by Jeremy Meckler and Peter Valelly
Last Sunday marked the climactic final installment of HBO’s True Detective, a show whose innovative production format may transform and modernize television’s approach to narrative form. Conceived and heavily guided by its showrunner and sole writer Nic Pizzolato, a novelist and creative writing professor before making a foray into television, the show is a pure serial with its eight episodes forming a complete narrative arc. It runs sequentially on a weekly basis, in standard television fashion, but in a startling reversal of convention, it was shot in one six-month shoot, using the same director and cinematographer for its entire run. There’s a reason for this: the show is conceived so that each season will feature a new storyline and cast (assuming the show is renewed for a second), so this season of True Detective represented a fixed commitment. The format allowed Pizzolato to attract talent that would not normally sink as low as television—including bona-fide movie stars Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson—but more than that, it freed all involved from television’s primary constraints: the need to draw a continued audience and to perpetuate its characters’ stories over an indefinite succession of seasons. Instead, True Detective’s story arc is a well-drawn whole forming the show’s beating heart.
This finite yet serialized structure, which is referred to as an “anthology” series (since the show will almost certainly return for another serialized season), is indeed a breakthrough in today’s televisual world, but it’s not itself formally new. Cinema has long been operating in such a way, with most theatrical films presenting a complete narrative arc rather than installments in an ever-evolving episodic thrust toward continued viewership—all but required for network television. But seeing that narrative structure transcribed into the most popular medium is satisfying and interesting nonetheless.
True Detective is not unique in its desire to modernize television viewing—we’re seeing it everywhere, so much that many critics have hailed ours as the golden age of television. Netflix’s original content is transforming viewership, removing it from the regimented zeitgeist of scheduled broadcast and making it a more indulgent, private experience. House of Cards and Orange Is the New Black have both aimed for maximum watchability, that “Pringles effect” where you can’t watch just one, and the whole can is just sitting there to be consumed. Meanwhile, plummeting special effects costs are making network television look nearly as good as big-budget science fiction movies. Shows like Joss Whedon’s Marvel’s Agents of Shield and Ryan Murphy’s American Horror Story are doing interesting visual work, particularly the latter’s devotion to long takes and classic cinematic tricks of the trade. In general, as the multi-camera sitcom goes the way of the western, the line between television-quality and film-quality has become more blurred, with more film actors willing to “slum it” in television, and more directors lending their name to these lesser works—like David Fincher directing the first two episodes of House of Cards.
The burgeoning fandom surrounding prestige shows is itself staggering. These are the cable shows whose critical acclaim and vociferous fandom elevate them higher in the cultural schema than most films. Few films in the last decade have had the wide-ranging ripples of Mad Men, Breaking Bad, or Game of Thrones and that seems only likely to increase (True Detective’s surprise popularity was so massive it crashed HBO’s streaming service last Sunday). Each of these series has much more time to develop the same iconic moments that echo in the larger world than feature films do, and with prestige television, the quality is high enough to make such moments numerous. Television has always had a broad, involved audience; think back on The Sopranos, The Wire, and Lost, shows that heralded this new televisual era. Even in comparison, though, today’s television audience is a particularly vocal and involved one, due—in large part to the explosive power of social media to connect and validate obsessive behavior. With a guaranteed linkage with others interested in harebrained theories or holier than thou superfan competition (“actually that scene was in episode three”), social media is a powerful force in validating fan involvement in television. Regardless of its cause, television viewership is changing, becoming more emotionally and intellectually involved, more pretentious and self-congratulatory, and temporally longer. It’s becoming more like cinematic viewership, and will hopefully, spawn more interesting, creative, and beautiful work.
The question that remains, though, is whether the content is changing, or just the way it is watched and appreciated. Is True Detective all that different from The X Files or Twin Peaks or the many other expressionistic takes on detective television that have littered America’s visual history? Or is it simply that a fair wind is blowing, and television shows are being treated the way films are, like creative works meant to be critiqued, analyzed, and respected? Television is undergoing the same process that has happened widely across art forms: the process of canonization.
