Comment by klodolph | Hacker News Reader

Comment by klodolph | Hacker News Reader

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TV shows have also gotten more prestigious, and so the people who would have been telling their stories as movies may be making TV shows instead. The article compares traditional movies to movies from streaming services, and I just think that’s avoiding the elephant in the room.

The change started happening slowly in the late 1990s, but at this point I’d say that the change has happened and we’re in a golden age of television. In the 1990s, TV was seen as a step down from movies in terms of cultural prestige, but nowadays we have A-list actors starring in TV shows with budgets over $10M per episode. The formats for TV shows have changed, too, and you’re much more likely to see TV shows written as six-episode or eight-episode seasons. They can be much more like a big, long movie, rather than a short TV show.

(Of course, the UK has produced six-episode TV series since forever.)

Still, I recently rewatched a few episodes of Siskel and Ebert, and it made me a bit sad to think about just how many movies were coming out every year during the 1990s, and remember being excited to go to the theater. Rewatching some 1990s movies, there are shots that just don’t have the right impact in typical home theaters.

I think Breaking Bad really set the stage for TV shows being good film. Whether you like the show or not it had a clear and defined story and ended after 5 seasons where most shows before would just run until their ratings dropped.

HBO had been doing it for a few years, with shows like The Wire and Deadwood. But Breaking Bad helped bring it to a wider audience, since AMC is basic cable rather than premium. (AMC had launched into that a year before with Mad Men, which was similarly TV as good film.)

I think the turn of the century start of the prestige drama cable age was The Sopranos, with The West Wing doing something similar on network TV.

That seems a really good starting point. Oz preceded it, but was never the breakout hit that The Sopranos became.

WW was still quite formulaic. ER, NYPD Blue, etc were all shows that maybe pushed for more consistent storylines but they were still boxed in by old school network expectations, and they got their starts in the mid-90s.

Sopranos was a very clear break in writing style. People like to slot in The Wire next to it, but The Wire was more episodic/restricted and honestly felt like an R-rated network tv show to me.

I'd add Rome as perhaps a closer model to the sort of high budget, prestige television we're afforded now. First season had a budget in excess of $100 million dollars, a major increase over anything comparable (compare this to The Wire that was filming contemporaneously).

I do think Sopranos was one of the first but specifically left it off due to it having lots of filler compared to breaking bad. It's a weird middle point where it did tell a movie like story but still lots of the unneeded drama of syndicated shows that came before it.

Better Call Saul at its best is as good, if not better, than 99% of Breaking Bad. Of course, the best episodes of BB are among the best in TV history.

I agree I think it's actually a much better show. It does take a couple seasons to really kick into high gear so I've had trouble turning other people onto it who were BB fans.

Roots in the 1970s (and The Thorn Birds afterwards) was notable for being a widely-viewed blockbuster miniseries, so the concept was there; without streaming, it was just hard to get an audience to watch every episode at the right time.

Also Winds of War and others. Yeah, the miniseries had its day but, especially pre-widespread VCR, depending on an audience to watch every episode at a scheduled time was a high bar. It obviously could work but it depended on having a sufficiently big "event" for people to schedule a week or nights on successive weeks around it--in a way few would do today.

There are more amazing high budget TV series out now than I have time to keep up with. Many of them are foreign also. It went into overdrive after The Sopranos, so has been going steady for 20+ years.

Anyone complaining "nothing good" anymore just either have terrible taste, or don't know how to do simple searching for new content. Same for movies IMO. There are good films everywhere on almost all the streaming platforms too if you just look for them.

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