How many times have you sat down to watch a TV show and thought: That should have been a movie?
It’s a phenomenon particular to streaming originals, where an idea suited for a two-hour movie is stretched to fill a 6-10 episode season, if not multiple seasons.
I often find myself watching screeners for a series and thinking: Interesting premise — for a movie. But there’s not enough story or character development here for a multi-episode series. The results are often bloated and stalling for time, robbing the show of any sense of pacing.
In just the last month: “Severance,” Apple’s high concept workplace dystopia? Great concept. Shoulda’ been a movie. Or as someone on social media described it: “What if the first act of ‘Being John Malkovich’ wasn’t funny but was eight hours long?”
The return of Netflix’s action-thriller “The Night Agent”? Shoulda’ been a movie. Another action-thriller on Hulu called “Paradise”? Shoulda’ been a movie.
There’s a running joke in “Paradise” that references “Die Hard,” which inadvertently underscores the truism that if “Die Hard” were an eight-episode series instead of a movie, it wouldn’t have worked half as well — and it wouldn’t be the pop cultural touchstone that people remember and rewatch decades after its initial release.
Apple tried it anyway two years ago with Idris Elba in “Hijack,” which was “Die Hard” in a plane. I have no issue with that premise or the eternally watchable Elba. But it didn’t need seven episodes — it certainly didn’t need the second season renewal it also got — because it never became more interesting or complex during its overly generous running time. It just became longer.
That’s true of the Amazon adaptation of James Patterson’s Alex Cross character, which has a terrific star in Aldis Hodge. Shoulda’ been a movie. (And was a movie three times over in an earlier era.) Apple’s adaptation of Scott Turow’s “Presumed Innocent” starring Jake Gyllenhaal? Shoulda’ been a movie. And it was. In 1990. Both shows have been renewed for a needless second season.
Bridgett M. Davis is a professor emerita at City University of New York’s Baruch College. She is also a memoirist, screenwriter and director. Her 1996 film “Naked Acts” was re-released last year.
“The beauty of film is really distinctive,” she said. “You go into it with a specific time horizon — both within the film and within the viewer’s experience — so the viewer knows that it’s all going to come to a head at the end of two hours. That’s what distinguishes it as an art form. If you are watching a TV series, you’re coming to it differently. So when I’m teaching screenwriting for film specifically, I’m saying, ‘You’re going to drop people into a world and take them on a finite journey. It’s a one-off experience.’”
Film characters function differently than TV characters. “If it’s a really well-written script, a film character shows you who they are in the first few seconds. Whereas a TV character can be about expansion — you’re learning, over the course of the season, all the ways this character can grow and change. And I don’t think enough writers understand the distinction. You might have a really cool idea for a character, but that character needs to be richer and much more complex in a TV series.”
Too often, shows resort to variations of the same beats and themes to fill the episode count. “Because the show creator came up with a premise that’s really a film idea,” said Davis. “They’re searching and scrambling. You have a film character that’s getting dropped into an expansive format, and they’re getting lost in it.”
She mentions the 1991 movie “Thelma & Louise” starring Susan Sarandon and Geena Davis and “that great opening where you ‘get’ who they are right away.” The middle portions resemble a buddy movie, and imagine, I said, if their misadventures were extended to fill a TV series — and then at the end of three seasons, they drive off the cliff in the series finale. “It would be torture! Also, there’s a power to the tight time frame of a movie.”
I have some theories about why this is happening. The movie industry has cratered and aside from blockbusters and arthouse films, studios aren’t releasing the kind of mid-budget titles in theaters that used to make up the vast middle ground. Which means all those great movie ideas have no place to go. Writers want to sell their work — understandably — so it’s possible they’re repurposing movie ideas for TV, where they have a better shot at getting green-lit.
The business model of streaming is also radically different from that of theatrical movie distribution. Streamers want to keep you watching as long as possible. It’s easier to do that with a series viewers are invested in. But too many shows fail to reward that viewer investment because they don’t understand television as a form. Some audiences will stick it out anyway. I’d wager many more bail long before the season is over. Completion rate is a data point that’s important to streamers, but they don’t make those numbers public. If we’re speculating why, maybe it’s because they’re so low.
On social media, the filmmaker Dan Mirvish, co-founder of the Slamdance Film Festival, said there was something else going on as well: “Hollywood is being driven by agents who know there’s way more money (for them) in streaming series. So the motive for screenwriters is to stretch out premises from a feature to series. In older days, it might be feature first, then maybe spin-off to series.”
In other words: Selling a series, and the percentage a show creator’s reps collect over the life of the series, adds up to more than the percentage reps take get when a film script is sold. That’s true even if the average streaming show ekes out two seasons at most.
Streaming may have collapsed the distinction between TV and film, but each is a distinctive form. Streamers tend to favor the one-long-storyline approach — serialized rather than episodic — and because of that our understanding of television’s potential has eroded. It’s worth pointing out that some television characters don’t change. Jessica Fletcher was fully formed from the start on “Murder, She Wrote.” Same goes for Lt. Columbo on his eponymous series.
Procedurals benefit from an unchanging lead character who tackles a new challenge in each episode. It’s the story around them that can be unique and unexpected. I suspect procedurals abound not just because audiences like them, but because the case-of-the-week template is easier to write and it functions as an external storytelling engine.
That’s not true when it comes to other types of dramas. Think “Parenthood” and “This is Us,” both of fairly recent vintage, where you’re simply checking in on the lives of these people and watching how they interact with each other — their conflicts, their alliances, their anxieties. Finding ways to tackle the ordinary in compelling ways was sacrosanct on these types of shows, rarely giving in to the cheap tactics of a writing technique I call “forever suspense.”
Rewatching the ’90s series “Northern Exposure,” I realized something. After you get past the initial fish-out-of-water premise — of a doctor from New York struggling to adapt to life in a small Alaska town — the show’s writers had to come up with everyday stories that were less about plot and more about the pleasure of spending time with these characters, in this place.
Some episodes don’t hit. But I appreciate the effort and the sense of community the show captures. It’s filled with a core group of characters whose personalities clash or are just wildly divergent, and they’re all figuring out a way to exist on their patch of Earth together. There isn’t a larger conspiracy or a Big Bad they’re contending with. It’s just people, living their lives, being human and absurd, because to be human is to be absurd. In one episode, everyone in town gets the flu. In another, the doctor’s plumbing needs fixing.
Maybe that sounds dull. But the characters are so thoroughly specific and their interactions so entertaining, it isn’t.
The show also creates a specific sense of place. It establishes, in Davis’ words, an entire world.
“Mad Men” might be one of the better examples. “It takes a lot to build that kind of world convincingly,” Davis said. The show’s creator Matthew Weiner “was obsessed with the time period and with the possibilities. He knew it so well, he was entrenched. It takes a lot to build that world convincingly. No one is taking that kind of time anymore, and it shows. But he also understood that he was also bringing a contemporary lens to the world that he was creating.” While each season may adhere to a larger theme, individually the episodes are about the characters navigating their professional lives at the ad agency, as well as their personal lives away from the office.
The show was one of the bridges between TV of old and TV in the streaming era, and it ended in 2015. Ten years later, streamers have gone in a different direction. The result? Two-hour ideas stretched beyond reason and we’re stuck with another round of: Shoulda’ been a movie.
Nina Metz is a Tribune critic.
