A few days ago, the critic Matt Seitz wrote a valuable, provocative, and deliciously finger-jabbing manifesto, arguing that TV and film critics concentrate too much on plot and character and theme and don’t write enough about visual craft. This is true. It’s certainly been true at times in my own television criticism, although I could defensively point to counterexamples as well, as one does when jabbed. The challenge Seitz sets forth is particularly timely this year, because there’s been an amazing influx of film directors into television—and this cohort has begun, slowly but surely, to warp the medium’s writer-on-top traditions. On shows ranging from Jane Campion’s “Top of the Lake” to Mike White’s “Enlightened” and Brian Fuller’s “Hannibal,” creators have been breaking the rules of what TV is “supposed” to look like.
Here’s Seitz’s nut graf:
Hello, Cinéasty!
Seitz is right, of course: filmed images and editing and music should be described with specificity—leaving them out entirely is wrong. There are a few things that trouble me about his argument, however, and the main one is that Seitz, who has reviewed both movies and television, draws no distinction between the two. As annoying as this subject is to discuss—if I get another request to debate “Is TV the New Movies?,” I’m going to sweep papers off my desk like a furious lawyer on a CBS procedural—it’s a key question.
Certainly, television has plenty in common with movies: it’s filmed with cameras, it’s performed by actors, and it follows a script. And, as I said, TV shows get more “cinematic,” to use a somewhat hand-waving category, every year. But TV is not movies. It’s an episodic art form. Scripted television shows are often, although not always, produced collaboratively, for a variety of pragmatic reasons—and these pragmatic reasons inflect the artistic results, just as they do in Hollywood film production. (There’s a newer model of solo creation, but that’s no simple thing, either: it can be fantastic, as with “Louie,” or a real problem, as with “The Newsroom.” Next season, “True Detective” will be filmed by multiple directors, and I’m curious how that will affect people’s responses to the show.) Andy Greenwald, of Grantland, once summarized these practical issues to me with a simple koan: directors go to movies for art and to TV for money; writers do the opposite. That’s changing, but it’s a historical pattern, and it’s the reason visual craft needs to be understood within television’s unique context.
Television also plays with a distinct set of genres (sitcoms, procedurals, and soap operas among them), each with its own history and set of aesthetic values. But, mostly, TV is long and movies are short; TV takes place over not just hours but seasons and years. A movie can sustain a mood for two hours on exceptional craft, but that’s not the primary approach of most current TV, and, really, it doesn’t need to be. There’s a reason that television has been so fruitful for writers, creatively, and it’s that episodic, seasonally created series showcase writers’ strengths: rich characters, long plot arcs, smart dialogue, and thematic complexity. Television nurtures storytelling—to use another annoying modern buzzword. As Teo Bugbee put it the other night on Twitter, “I’m definitely happy to see TV expand as a medium, but I think it’s important to make a distinction btw TV & film, & not to hold one to the other’s standards.”
My response to this issue isn’t entirely abstract and intellectual. Some of it stems from a primal emotional experience, what historians (or, at least, people who used to post to Television Without Pity) might recall as the Great HBO/WB Schism of 1999. That was a year when I was not yet a professional TV critic, just a woman, standing in front of a television show, begging everyone to love it. Every week, I watched “The Sopranos” and “Buffy the Vampire Slayer”; I was an avid fan of both, convinced that David Chase and Joss Whedon were turning television into something radical and groundbreaking, the former by deconstructing the mob genre (as well as capitalism and psychotherapy), the latter by forging a mythic, feminist-inflected meld of horror, comedy, and teen drama. Yet only one of the shows was being written about, seemingly on a near-daily basis, by the Times. At cocktail parties, I spent a lot of time evangelizing for “Buffy,” jabbing my own finger. Mysteriously, many of my targets were resistant, even when ranted at by a woman holding a vodka gimlet.
In part, this was because “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” had a silly name; in part, it was because it aired on the miniature “netlet” called the WB, and because it starred a teen-age girl and featured vampires. But a significant element of the disdain stemmed from how the show looked, which was in no way Scorsesesque or Fellinian. The werewolf costume looked like it was my great-aunt Ida’s coat. The dialogue was conducted in tennis-match closeups; the stuntwoman’s Buffy wig shook over her eyes when she kicked; there was a notable lack of mise-en-scène. You could argue that this was a choice, or an homage to seventies horror schlock (as is certainly true in, say, “American Horror Story”), but, realistically, “Buffy” ’s low-key charm had far more to do with its budget and the writer-centric tradition in which it was produced. Visually, “Buffy” got more ambitious in later seasons, with gorgeous episodes such as the largely wordless “Hush,” directed by Whedon, which featured floating villains inspired by “Nosferatu,” “Hellraiser,” and Mr. Burns from “The Simpsons.” But in early installments the show used directors for hire, not auteurs or big names. It didn’t look like what my cocktail buddies thought of as worthy TV. Damn them all to hell!
This false hierarchy has continued to be a problem: shows that look fantastic, like “House of Cards,” get unearned prestige, even when they’re empty suits. Shows made on a budget, or collaboratively, or on off-brand channels, or on channels for teen-agers, get the side eye. Far too often, people conflate looks with class. For example, there’s a foolish assumption that “Modern Family”—a network sitcom about a well-off family, filmed in the mockumentary style of “The Office,” with a single-cam looseness and confessional closeups—is sophisticated, while “The Middle” (also a single-cam show, but with harsh musical stings and more linear editing, more closely resembling older sitcoms) is dumber and simpler. As “30 Rock” ’s Liz Lemon would say, “Opposite!” “The Middle” is the better, smarter, more original show. This conflation of economic class and TV genre, and visual sophistication and over-all worthiness, is an ongoing problem in television criticism, and while it is important for critics—as Seitz suggests—to raise our game in describing how a show looks and sounds (and how it is made to sound and look that way), it’s also important not to fall into the adjacent trap: to mistake beauty for substance or, really, for anything other than beauty. (There’s also reality television, of course, which has been shoved, hierarchically, beneath even sitcoms, and which has its own highly distinct and theatrical visual tradition—but that’s a post for another day!)
Naturally, this is never going to be an issue upon which all critics agree—that’s the whole fun of criticism. On my own magazine’s Web site, there lurks my friendly nemesis, Richard Brody, a film critic whose auteurism is so inflamed that he has told me, on several occasions, that images from television shows cause his eyes to vomit. To me, Brody’s auteurism feels more like a sort of religion: he believes he can judge a television show after five minutes, based on his sensitivity to its craftsmanship, a kind of princess-and-the-pea theory of television aesthetics. I’m an unbeliever, understandably, having spent time in spiritual communion with some of the less distinguished Season 1 episodes of Buffy; my conversion point was “The Pack,” which I’m happy to argue about any day. Episodes like that one, and the anonymous commenters at the now tragically defunct Television Without Pity, were my main entrance ramp to engaged arts criticism—not movies, and not filmmaking, and not Andrew Sarris or Cahiers du Cinéma or even Pauline Kael. Yet it’s clear that, each day, the TV map gets recalculated. More knowledge is always better, and I accept the Seitz challenge—and promise to read any cinema-studies book he assigns to me. I hope he’ll also accept mine: a Xander-versus-Harmony slap fight, filmed from a crane five hundred feet high, in slo-mo and 3-D, through a Super Baltar lens.