The burgeoning fandom surrounding prestige shows is itself staggering. These are the cable shows whose critical acclaim and vociferous fandom elevate them higher in the cultural schema than most films. Few films in the last decade have had the wide-ranging ripples of Mad Men, Breaking Bad, or Game of Thrones and that seems only likely to increase (True Detective’s surprise popularity was so massive it crashed HBO’s streaming service last Sunday). Each of these series has much more time to develop the same iconic moments that echo in the larger world than feature films do, and with prestige television, the quality is high enough to make such moments numerous. Television has always had a broad, involved audience; think back on The Sopranos, The Wire, and Lost, shows that heralded this new televisual era. Even in comparison, though, today’s television audience is a particularly vocal and involved one, due—in large part to the explosive power of social media to connect and validate obsessive behavior. With a guaranteed linkage with others interested in harebrained theories or holier than thou superfan competition (“actually that scene was in episode three”), social media is a powerful force in validating fan involvement in television. Regardless of its cause, television viewership is changing, becoming more emotionally and intellectually involved, more pretentious and self-congratulatory, and temporally longer. It’s becoming more like cinematic viewership, and will hopefully, spawn more interesting, creative, and beautiful work.
The question that remains, though, is whether the content is changing, or just the way it is watched and appreciated. Is True Detective all that different from The X Files or Twin Peaks or the many other expressionistic takes on detective television that have littered America’s visual history? Or is it simply that a fair wind is blowing, and television shows are being treated the way films are, like creative works meant to be critiqued, analyzed, and respected? Television is undergoing the same process that has happened widely across art forms: the process of canonization.
Television, the ultimate in low-brow, populist art forms, has finally reached the point at which public and critical involvement necessitates canonization. The canonization of modern forms began first, and most earth-shatteringly, with the novel in the early modern era, transforming those mid-1800’s epistolary amalgams from brain-rotting time wasters to the realm of high literary art. Soon to follow would be the pulpy science fiction and true crime anthologies of the 1930s and 40s, now the backbone of Americana and noir, and films in general (with the artful glory of the studio picture) jazz, comic books, rock and roll, hip hop, and much more. Of course this process tends to kill creativity in the art form by making it a part of the academy’s canon, but it also brings a lot to that form: attention, acclaim, and most importantly, money.
As money cascades over the television industry (HBO pegs the budget for Game of Thrones at roughly $10 million per episode), some stupendous work is being produced. Certainly a lot of money doesn’t guarantee good work, but no money throttles its possibility, and in today’s hyper-saturated entertainment clime, the green is flowing. As of 2012, television made up 89% of profits for the five major telecom companies, and they have paid their dues accordingly. All of these companies are in search of the ever-indefinable “cool,” suddenly willing to bankroll more interesting and experimental work in hopes of finding sleeper hits like True Detective, while the way people consume this so-called prestige television is completely different from how television was watched 10 or 20 years ago. It’s easy to imagine next year’s Mad Men finale commanding near-Super Bowl levels of ad revenue.
But in all of its economic success, what is it that makes so-called prestige TV into an art form of its own? Certainly its serial format differentiates it from most of its filmic cousins, inserting forced week-long temporal breaks between installments and creating space for deeper intellectual engagement and more wild speculation. Something about that timeframe is more effective than the yearlong gaps that sequential films often create. (There was certainly a lot more speculation and analysis on True Detective than there is about the next Hobbit or Bond movie.) But these breaks, and the collective unconscious that comes from relatively concurrent viewing, achieves a type of societal connection, making viewers feel like they belong to a bigger movement. The slow burn of the plot also allows for developments to be analyzed from many different angles—and the trend of weekly TV recap articles contributes to this; after all, how many films have reviews written from the perspective of every eighth of their length?—leading to more insightful, in-the-moment emotional closeness, and also many stunningly wrong predictions and impressions. All of these differences accrue to create a unique aesthetic distinct from traditional cinema, even for shows as cinematic as True Detective (the show’s director, Cary Fukunaga, who directed all eight episodes, refers to it as an “eight-hour movie”).
