Cinema paving the way for TV?

Cinema has always been seen as a more prestigious format than television. You can see it how Academy Awards are seen as more important than the Emmy’s, in how film releases are donned with red carpet premieres, or simply in how Alfred Hitchcock famously refused to have any of his creative efforts go into television. But the days of Alfred Hitchcock in his prime are long gone, and now it seems that TV has taken on some of the traits of cinema and is consequently coming up in the world.

The ‘Cinematic Universe’ is something that has always been related to Cinema (obviously) in instances such as Star Wars and more recently Marvel. A Cinematic Universe created a continuous story within a fictional world that allowed moviegoers to become a part of. Now, from this description it would seem this concept of a cinematic universe is somewhat already the format television operates within, long form stories spanning across series. Right? Not quite. The format of TV never really had the layers that a cinematic universe had, the closest thing TV had previously had to a cinematic universe was spin offs. But, there was a disconnect with spin offs a lot of the time, and the spin off series, while related to the original series, was taken in isolation. What TV is now doing though is applying the cinematic universe format more effectively, perhaps most notably with The CW and what they have done with Arrow and The Flash, series’ on a single network interlocking in both story lines and characters to create a large entity.

That is a way in which Cinema has allowed Television to borrow a concept, however there are other instances where Cinema has made mistakes which TV has noted and is aptly avoiding, one of the main ones is the idea of the blockbuster. Cinema, with the growth of CGI and scope has lost its way slightly with storytelling. Films like Transformers dominate the box office, Transformers which is a film that is comprised of 70% CGI fighting robots, 30% irrelevant forced love story, and 0% real plot.  As the budget of Blockbusters continue to rise, in a lot of cases the quality of the films is decreasing due to narrative taking a back seat. Now, narrative, long form storytelling, and plot in general are all things that play neatly into Televisions hands. TV will always remain grounded because it will never get the income that films can from a £7 admission, and so, as of late, TV has taken this understanding of what is important and run with it, leading to some of the most critically acclaimed programmes ever to be shown on TV.

The final favour that cinema has done for TV is lend it its star power. There are more A list actors on TV now than there has ever conceivably been in the past. We have Kevin Spacey, Matthew Mcconaughey, Woody Harrelson, Lawrence Fishburne, Madds Mikkelsen etc. The list goes on. With the audiences that these names draw, the interest that compelling long form storytelling has, and the ideas that TV has taken from film, TV looks to not only keep growing as an industry but maybe one day put the Emmys at around the same level as the Oscars.

Conor M.