Television = The New Movies

The movie industry is in serious trouble. It's gradually being replaced, and most people don't even realize it.

This summer I went to the movie theater pretty much every weekend. That's quite a bit of movie-going for me. I'd get home from a week of camp, and have a day before I needed to head out again, and I never really felt like doing much "social". Sitting in a half-empty movie theater watching a movie was about the level of social involvement I craved: none of the actors ever wanted anything from me.

None of the movies I watched this summer really knocked my socks off, and some were huge disappointments.

Take the movie Transformers, for example.

This movie was such a huge disaster that it gives an entirely new meaning to the phrase "distaster movie". When I got half-way through the movie, I suddenly realized, I cared so little about any of the characters that I really couldn't have cared less how the movie ended.

I kid you not. They could have blown up all the transformers, and all the main characters, and I would have thought it was a satisfactory ending.

Who do you blame that on? Do you blame it on the actors? The script writer? The director? Maybe a little bit of each of those.

Well, yesterday I stumbled on an interview with one of the visual effects guys - an interview in which he talked about the upcoming sequel NOOOOOO! And the interview made it quite apparent that they have no idea what made the first movie so very bad. Which means they're going to make all of his mistakes all over again...

He was bragging about how the next Transformers movie is going to be more "ambitious", and here are a couple things he said:

"they're going to raise the tight-wire walker a little bit higher next time"

Here's a clue for you...the problem with the first movie was not the special effects. In fact, it would be nice if you paid as much attention to creating believable, interesting characters as you paid to having high action, clever special effects. After watching a Transformer transform in a truck for the seventeen millionth time, some of us would like to see something that makes us care about those trucks.

And here's the other comment, that just raised the goosebumps on my arm: "And so they want to really keep the characters rich"

Did you catch that? They want to keep the characters rich. Implication being...they think the characters were rich in the first place. They think they succeeded in creating deep, believable, rich characters in the first movie. So they have no intention of doing anything different in the second movie.

In other words, they're all excited about cranking out another appallingly bad movie!

The title of this post is Television = The New Movies, and I started out by saying the movie industry is in serious trouble. Let me explain what I mean by that.

For the last couple years I've been making a prediction that eventually the movie industry is going to get replaced by high quality television shows.

Why? There are a few reasons for this...

High profile, talented actors are not afraid to settle into television shows any more. In the past, the well known actors wouldn't touch a television series. Now that seems to be changing; actors who are already known to us because of movies are willing to cross the great divide and join a TV show cast.

Television shows are now able to produce an acceptable quality of visual effects within their budgets. In addition, since television has always run on a tighter budget than movies, they've never had the luxury of falling into the "Transformers" trap of thinking that their show has to be about special effects. In a television show, the special effects, no matter how good or bad, are rarely the focus of the show.

It used to be that people said "you can do more in a movie, because you have more time to develop plot, character, etc." But somewhere along the line, someone realized, in fact, that is simply not true. Because while a single television show is limited to forty-five minutes, a season can have twenty to twenty-five episodes. And if you get a writer/writers talented enough to create a single, carefully planned plotline, then you can do far more with television than you can with a movie.

Which brings me to another key point about television: talented writers are joining the shift to television, along with the talented actors. Based on what I've seen in the last year, if you want quality, you need to stay in your living room, and not head out to the movie theaters.

Television is now producing shows which have enormous plotlines, complete with all the character development and exciting plots that movies used to have, but no longer do.

When you have shows like Lost, 24 and (to a lesser degree) Smallville, on nights those shows are on, people are far more likely to sit at home and watch a set of characters they've grown to love and care about, than to spend $10 to watch a bunch of special effects and a handful of characters they don't know, and who will be in and out of their lives in less than two hours.

These shows I've mentioned (particularly Lost and 24) are essentially one enormous movie. 24 is a series in which each season is essentially an 18 hour movie with one single, carefully planned plotline. Lost still maintains a bit of the episodic quality of older television shows, but it is clear that they have a single cohesive idea and goal that is going to play itself out over several seasons. Smallville is very definitely episodic in nature, but it is clear (even though I've only watched two seasons) that with Clark and Lex starting out as good friends, the writers have some sort of long range plan to "unresolve" this complex friendship. (I think the Clark-Lex friendship is one of the things that makes this show work as well as it does - far more than the silly teen romances. We start out with the knowledge that Clark and Lex end up as arch-enemies, and we come back week after week to find out how in the world they get from where they are to where we know they'll end up)

Of course, the fact that Television is becoming the New Movies, raises an interesting question...

Is this a good thing?

The upside is that now if I want to be entertained, I don't have to spend $10.00 to go out.

The downside is that now if I want to be entertained, I don't have to spend $10.00 to go out.

Heh heh...bet you didn't see that coming. :)

Unfortunately, it is far too easy to get "addicted" to one of these television shows. And if you get addicted to many of them, you're frittering away far too much of your life in front of a television.

If you like analogies, here's one for you:

Movie is to Television as Arcade game is to X-Box.

When I was growing up, most people who wanted to play computer games had to get together a sizeable stack of quarters and take a trip to the mall. Now you don't have to even leave the comfort of your own home to waste an entire day playing games.

The entertainment industry, is making it easier and easier all the time for us to waste our lives. And that's not a good thing.

Candid Camera Meets The Silent Movies...

Someone told me recently that I should watch the TV show "Just For Laughs". After he described the show to me, I said, "So it's like Candid Camera?"

"Well, not exactly..." But he couldn't exactly explain why it was different from Candid Camera.

And the answer is...it's "Candid Camera" meets a Silent Movie.

Unlike Candid Camera, this show doesn't give a single word of explanation of any of the gags. You have to be paying attention closely enough to figure it out for yourself (not that it's difficult to figure out what's going on - it's just different to not have it spelled out for you).

Furthermore, there is no dialogue in any of the clips - the audio is just a sound track and laugh track. The result is that your full attention focuses on the facial expressions of the "victims".

I watched it for the first time last night, and almost regretted it, because a couple times it got me laughing, which made my side hurt.

My favorite stunt was the one where they had a postal truck being driven down the road with a dog in the driver's seat. The expressions on people's faces were hilarious. But then it got twice as funny, because the truck stopped (the dog apparently was lost, and needed directions) and one of their actors stepped up and started explaining to the dog where he needed to go. That was when the onlookers' facial expressions were through the roof funny!

Anyway, I'll probably watch this show again - and hopefully next time it's on it won't hurt my sides!