As money cascades over the television industry (HBO pegs the budget for Game of Thrones at roughly $10 million per episode), some stupendous work is being produced. Certainly a lot of money doesn’t guarantee good work, but no money throttles its possibility, and in today’s hyper-saturated entertainment clime, the green is flowing. As of 2012, television made up 89% of profits for the five major telecom companies, and they have paid their dues accordingly. All of these companies are in search of the ever-indefinable “cool,” suddenly willing to bankroll more interesting and experimental work in hopes of finding sleeper hits like True Detective, while the way people consume this so-called prestige television is completely different from how television was watched 10 or 20 years ago. It’s easy to imagine next year’s Mad Men finale commanding near-Super Bowl levels of ad revenue.
But in all of its economic success, what is it that makes so-called prestige TV into an art form of its own? Certainly its serial format differentiates it from most of its filmic cousins, inserting forced week-long temporal breaks between installments and creating space for deeper intellectual engagement and more wild speculation. Something about that timeframe is more effective than the yearlong gaps that sequential films often create. (There was certainly a lot more speculation and analysis on True Detective than there is about the next Hobbit or Bond movie.) But these breaks, and the collective unconscious that comes from relatively concurrent viewing, achieves a type of societal connection, making viewers feel like they belong to a bigger movement. The slow burn of the plot also allows for developments to be analyzed from many different angles—and the trend of weekly TV recap articles contributes to this; after all, how many films have reviews written from the perspective of every eighth of their length?—leading to more insightful, in-the-moment emotional closeness, and also many stunningly wrong predictions and impressions. All of these differences accrue to create a unique aesthetic distinct from traditional cinema, even for shows as cinematic as True Detective (the show’s director, Cary Fukunaga, who directed all eight episodes, refers to it as an “eight-hour movie”).
Like other recent prestige programs, True Detective and its steadily unfolding plot inspired feverish and widespread speculation from fans with each successive episode. For those who have missed the boat on this one (so big it must be an aircraft carrier), the show follows Rust Cohle (Matthew McConnaughey), a nihilistic ubermensch—in the most troublingly Nietschean sense—as he tries to puzzle out a string of occult murders and disappearances being covered up in rural Louisiana. His no-nonsense, good ol’ boy partner, Marty Hart (Woody Harrelson), is a cad and a ne’er do well, fooling around on his wife, being generally negligent toward his two daughters, and boozing his way through a midlife crisis, but he is soon pulled in over his head by Rust’s obsession with the crime. Less a police procedural or detective narrative than it sounds, the show focuses primarily on the taut relationship between the two detectives, turning its focus more on character than plot. Still, it bears many of the hallmarks of the detective genre, and its vocal fanbase is largely unable to differentiate it from the typical whodunnit fare, evidenced by the hundreds of plot-based theories that have populated the internet in the last month.
It’s true that by its title alone, the show binds itself to the lineage of now-canonized pulp fiction--True Detective was a name used by numerous true crime magazines in decades past, cropping as early as the 1920s—and it certainly indulges in sporadic but usually well-earned moments of borderline camp. (In one memorable such scene, a leather-clad biker grabs Cohle’s crotch while growling “I embrace the outlaw life.”) But it also dissects the narrative heritage established by America’s long and ongoing romance with detective stories, attentively exploring and at times subtly puncturing archetypes of masculinity that typically anchor this type of storyline, especially on television. The hard-boiled detective, spawned by the pulpy stories of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, may be the most exaggerated impression of masculinity that exists , and as hard boiled as these detectives may be they are also broken, crushed under the weight of that overbearing masculinity. True Detective’s split timeline, in which its central characters reflect on events from 1995 to 2002 while being interviewed by police in 2012, allows it to portray its characters’ psychological interiority in an extraordinarily careful and deliberate fashion. McConnaughey and Harrelson, in particular, have the subtlety and devotion to portray that time gap carefully enough for any Hollywood studio script supervisor.
