What's old is new, and what's new is.....

TV has never been better, but I wonder if that's a good thing. Part of the joy to TV was that it was bad, and movies were good (the smart ones), and you had one or the other. Now you have neither, and we've lost something. I'd say I lost something, and I have, but that almost makes it sound trite. The art of movies is over, the two hour bit with perfect cuts and music, expressing a range of emotion, in the whirlpool of an event, is over. Now we have serialized shows that take the best of movies, and the best of TV, and mix them into one (the MadMen, House of Cards group), and this is thrilling, from a TV historical perspective. They really speak to the people, something movies almost intentionally stopped doing years ago in favor of a blockbusters only mentality. Now I know, Mr. Movie Producer, would tell me that the people want 'blockbusters' but I'd argue only a sliver of the people want them, but it's a predictable sliver, and perhaps the biggest group out of a pie, an easy and safe bet. It's mainstream geek culture that lives and dies on the next Harry Potter book, or the final edition of Game of Thrones, or goes ga ga over "Batman," and I liked the Batman/Christopher Nolan franchise, but the word franchise say's a lot too implying that the movies themselves are bigger than the studio, and are almost like the big star on a basketball team, who make everything happen. These blockbusters aren't really speaking to the people but the stockholders looking for the weekend gross numbers. The alternative, Sundance, got sold down the river, and became another niche market that stopped speaking to the people too. The only genre that tried was 'mumblecore' and that say's it all.

A big point in assessing an era is to really listen to it all. I spend whole nights at work listening to 'Lithium' the grunge station, and I'm amazed and impressed at how much depressing and deep rock n' roll my generation spewed out. It makes me smile inside, but it also makes me aware of the totality of an era, and how a time period of music or art is not judged solely by the one or two breakthroughs but the feeling or mood of a time that one or two big acts end up embodying. Any era is judged on its totality, more than its individual songs, though songs make up the whole, but taken in a totality they sound different, or become part of a mix. Lithium makes it clear we all live in a collective generational consciousness and are reflecting it in our own way.

Movies in three act structure have a way of compressing time that makes them very dreamlike, and indeed movies at their best have the logic of a dream. The new shows have the logic of real life, which is like a dream, but in a different time. If anything, the shows have more of an opportunity to really get into the sociology of an era and exploit the recent past in a way that movies can't as much, existing in real time like potent bursts of poetry. The shows are stretched out family trees about every men but I'm not sure the writing or acting ever elevates them to mythic characters, in the way that movies did, and that could be the size of the screen. The stars of the past were literally 'larger than life' and though they may have been every men, they loomed like great Gods in a dark theater, enrapturing audiences (me!). I'd also argue the time compression of movies made even ordinary men seem quiet heroic in a way that a long series stretched out on a TV screen just doesn't capture. Instead, we get the ins and outs of a hero or heroine, but we see them more like us, because their lives become stretched out and flat over a matter of time. TV shows have been doing this since "St. Elsewhere," but the new show has become more cinematic, but less TV. I know trashy TV will always survive, and any fan of "Revenge" or "Scandal" knows what I mean, but the trashiness seems calculated now, and not so much a byproduct of ignorance, or bad taste, but a manufactured trashiness, that sometimes leaves me empty. There are no more thoughtful movies that echo the best of photography, concerts, or theater, so we're left with TV to supplement us, with a new form that may have already peaked, but TV will probably keep getting better and though I long for trash there's more than enough of that now, so there's nothing to fear. TV will get better but movies in two hour three act structure time will die and I'm not sure what will replace them because the greatness of the characters was exacerbated by the larger than life screen that made movies come alive in a way that TV never could, or as Ernie Kovacks famously realized a TV personality was like a friend in a living room. A movie personality was more like a Greek God, whose life you were allowed to glimpse in compressed time, making his tales epic. TV serialized dramas even at their best aren't so epic because they almost intentionally focus on the minutiae of the characters lives, if only to set up more episodes, since they have much more time to kill. They are more about down time than movies ever were, and in this way are true to a TV tradition. So, what will take over the movie tradition? TV movies about how great movies used to be?

I've been daunted to write this review and don't really know where to begin, and still don't. The movie industry and the TV industry have always walked a tight line, since they employ many of the same people. The politics of the Seventies were that TV was for idiots and movies were for adults, and that if you wanted to be something as an actor, you went to the movies, and if you were a washed up has-been TV was your bag. Of course, there were exceptions but shows like "The Love Boat" and "Fantasy Island" were full of washed up has-beens from another era. I know that still exists to a degree, but what is happening and what will continue to happen is that A list talent will no longer think TV is somehow beneath them, and the TV shows they produce, direct, or write, will become the new gold standard. (It's interesting to note that Richard Nixon got rid of the old gold standard in the early Seventies in favor of paper money and credit, and I'd say soon after a new artistic gold standard was being created too, and the idea of the corporate Franchise came into being.) The old Boomer idea that TV was for retards seems so dated today that I laugh when I see it promulgated on old sitcoms. TV became cool and the impending mediocrity of movies, that strove less for art, and more for materialism, so that TV didn't look so bad. The media landscape has never been more divided, and I can only guess that my generation made the shift complete, the first real "TV Babies," who Matt Dillon warned everyone about dying in "Drugstore Cowboy." The 'TV babies' have really taken over, and movies are toast, but the three act structure lives on. The shows have it, of course, but within episodes that exist within a larger framework, so the structure isn't as tight. It's the everyday looseness that TV brings, and what will be missed with the movies. We're getting novels now not poetry, but what's wrong with that? Well, we live in a Country that doesn't like poetry much, and yet poetry is the underpinning of all great characters and story. What does that say about America? That we don't like stories, or that we can only take our poetry in a watered down novel like splaying out of shows, that hearken to TV. Maybe we just like poetry in a new way. I'd say the rise of TV serialized dramas show that novels aren't really dead at all but transforming into a new form, and poetry is now an unspoken subset of drama.