What a crazy thread...
We live in both the worst and the best era of television
ever. The overwhelming majority of TRADITIONAL BROADCAST television (which I can only assume is that to which everyone here is referring) is, from what I gather from snippets glanced at friend's houses, of exceedingly base, lowest common denominator quality. Most of it is patent voyeurism (I am referring to so-named "REALITY" TV); the only difference between this type of TV and gazing through your neighbour's window is that Reality programs are often loosely organized into competitions to give them some semblance of structure and intent.
However, the rise of extremely high quality episodic television cannot be ignored. The best of them rival the best of (albeit commercial) feature films.
Hollywood used to work like this:
A) A studio producer finds/creates a story
B) The producer hires a writer or team of writers to pen the script
C) the producer assigns an in-house director and either in-house actors, or borrows talent from other studios at a premium (or "discovers" an unaffiliated unknown.)
With the rise of the french "auteur" film, hollywood film sales suffered and the studios had to abandon this model and take risks on crazy maverick directors in the late 60s and early 70s, like Scorcese, Coppola, Peckinpah etc., who either wrote or found their own scripts.
Then Spielberg inadvertently invented the BLOCKBUSTER with Jaws, and put the power back in the hands of the execs by giving them a formula to print cash. Enter the 80s and the multi billion dollar grossing BLOCKBUSTERS.
What is the relevance? Writers were left high and dry. (bear with me a few more sentences
)
This new money era ushered in an era of "spec" scriptwriters (writers who wrote stories with no affiliations to studios and no cash up front to write, who would then sell the finished scripts to studios). It was war, tooth and nail, take no prisoners and show no mercy:
Writers, the smart ones, would check out Paramount, Universal and Twentieth Century Fox's roster of films and then write accordingly. If a space western was in development at Universal, a writer would write a space western, on "spec", then play the studios off one another in a bidding war (in a best case scenario, of course):
Another studio might buy the "spec" script to compete with Universal in a posturing war. Often, both projects would get canned because the risk of losing money had now skyrocketed. More often though, Universal would buy the script, for 30-80 grand, then shelve it, just so no other studio would get a chance to either make it or shut down Universal's development by introducing a variable and a risk ( i.e. another studio making the same movie).
So writers in this era (from the 80s until recently, and arguably ongoing), would write 2-3 scripts a year and haul in salaries of 60-240 thousand dollars a year, and NEVER have a movie made. EVER. Hollywood was filled with wealthy writers who had never had a credit on screen. The lucky ones had a couple of scripts made out of the 40 plus sold, but, believe it or not, that was rare.
So along comes HBO and SHOWTIME (and now Netflix). They see this glut of disgruntled and underused screenwriters with no screen credits, no health insurance or dental and certainly no job security. They hire the talented ones and give them all of the above and, more importantly, a sense of worth and a sense of working and contributing. The writers write the shit outta some kickass series proposals, attracting name directors and stars, who are starved of well written projects.
Voila: the dawn of a new industry and a new era of quality TV: Walking Dead, Sopranos, Spartacus, Homeland, Sons of Anarchy, Breaking Bad, The West Wing, Arrested Development, 30 Rock, 24, Dexter, Parks and Recreation, Boardwalk Empire, Game of Thrones, Californication, Downton Abbey, The Borgias, Mad Men, House of Cards... etc, etc...
I work in film and television. And, for the record, I have watched a meagre 4 hours of broadcast TV in the last 2 years: once a year, the academy awards. Before that, it had been likely 20 yrs that I had not switched on the TV to watch network programming.
My TV is now a screen for movies and rented or streamed Episodic TV programs.
A television is a box of wires and phosphorescence or LEDs, no more. The content is what we are discussing here, and the content is the very art of story telling, one of the first - likely THE first - of the arts. Don't deny yourself the best episodic motion picture experiences that have ever existed just because traditional broadcast television is so deplorable - look at the upper echelons of the programming, not the lower. I swear to you:
TV HAS NEVER BEEN THIS GOOD.
Cheers,
JBArk
JBArk is a Mandelthought; a non-fiction character in a drama of his own design he calls "LIFE" who partakes in consciousness expanding activities and substances; he should in no way be confused with SWIM, who is an eminently data-mineable and prolific character who has somehow convinced himself the target he wears on his forehead is actually a shield.