The crucial difference, the aspect that most fundamentally separates True Detective from CSI, is the anthology format—since True Detective tells a story with a true beginning, middle, and end, there’s no need for the drawn-out, open-ended morass of teases and twists, gaping plot holes and irrational character transformations that even the most compelling of the traditionally plotted prestige shows lean on so heavily (think of Lost’s numbing Shyamalan-esque twists). By removing this “endless middle,” True Detective has curbed many of television plotting’s most garish irregularities. Some of the show’s stranger visual and thematic cues appear at first as clues, especially to audiences adapted to traditional TV storylines, but ultimately linger as tonal decoration and atmospheric coloring. Reacting to his newfound fanbase’s fixation on these sorts of visual motifs, PIzzolatto mused, “I’m also sort of surprised by how far afield they’re getting. Like, why do you think we’re tricking you? It’s because you’ve been abused as an audience for more than 20 years. I cannot think of anything more insulting as an audience than to go through eight weeks, eight hours with these people, and then to be told it was a lie—that what you were seeing wasn’t really what was happening. The show’s not trying to outsmart you.”
It’s true that by its title alone, the show binds itself to the lineage of now-canonized pulp fiction--True Detective was a name used by numerous true crime magazines in decades past, cropping as early as the 1920s—and it certainly indulges in sporadic but usually well-earned moments of borderline camp. (In one memorable such scene, a leather-clad biker grabs Cohle’s crotch while growling “I embrace the outlaw life.”) But it also dissects the narrative heritage established by America’s long and ongoing romance with detective stories, attentively exploring and at times subtly puncturing archetypes of masculinity that typically anchor this type of storyline, especially on television. The hard-boiled detective, spawned by the pulpy stories of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, may be the most exaggerated impression of masculinity that exists , and as hard boiled as these detectives may be they are also broken, crushed under the weight of that overbearing masculinity. True Detective’s split timeline, in which its central characters reflect on events from 1995 to 2002 while being interviewed by police in 2012, allows it to portray its characters’ psychological interiority in an extraordinarily careful and deliberate fashion. McConnaughey and Harrelson, in particular, have the subtlety and devotion to portray that time gap carefully enough for any Hollywood studio script supervisor.
The crucial difference, the aspect that most fundamentally separates True Detective from CSI, is the anthology format—since True Detective tells a story with a true beginning, middle, and end, there’s no need for the drawn-out, open-ended morass of teases and twists, gaping plot holes and irrational character transformations that even the most compelling of the traditionally plotted prestige shows lean on so heavily (think of Lost’s numbing Shyamalan-esque twists). By removing this “endless middle,” True Detective has curbed many of television plotting’s most garish irregularities. Some of the show’s stranger visual and thematic cues appear at first as clues, especially to audiences adapted to traditional TV storylines, but ultimately linger as tonal decoration and atmospheric coloring. Reacting to his newfound fanbase’s fixation on these sorts of visual motifs, PIzzolatto mused, “I’m also sort of surprised by how far afield they’re getting. Like, why do you think we’re tricking you? It’s because you’ve been abused as an audience for more than 20 years. I cannot think of anything more insulting as an audience than to go through eight weeks, eight hours with these people, and then to be told it was a lie—that what you were seeing wasn’t really what was happening. The show’s not trying to outsmart you.”
And you can’t quite blame audiences for seizing on these specifics: the particularities of True Detective’s serialized single-arc narrative indeed allow for an extraordinary level of detail and intrigue to be packed into each frame and each line. Because we’re watching a full-fledged story in motion, one that must end after eight episodes, the show’s central mystery is not just the murder that opens its story, but also the broader questions that radiate outwards from this gruesome event—who are these detectives? What happened between them, and how have they been changed by it? What does the horror of the world’s true form do to the psyche of all of those who see it?
