Once upon a time, movies and television were mortal enemies, and pretty easy to tell apart, too. But the lines that once separated these two mediums have been blurring for a while now—a process that’s only been accelerated by the rise of streaming platforms, where everything is just content for the algorithm. And this year, as movie theaters closed their doors in the face of a deadly pandemic and people began watching everything at home, the distinction between big and small screen entertainment seemed less relevant than ever. But have we really reached the point where the two are one and the same? On this week’s episode of Film Club, critics A.A. Dowd and Katie Rife are joined by a very special guest, TV Club editor Danette Chavez, to discuss our strange new media landscape. Don’t worry: Twin Peaks comes up, of course.
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Louis C. K. had a series which was inarguably “indie”, even compared to his FX series: “Horace & Pete”. It was entirely self-funded, released as a surprise (shortly after some surprise album releases prompted people to note that could never happen with TV), and sold via his website. It was also unusual in being a multi-camera drama, filmed on one static set, although it didn’t have a live audience as far as I recall. He did have a live audience for “Lucky Louie” on HBO (where he started collaborating with Pamela Adlon), and he had to put up disclaimers noting that the audience laughter was live rather than canned.
“Small Axe” really does seem to straddle the line between a series of movies vs an anthology miniseries. However, something like “O.J: Made in America” clearly seems to be a series of TV episodes as it’s really too long to work as a single movie. British television earlier had a “Red Riding” trilogy adapting a series of novels (though skipping over one) as three feature-length episodes telling one story over a long period of time.David Lynch claiming his series (the third season of a series that began on ABC!) is an 18 hour movie should obviously be rejected, but recall he also claimed his “Rabbits” was a sitcom, presumably yanking our chain.“Review” was a series about a critic who knew no bounds as to what he could rate! I never finished watching the American remake.