GELFAND’S WORLD-Has television become the preeminent art form of the 21st century? You might be tempted to agree if you had listened to Michael Connelly talking about his new project the other night. Connelly, author of numerous books including The Lincoln Lawyer, can take his pick of media. He has already had movie versions of his books produced, one starring Clint Eastwood and another Matthew McConaughey.
The other night, Connelly spoke of his new work, which uses what he calls long form television. We understand this to mean a series of shows that include a unified story arc, complete with character developments, triumphs and tragedies. It is the ancient epic made new, and brought forth using high definition digital imaging.
Connelly's new series is called Bosch, and is based on his novels about LAPD detective Harry Bosch. It is representative of a trend in quality television that has been developing for a couple of decades and now seems to be cresting. What we are seeing is high art developing within a medium that used to be mainly about low art -- variety shows and potboilers. In this sense, it is an art form all its own, and a newly developing one at that.
One of the aspects of this new art is its technical quality. When the first episode of Bosch was screened at the Writers' Guild Theater the other night, the technical quality was equivalent to that of film, both in picture and sound. As home video screens get larger and larger, and as the rendition becomes closer and closer to 35 mm film, we are approaching the reality of the home television system as a real theater. This is not something that was prevalent twenty years ago.
Of course, early television tried its hand at drama. Along epic lines, there were serials such as The Fugitive. You can now revisit some of these shows on local broadcast television. Route 66 just ran as a marathon, and Alfred Hitchcock Presents is a regular.
The old shows have a superficial resemblance to modern dramatic television, but that's as far as it goes. They don't hold up all that well on revisiting.
Some of it has to do with changes in picture quality.
Television pictures originally were fairly narrow, a bit fuzzy, and often enough, full of extraneous visual noise. Television pioneers did their best to adapt to these limitations. One way was to keep the image simple. "Keep the main image big, contrasty, and in the middle part of the screen" was the norm. This was not the case with the movies, which had evolved into the wide screen image, complete with high density images and realistic color.
Subtle imagery was available in movies even in their early days. The director could let the audience know that somebody was a hidden part of the scene by showing cigarette smoke rising from behind a chair. Directors learned how to indicate that someone was in danger simply by showing his back in medium close-up.
Early television didn't have these visual tricks available, at least not with the same effectiveness, because the picture was just a little too fuzzy, the image was a little too boxed in, and the contrast was limited. Writers and directors learned to rely on staccato dialogue and intrusive musical cues. The earlier LAPD drama Dragnet took these techniques to absurd, sometimes laughable lengths, but there was a bit of the Dragnet style of overreaching in much of the action television of the time.
Technologies and techniques have certainly changed, and they are being put to artistic use.
In the opening episode of Bosch, it would have been hard to tell the difference between what we were watching and a major studio movie. Part of this is the improvement in digital imaging. The movies and television have been technically converging to digital images that achieve cinematic quality.
Most home viewers won't have access to a private screen that is 50 feet wide and 21 feet tall, but they can sit a lot closer to a 4 foot screen and achieve a nearly equivalent effect.
But these are just the technical capabilities that allow a director and crew to achieve the cinematic look. It is the writing style, the acting, and the editing that make modern long form television so different from early television.
For one thing, high definition, like film, allows a more nuanced form of acting. The inner life of the character is conveyed by subtlety of expression, and this televised equivalent of film acting is communicated by an evolved art of camera movement, lighting, and art design. When we can see somebody's face in detail, we can recognize expressions and looks that would have been lost in the fuzziness of old style television. It is up to the modern generation of actors and directors to realize this distinction and make use of it.
They seem to be doing so. This in turn allows them to create more introspective character arcs and plotlines.
In introducing subtleties of plot and character into modern television, writers and directors have moved away from producing the caricatures we used to see. It's hard not to feel a little embarrassed for the writers and cameramen of Dragnet, now being rerun on one of the local broadcast stations. Most Dragnet episodes show some character who is played so over-the-top as to be unbelievable.
The writers and art directors seem to have had a particular penchant for dressing up adult actors and actresses in some Hollywood vision of the flower child era, and then giving them lines that ranged from the unintelligent to the unintelligible. Dragnet is short form television taken to the extreme, as it had to introduce the crime, find the bad guy, and do its moralizing speech in 25 minutes. Dragnet was probably the most extreme example of this formula, but you can see some of the same moralistic speechifying in the new version of Hawaii Five-O and other prime time series.
Bosch is of course an extension of quite a few recent serious dramas produced by and for cable television. Bosch is being marketed via Amazon Prime, which is definitely a big difference from traditional television marketing. We seem to be moving more and more quickly into an era in which digital technology is providing competitive alternatives. The idea of finding quality drama as an offshoot of internet technology, rather than through cable television networks, is appealing.
The development of high dramatic art being made available through the most popular modern medium, the internet, is an example of an idea that was expressed more than half a century ago by the esteemed drama critic Walter Kerr. His book, with the enticing title How Not to Write a Play, compares highbrow academic art with the popular entertainments of the day.
Kerr argued that popular art forms are the source of great art. One example Kerr used was theater in Elizabethan England. Shakespeare's plays were performed as popular entertainments during an era when a more academic theory of playwriting was in flower in the university centers. Shakespeare is still performed these four hundred years later to large audiences, and for good reason. Hardly anyone remembers anything about what was considered intellectually acceptable up in Oxford.
We don't expect great art to appear at every opportunity, but the fact that stories are written and acted out provides an opening. Some of it won't be very good, and some of it will be very good. When westerns were in flower, we had some dull movies and we had High Noon. Out of hundreds of attempts at filmed comedy, we got Safety Last, The General, Modern Times, and Airplane.
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The fact that a particular genre comes into being results in a set of implied and understood rules. There was a language and structure of western movies, so to speak, and successive generations of westerns had to live by the rules and improve on previous efforts. Out of this process, a John Ford will develop, just as Ozu, Mizoguchi, and Kurosawa perfected different aspects of Japanese film.
There was one other point that Walter Kerr made that is of interest to the contest between movies and television. Kerr pointed out that few art forms last very long in terms of the time they spend in the ascent. Then they become decadent and begin to fade away. Sometimes a quarter of a century is all there is.
In this era of filmed and videotaped drama, we can recognize distinct eras. The silent film era lasted about 30 years before it was all but completely erased and replaced by sound film. Sound films were without competition from 1930 into the 1950s, whereupon they began to see competition from broadcast television. Broadcast television has largely been supplanted by cable television, and cable TV is finding itself under attack from internet-based shows. In each case where one medium finds itself under competition by the newer technology, the older medium makes changes hoping to survive. In short, it becomes decadent.
Film has had its century, but it has endured competition from television. In competing, the movies have made themselves more and more driven by special effects, and more and more violent. In a sense, they have ceded the more human stories to television. At first, this was because television was free, and it cranked out hundreds of hours of human interest yarns. What is different now is that television is capable of the same technical standards as film, and is now capable of doing what the movies used to do, telling human stories in a compelling way.
Some of this was discussed long ago by Marshall McLuhan, but that is a debate for another day.
(Bob Gelfand writes on culture and politics for CityWatch and can be reached at [email protected]. The presentation by Michael Connelly took place at Writers Bloc, and in disclosure, Gelfand points out that he is related to the founder and director of Writers Bloc.)
-cw
CityWatch
Vol 13 Issue 14
Pub: Feb 17, 2015