The year before True Detective consumed the American cultural consciousness, another remarkable single-arc television serial garnered a substantial amount of buzz. Jane Campion’s miniseries Top of the Lake, co-produced by the Sundance Channel and the BBC and released to Netflix immediately after its initial airing, also blurs the already flimsy boundary between film and miniseries. Clocking in at six hours, it’s too long for a feature, and shorter than a typical season of television, but this roomy runtime gives the show an opportunity to organically foster a truly strange, radical narrative milieu.
Campion, a filmmaker renowned for a stark yet lyrical strain of feminist storytelling exemplified in her 1993 Palme d’Or-winning masterpiece The Piano, insists that the experience of making Top of the Lake was incredibly liberating in the wake of three decades of cranking out narrative feature films within the (often economically fueled) aesthetic constraints of the existing studio system. The result is a subtly strange, suffocatingly dark story that remains one of the most unique television artifacts in recent memory. Like True Detective, it develops a handful of complex characters and traps them in an elliptical arc of culturally inherited violence that manifests itself in a long-running cover-up of widespread pedophilia and murder. (Curiously, the two projects also share a cinematographer in the astonishingly talented Adam Arkapaw, who earned an Emmy for his work on Top of the Lake and will likely repeat that performance when True Detective is up for consideration next fall).
The year before True Detective consumed the American cultural consciousness, another remarkable single-arc television serial garnered a substantial amount of buzz. Jane Campion’s miniseries Top of the Lake, co-produced by the Sundance Channel and the BBC and released to Netflix immediately after its initial airing, also blurs the already flimsy boundary between film and miniseries. Clocking in at six hours, it’s too long for a feature, and shorter than a typical season of television, but this roomy runtime gives the show an opportunity to organically foster a truly strange, radical narrative milieu.
Campion, a filmmaker renowned for a stark yet lyrical strain of feminist storytelling exemplified in her 1993 Palme d’Or-winning masterpiece The Piano, insists that the experience of making Top of the Lake was incredibly liberating in the wake of three decades of cranking out narrative feature films within the (often economically fueled) aesthetic constraints of the existing studio system. The result is a subtly strange, suffocatingly dark story that remains one of the most unique television artifacts in recent memory. Like True Detective, it develops a handful of complex characters and traps them in an elliptical arc of culturally inherited violence that manifests itself in a long-running cover-up of widespread pedophilia and murder. (Curiously, the two projects also share a cinematographer in the astonishingly talented Adam Arkapaw, who earned an Emmy for his work on Top of the Lake and will likely repeat that performance when True Detective is up for consideration next fall).
In lieu of the nihilist burnout mystic Rust Cohle, Top of the Lake presents the equally magnetic and enigmatic GJ, expertly acted by Holly Hunter. She’s a cult leader of sorts who’s assembled a collective of older women living in a collection of shipping containers scattered on the shore of a lake on New Zealand’s South Island—lost souls intent on rejecting society’s demands on their bodies and livelihood. Their world is adjacent to, but never quite fully implicated in, the show’s central mystery, the case of a missing, pregnant 12-year-old girl whose experience may hold the key to understanding a widespread pattern of rape and child abuse afflicting this socially tangled backwater. Harrelson’s analog—the hot-tempered morally stout career detective—is Elizabeth Moss’s Robin Griffin, a native of this small Kiwi backwater who has returned from her Sydney police gig to visit her ailing mother only to find herself sucked into the mysteries that govern her hometown—many of which are thoroughly intertwined with her own past.
