A
Art Mann
Guest
If you've been waiting for TV
to stop being TV, welcome to the future
Robert Taylor stars as a Wyoming sheriff in Longmire from AMC.
The show is shot against a mountainous landscape that dwarfs the hero.
By Tirdad Derakhshani, Philidelphia Inquirer
Television isn't TV anymore. Not the 55-inch widescreen high-def flat screen in the corner. That's a TV set?
What about all these new shows, with their bold, innovative look, their gorgeous textures and arresting plotlines? House of Cards and The Killing look nothing like TV. And thank heavens for that.
Something has happened to the TV drama over the dozen years since the 16-by-9 ratio widescreen format was introduced. A revolution that has given birth to some of the most stunning series in the history of the medium, including Game of Thrones, The Borgias, Boardwalk Empire, American Horror Story, Longmire, Mad Men, and Hannibal.
"These shows don't look anything like the TV of our youth," said Mark Johnson, executive producer of AMC's mind-blowing drug saga, Breaking Bad, and Sundance Channel's Dostoyevskian meditation on crime and punishment, Rectify. "I mean, all these dramas now get their own red-carpet premiere at Hollywood cinemas!"
Cable channels and, to a lesser extent, the networks, are redefining the drama with productions that have the visual sweep and narrative breadth and depth of the best films at the multiplex.
"It's a good time to be in television," Temple University's Kristine Weatherston said. "It really is replacing the cinema, [which is] losing ticket sales every year."
Weatherston, who teaches media studies and production, said shows such as HBO's The Wire, an epic saga about crime, politics, and the economy set in Baltimore, were aimed at theatergoers who expected the same quality of entertainment at home.
"There's a real need for . . . real creativity to counter the taped garbage that is generated by reality TV," she said.
There have been innovative shows since television was born. The early 1960s brought the sophisticated private-eye yarn Peter Gunn, with its edgy jazz score and noir lighting, as well as the road story Route 66, which was shot entirely on location.
Hill Street Blues in the 1980s and Murder One a decade later introduced audiences to a richly textured, novelistic, serialized style of storytelling that included numerous subplots. The story didn't wrap up at the end of each episode but developed over the course of one or more seasons. (Today's most innovative programs have the same structure.)
Yet those shows all were shot in the 4-by-3 full-screen ratio and were watched on small, sometimes tiny, screens.
Because life is lived horizontally, a wider screen allows more story, more character, more action to happen at once.
By contrast, the boxy full-screen ratio forced TV directors to keep the actors in a tight frame.
The Western suffered when it was put on the small screen. Bonanza and Gunsmoke couldn't show audiences the vast landscapes that helped define the Western experience. At best, we'd see a bit of horse and rider and a chunk of sky or a hillock in the background.
The small screen demanded directors use an overabundance of close-ups. A simple conversation between two people had to be constructed by the laborious, one-camera, over-the-shoulder process that chopped up the action.
"Everything was shot in these really controlled interiors," Weatherston said. "And every corner of the frame was overlit by several lamps."
Shows shot that way often came across as flat, antiseptic, and devoid of texture.
With the development of light, portable, high-definition digital cameras, directors were able to bring a more dynamic feel to the most staid conversations. By swooping around the two actors using two cameras, the dialogue feels more fluid and spontaneous.
These innovations don't simply alter the look, they have a fundamental effect on how a drama tells a story, said Marvin Rush, director of photography on AMC's post-Civil War Western, Hell on Wheels.
to stop being TV, welcome to the future
Robert Taylor stars as a Wyoming sheriff in Longmire from AMC.
The show is shot against a mountainous landscape that dwarfs the hero.
By Tirdad Derakhshani, Philidelphia Inquirer
Television isn't TV anymore. Not the 55-inch widescreen high-def flat screen in the corner. That's a TV set?
What about all these new shows, with their bold, innovative look, their gorgeous textures and arresting plotlines? House of Cards and The Killing look nothing like TV. And thank heavens for that.
Something has happened to the TV drama over the dozen years since the 16-by-9 ratio widescreen format was introduced. A revolution that has given birth to some of the most stunning series in the history of the medium, including Game of Thrones, The Borgias, Boardwalk Empire, American Horror Story, Longmire, Mad Men, and Hannibal.
"These shows don't look anything like the TV of our youth," said Mark Johnson, executive producer of AMC's mind-blowing drug saga, Breaking Bad, and Sundance Channel's Dostoyevskian meditation on crime and punishment, Rectify. "I mean, all these dramas now get their own red-carpet premiere at Hollywood cinemas!"
Cable channels and, to a lesser extent, the networks, are redefining the drama with productions that have the visual sweep and narrative breadth and depth of the best films at the multiplex.
"It's a good time to be in television," Temple University's Kristine Weatherston said. "It really is replacing the cinema, [which is] losing ticket sales every year."
Weatherston, who teaches media studies and production, said shows such as HBO's The Wire, an epic saga about crime, politics, and the economy set in Baltimore, were aimed at theatergoers who expected the same quality of entertainment at home.
"There's a real need for . . . real creativity to counter the taped garbage that is generated by reality TV," she said.
There have been innovative shows since television was born. The early 1960s brought the sophisticated private-eye yarn Peter Gunn, with its edgy jazz score and noir lighting, as well as the road story Route 66, which was shot entirely on location.
Hill Street Blues in the 1980s and Murder One a decade later introduced audiences to a richly textured, novelistic, serialized style of storytelling that included numerous subplots. The story didn't wrap up at the end of each episode but developed over the course of one or more seasons. (Today's most innovative programs have the same structure.)
Yet those shows all were shot in the 4-by-3 full-screen ratio and were watched on small, sometimes tiny, screens.
Because life is lived horizontally, a wider screen allows more story, more character, more action to happen at once.
By contrast, the boxy full-screen ratio forced TV directors to keep the actors in a tight frame.
The Western suffered when it was put on the small screen. Bonanza and Gunsmoke couldn't show audiences the vast landscapes that helped define the Western experience. At best, we'd see a bit of horse and rider and a chunk of sky or a hillock in the background.
The small screen demanded directors use an overabundance of close-ups. A simple conversation between two people had to be constructed by the laborious, one-camera, over-the-shoulder process that chopped up the action.
"Everything was shot in these really controlled interiors," Weatherston said. "And every corner of the frame was overlit by several lamps."
Shows shot that way often came across as flat, antiseptic, and devoid of texture.
With the development of light, portable, high-definition digital cameras, directors were able to bring a more dynamic feel to the most staid conversations. By swooping around the two actors using two cameras, the dialogue feels more fluid and spontaneous.
These innovations don't simply alter the look, they have a fundamental effect on how a drama tells a story, said Marvin Rush, director of photography on AMC's post-Civil War Western, Hell on Wheels.
