Back in the day, whatever day that was, a film was enough. We’d go
into the cinema, sit down in their painfully upright seats, unpeel our feet
from the sticky floors which know not the meaning of the word ‘mop’, and enjoy
a couple of hours of storytelling, pure and simple. There was something special
about film which stole our attention, as if entering into that dark room was
akin to walking into the world of fantasy which the film was capturing. Talk to
your parents (or indeed, if you are parents, then talk to yourself), and they
will fondly reminisce about the 4 cinema trips a year, if that, and how the
‘pictures’ was a special treat for them. So what happened? What do I mean ‘what
happened’? Well, it seems, and I may be wrong, but that the little brother of
the cinema, formerly known as the television, has perhaps stolen this magic,
and crowned its ‘TV series’ in place of the film. So what happened?
The first formal rise of television from popularity to global
superstardom can be recognized in the advent of the boxset. Formerly having to
wait a week or so for the next episode of your favourite TV show this meant you
could now watch the whole series on demand, without a care in the world (other
than the prospect of wasting away hours of your life in a comatose slumber in a
darkened room in front of the blinking television). The boxset meant we could
avoid the annoying ‘next week on [insert TV show here]’, instead
fast-forwarding through the week and arriving at the next episode instantly.
Most importantly, however, it meant we could never miss a thing: we could start
a series when we wanted, regardless of whether we had even been born when the
programme was first aired. My childhood was forever changed when one birthday
brought me the first 7 or so series of The
Simpsons, a gift which resulted in the disappearance of about a week of my
life. As I grew up, the dripfeed was changed into 90s comedy gold such as I’m Alan Partridge and The Day Today, an attempt by my father
to inject his same sense of humour into my brother and I. What it meant,
however, was that this TV gold wasn’t lost in the vaults of television history,
but was again accessible and rewatchable forever more. 
The internet has added to this increased dominance by the
television, allowing viewers to access all these beautiful things from the
comfort of their own laptop, and perhaps more importantly to many, for free. It
would be argued that for many programmes, the internet was in fact their saving
grace, allowing many things to receive a wider audience than it might have
otherwise gained. Game of Thrones started
on the exclusive Sky Atlantic, but quickly gained notoriety for being largely
accessible online, and the third season in fact became the highest watched
series of all time, on account of the ridiculously large online audience. Breaking Bad, a personal fave, the
mindblowing tale of an average Joe’s descent into evil, picked up extraordinary
speed online, particularly through its cooperation with online viewing site
Netflix, most notably when the final series was released simultaneously on TV
and online: this perhaps being a thank-you, or at least a ‘shout out’ to the
online viewership which made this programme so popular. More groundbreaking a
phenomenon, however, has been the arrival of programmes made specifically for
the world wide web: Netflix has dominated the market with critically acclaimed
shows such as House of Cards, American
Horror Story, Lilyhammer (a spinoff from the box-set success story The Sopranos), and the long awaited
fourth series of cult-comedy Arrested
Development. The latter, the hilarious series from the early 2000s which
launched the careers of Jason Bateman and Michael Cera, among others, was
cancelled midway through the third series: an online launch, therefore, of the
fourth series preventing any such risk, releasing all episodes simultaneously
and ensuring that no further investment was at risk by screening the entire
series. A win-win situation for all. 
Perhaps most intriguing, however, in this seamless transition is the
production of a sequel in the format: it would seem that television is
providing a more steady and stable platform for directors and their ideas
beyond the original concept. 90s Coen Brothers crime-noir Fargo has recently found itself a television sequel, in the
imaginatively named Fargo: at the
time of writing the first episode has just been aired, and is, I assure, worthy
of the name, while not meaninglessly cashing in on the concept of the
successful original. Man of the moment Benedict Cumberbatch struggled at first
with the film format, and came into his own on the superbly produced Sherlock, supremely outclassing its
cinematic contemporaries a la Guy Ritchie, and perfectly fitting the three
episode mini-series in which it has arrived thrice. TV smash hit Breaking Bad has ditched the idea of a
film remake/spin-off, favouring instead the recently penned Better Call Saul, a prequel focusing on
the eponymous lawyer from BB, and
how he became embroiled in Walter White’s drug empire. It seems, therefore,
that the future, too, lies in film.
It would appear that film is perhaps no longer enough. We wait a few
years for a film to come out, only with the common occurrence that it
disappoints or misses the main points of the book/source material. With TV, we
are promised three things: the immense plethora of episodes means that it is
simply hard to disappoint, almost guaranteeing something for everyone; it
allows for proper character arcs to be fulfilled, rather than rushing out a
cheesy storyline in the 2 hour running time a film can offer; and it means we
can never miss a thing, with the boxset, the internet, and digital functions
such as Sky Plus or Virgin media ensuring that everything is on demand at our
fingertips. Film is by no means dead – rest assured, this blog is still very
much a film blog – but the future is very much in the hands of television, and
by god is it looking good.