If True Detective’s story arc uses pulp tropes as a conduit for character psychology, Top of the Lake aims squarely for the traditions (not to mention the built-in audience) of art cinema, the sort of stuff that populates Landmark Theatres nationwide. And yet, like True Detective, it transcends and subverts the tropes of its chosen genre thanks explicitly to its extended-yet-bounded length and its serialized format. Over the course of its storyline, nearly all of its characters expose their myriad flaws and their raw nerves, and the series’ thematic tilt approaches moral relativism and nihilism. And yet it pulls off a final twist worthy of its pulpiest peers, retroactively categorizing its narrative as a struggle between good and evil, albeit one fought sometimes on the most microscopic and myopic terms imaginable.
True Detective and Top of the Lake complete what seems to be a logical leap from prestige TV to something resembling auteur TV. Auteur cinema refers specifically to film that is conceived from and through the notion of the director as the primary creative force. But in this new realm of auteur TV, the extended length and uniformity of the production process allowing for several members of the production—powerful actors like McConaughey, Harrleson, and Hunter; gifted directors like Campion and Fukunaga; top-notch cinematographers like Arkapaw; and potent writers like Pizzolatto—to share in the role of the auteur, melding towards a collective auteurism that guides the show’s creative outcome. Each of these people contributes a remarkable amount of creative thought in their given role within the production—for example, McConaughey famously constructed a chart specifying the changes in his character’s psyche over the course of True Detective’s seventeen-year storyline—and together their combined contributions render a thrillingly layered narrative and a thorough formal approach.
If True Detective’s story arc uses pulp tropes as a conduit for character psychology, Top of the Lake aims squarely for the traditions (not to mention the built-in audience) of art cinema, the sort of stuff that populates Landmark Theatres nationwide. And yet, like True Detective, it transcends and subverts the tropes of its chosen genre thanks explicitly to its extended-yet-bounded length and its serialized format. Over the course of its storyline, nearly all of its characters expose their myriad flaws and their raw nerves, and the series’ thematic tilt approaches moral relativism and nihilism. And yet it pulls off a final twist worthy of its pulpiest peers, retroactively categorizing its narrative as a struggle between good and evil, albeit one fought sometimes on the most microscopic and myopic terms imaginable.
True Detective and Top of the Lake complete what seems to be a logical leap from prestige TV to something resembling auteur TV. Auteur cinema refers specifically to film that is conceived from and through the notion of the director as the primary creative force. But in this new realm of auteur TV, the extended length and uniformity of the production process allowing for several members of the production—powerful actors like McConaughey, Harrleson, and Hunter; gifted directors like Campion and Fukunaga; top-notch cinematographers like Arkapaw; and potent writers like Pizzolatto—to share in the role of the auteur, melding towards a collective auteurism that guides the show’s creative outcome. Each of these people contributes a remarkable amount of creative thought in their given role within the production—for example, McConaughey famously constructed a chart specifying the changes in his character’s psyche over the course of True Detective’s seventeen-year storyline—and together their combined contributions render a thrillingly layered narrative and a thorough formal approach.
Sequential works that are part of a complete narrative are hardly new, just as serial television isn’t. Their history is nearly as long as cinema’s itself. In the early days, before “feature length” was the law of the land, and long before the cathode ray tubes crawled into our living rooms, serial films were making their mark. In cinema’s earliest days, film exhibitors showed things in various ways, and one commonplace method marks the earliest rendition of serial television. On a weekly basis, these films would be shown to audiences who would then come back the following week for more. Most notable in this form (or at least the most remembered in today’s canonized early film world) is Louis Feuillade’s Les Vampires, which, in its entirety, clocks in at 417 minutes of dreamy French crime. The series was wildly popular in 1917 France, and like most new forms, it was panned by critics. As one contemporary critic wrote “That a man of talent, an artist, as the director of most of the great films which have been the success and glory of Gaumont, starts again to deal with this unhealthy genre [the crime film], obsolete and condemned by all people of taste, remains for me a real problem.” Yet the form caught on, even making it to Hollywood. Serials like this were moderately popular throughout film’s golden age, until the advent of television—after all, why go out to see a serial if you’ve got it right here in your own home? And so the film serial faded away in the 1950s.
