also studying television. Of course, any serious study of...