Movies vs. Television

Can someone please explain to me why actors want to graduate from television to movies? I’ve really never understood the appeal. Working on a television is steady work, hopefully over a number of years. The hours are incredibly long and surely can be exhausting, but you do get several months off every year.

If the issue is creativity, you have the hiatus to work on other pet projects. But really, if you want to tell a story you should need more than 2 hours to accomplish the goal. Movies have the big budgets and big names, but television consistently has the best stories. If you want your character to be more than a caricature, you’ll need to devote some years to the process.

Think about romantic comedies, the incessant bread and butter of the movie industry. You have to describe an entire love story in 90 minutes while including some sort of back story for the other characters. This is obviously pretty difficult, based on the number of failed attempts. If you have two characters on television who are ultimately supposed to fall for each other, you can tell your story more organically.

What’s even better is that you can have a television series about absolutely anything, and have the love arc be part of the series. You ever see a movie with much nuance? Movies are one dimensional by definition, but a long running series can tell all the stories within the story. You get to create an entire world. Movies rarely achieve that goal.

And the love story example is just a simple angle, science fiction necessitates a suspension of disbelief that can have a far grander scope on television than in a movie. Star Trek is an excellent example because the movie franchise necessitated the short running series to create context. The movies are successful because they built off of television, not the other way around.

It just makes me wonder why George Clooney graduating up from ER is a good thing. It’s certainly more profitable, but is his acting and story telling better or worse for making the jump? Now that premium television like HBO and Showtime et al are putting together great original content (avoiding much of the “networks” butchery) it seems like television is the way to go.

Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy movies and always will. There are certain things that can only be done well in movies. But let’s dispel with the rumor that they are a better medium.