But that wasn’t the end of serial storytelling, it just moved to its cathode ray cousin. Generally the distinction in TV has fallen between episodic works, in which familiar characters have a new and complete adventure each week (most sitcoms fit this mold), and serial works, where the story accrues episode-to-episode building a larger arc outside of the 22-minute format. The former is more immanently watchable, with an uninitiated viewer able to plop down on the couch and take in any episode at random, and for the majority of television’s history, the only serialized alternative has been a tacky one: the soap opera. Those dailies require constant viewership in a continuous story, making them long the domain of the home-bound, and their restrictive production schedules has limited their quality intensely. (Producing five hours of television a week on a regular basis turns the art into one of quantity over quality.) Still, more artful serial television has had its time too—think of shows like the 1967 British cult classic The Prisoner, a conceit-driven serial that, though still fairly episodic, builds to a fever pitch through its 13 episodes toward a truly psychotic finale, completing the narrative arc in the most mysterious way imaginable.
But that wasn’t the end of serial storytelling, it just moved to its cathode ray cousin. Generally the distinction in TV has fallen between episodic works, in which familiar characters have a new and complete adventure each week (most sitcoms fit this mold), and serial works, where the story accrues episode-to-episode building a larger arc outside of the 22-minute format. The former is more immanently watchable, with an uninitiated viewer able to plop down on the couch and take in any episode at random, and for the majority of television’s history, the only serialized alternative has been a tacky one: the soap opera. Those dailies require constant viewership in a continuous story, making them long the domain of the home-bound, and their restrictive production schedules has limited their quality intensely. (Producing five hours of television a week on a regular basis turns the art into one of quantity over quality.) Still, more artful serial television has had its time too—think of shows like the 1967 British cult classic The Prisoner, a conceit-driven serial that, though still fairly episodic, builds to a fever pitch through its 13 episodes toward a truly psychotic finale, completing the narrative arc in the most mysterious way imaginable.
With the advent of digital viewing, Netflix, Hulu, OnDemand, Tivo, HBOGO and the rest, seeing every episode no longer requires unemployment or a strict schedule, and maybe that’s what makes this new era of television possible. As we, the viewing audience, have all of these different avenues to access stories, and “binge watching” is becoming more possible and more accepted, 13-hour stories seem to be more common and more interesting. While there is much to be milked from the udder that is contemporary television, the most interesting may be the shows, like True Detective, that are reinventing the narrative structure, production, and exhibition of such work. It’s impossible to know what the future will bring, but in the world of television, these shows may be the closest thing we have to an avant-garde.
Yet even amidst these exciting developments, television remains an industry heavily steered by a particular combination of market forces, advertiser needs, and viewer demands. The third involves a thorough expectation of narrative, one so intense that even reality TV is forced to warp its endless hours of footage of boring people doing nearly nothing into regular episode storylines (a fact that has led several of its editors to request inclusion in the Screen Writers Guild). For all the debate over the withering of independent and art cinema in our current big-budget era, narrative feature film remains a medium with a fairly robust and healthy aesthetic fringe. In just the last year or so, formal and narrative experiments as strange and varied as Carlos Reygadas’ Post Tenebras Lux, Andrew Bujalski’s Computer Chess, Shane Carruth’s Upstream Color, and Leos Carax’s Holy Motors graced screens and garnered substantial critical and festival-circuit attention, not to mention exposure to a wider potential audience than possibly ever before, thanks to streaming services (all of the films mentioned are currently available on Netflix).
We may be years deep into television’s new golden age, and works like True Detective and Top of the Lake may indeed be pushing at the increasingly stretched and porous boundaries defining the medium’s possibilities, but the question remains: When will we see the television equivalent of something like Post Tenebras Lux? If these post-prestige anthology and miniseries formats do indeed offer a compellingly novel artistic staging ground whose potential for nuanced and intricate new uses for narrative and form, how can television as an industry nurture this new realm to the point that it can sustain a robust and forward-thinking aesthetic fringe?
Yet even amidst these exciting developments, television remains an industry heavily steered by a particular combination of market forces, advertiser needs, and viewer demands. The third involves a thorough expectation of narrative, one so intense that even reality TV is forced to warp its endless hours of footage of boring people doing nearly nothing into regular episode storylines (a fact that has led several of its editors to request inclusion in the Screen Writers Guild). For all the debate over the withering of independent and art cinema in our current big-budget era, narrative feature film remains a medium with a fairly robust and healthy aesthetic fringe. In just the last year or so, formal and narrative experiments as strange and varied as Carlos Reygadas’ Post Tenebras Lux, Andrew Bujalski’s Computer Chess, Shane Carruth’s Upstream Color, and Leos Carax’s Holy Motors graced screens and garnered substantial critical and festival-circuit attention, not to mention exposure to a wider potential audience than possibly ever before, thanks to streaming services (all of the films mentioned are currently available on Netflix).
We may be years deep into television’s new golden age, and works like True Detective and Top of the Lake may indeed be pushing at the increasingly stretched and porous boundaries defining the medium’s possibilities, but the question remains: When will we see the television equivalent of something like Post Tenebras Lux? If these post-prestige anthology and miniseries formats do indeed offer a compellingly novel artistic staging ground whose potential for nuanced and intricate new uses for narrative and form, how can television as an industry nurture this new realm to the point that it can sustain a robust and forward-thinking aesthetic fringe?
For one thing, the entry of streaming services like Netflix into creating original programming seems a promising precondition for future innovation, since these products aren’t beholden to the traditional, advertiser-driven TV rating infrastructure. And as these shows grow more artistically daring, surely it will challenge traditional networks to compete by introducing more interesting content. The number of networks involved in producing original programming is rapidly growing—and each seems to be hoping to carve out a particular niche. In particular, Sundance, who inaugurated their line-up of original shows with Top of the Lake, has proven willing to take risks with the type of work they put on air. In particular, their original drama Rectify, which premiered last summer and will return for a second season in June, evinces the same narrative richness and complexity as its Southern Gothic cousin, True Detective, not to mention similar philosophical and spiritual undertones. The growing popularity of subscription cable networks may be a good sign too, since it means people are willing to pay for good original work, the same way they do for movies in a theatre. While channels like HBO do have their own capitalist overlords to please, they aren’t the advertisers that stifle the networks, and some of the innovative work on subscription cable networks has paved the way for Netflix and Sundance. (2011’s Todd Haynes-piloted Mildred Pierce may have presaged this new era of auteur television years before Top of the Lake or True Detective).
But it remains true that there’s not a system in place just yet to bring interesting media makers from outside the mainstream TV and film industry onboard with new developments in television. And it seems especially hard to imagine how independent filmmakers with an experimental bent who are working outside the US, Canada or Europe (like Carlos Reygadas) could be brought into the fold stateside, although many innovative filmmakers worldwide are pushing television’s boundaries within their own countries. We can only hope that the forces governing the US television industry—who are certainly growing accustomed to such rapid change—begin to recognize that banking on audiences’ ever-increasing appetites for smarter, stranger, newer ideas means taking risks, expanding the playing field, and pushing things in new directions.
But it remains true that there’s not a system in place just yet to bring interesting media makers from outside the mainstream TV and film industry onboard with new developments in television. And it seems especially hard to imagine how independent filmmakers with an experimental bent who are working outside the US, Canada or Europe (like Carlos Reygadas) could be brought into the fold stateside, although many innovative filmmakers worldwide are pushing television’s boundaries within their own countries. We can only hope that the forces governing the US television industry—who are certainly growing accustomed to such rapid change—begin to recognize that banking on audiences’ ever-increasing appetites for smarter, stranger, newer ideas means taking risks, expanding the playing field, and pushing things in new directions.
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