Cinematic TV drama

ABSTRACT

Several television scholars have objected to the frequently made claim that TV drama in recent decades have become “more cinematic”, partly because cinematic-ness is such an ill-defined concept. This article seeks to make the concept less ambiguous and more useful by offering some basic distinctions between different meanings invoked by “cinematic”. I propose two meanings associated with production values, which are moderately evaluative, and two where “cinematic” serves as a higher compliment, one related to craft/skill, the other to notions of medium specificity. I also relate these meanings to the idea that TV series have grown increasingly cinematic. Here I argue that “film” and “television drama” are far too voluminous and heterogeneous categories to bear comparison in general, but that they can be meaningfully studied when framed as contingent creative practices grounded in time and place. The particular context for my discussion of “cinematic television” is American TV drama since the turn of the millennium. The article does not merely seek to clarify the connotations of “cinematic”, but to use cinematic-ness as a prism to through which important stylistic shifts in American TV drama can be examined. As such, the conceptual-theoretical discussion also serves historiographic purposes: The different meanings of “cinematic” highlight different industrial developments, which offer complementary perspectives on the aesthetics of American TV drama since the late-1990s.

KEYWORDS:

• Television aesthetics
• cinematic
• American TV drama
• television studies
• film studies
• aesthetics

One of the most notable cultural developments in the new millennium has been a surge of critically acclaimed American TV series. The cinema has been a frequent point of reference in media debates about this latest golden age of television. Critics and commentators have been keen to contrast the rise of TV series with the fall of feature films, and to argue that they are now “better than film”. More specifically, it’s been regularly pointed out that that TV series have become “more cinematic”.

In the field of television studies, the response to American TV drama’s newfound prestige has been somewhat ambivalent. On the one hand, a great many scholarly books and articles have been published both on individual shows and on their broader industrial, cultural, and creative contexts. On the other, many scholars have been wary of the special praise heaped on a subset of TV programming, and there have been strong misgivings about the term “cinematic” As Brett Mills has noted, the problem is not just that it’s unclear what it refers to when applied to television, but that there’s also “difficulty in defining what it is about cinema that we can call cinematic, considering that medium encompasses a wide array of visual styles, conventions, genres and aesthetics” (Mills 2013, 60).

This article thus seeks to unpack what cinematic means, or might mean, and to examine the idea that TV series have become more cinematic. The implication that some kind of aesthetic shift has taken place can, I want to argue, be justified, though it doesn’t add up to some single, unilinear, and synchronous story. In short, “cinematic” has different meanings and dimensions that point up different industrial contexts and aesthetic developments.

Empirical and analytical focus

It’s not feasible to examine two so exceptionally voluminous and heterogeneous categories as “film” and “TV series” in the abstract. This is worth emphasizing at the outset as, traditionally, discussions of their relationship have tended to be informed by notions of innate capabilities. However, the passing of time has steadily turned widely held assumptions about what sets the media apart–and related claims about what they can and cannot do–into snapshots of temporary technological affordances or passing industry habits. For example, the distinctive properties of celluloid and video, which once appeared fundamental to the distinction between film and TV, has been rendered practically irrelevant in our digital age. I’d point out as well that the most obvious difference–that TV series are longer than films–is also a matter of convention rather than constitution; it’s just a particularly conspicuous and pervasive convention. But Edgar Reitz’s monumental Heimat is a 54-hour, three-part film (which has also been screened as a TV series), while each season of State of the Union consists of 10 episodes whose total runtime of 100 minutes is shorter than many a movie.

My anti-essentialist outlook does not imply that general differences between films and series are arbitrary. It’s easy to make out various logistical and economic rationales for them, but to spell out these rationales is just to state why, for the time being, some ways of doing things make more sense than others in light of practical circumstances. To be sure, creative, financial, and industrial practices may interlock in familiar and predictable ways over time, and in such periods of relative stability it can be difficult to see how current conventions and habits could be much different. That’s when it’s tempting to think that film and television have distinct inherent properties, but I see their distinguishing features as fully contingent and provisional.

As the aim here is to examine possible aesthetic shifts, I’ll see “TV series” primarily as the resultant works of contingent creative practices, which are in turn embedded in a range of other contingencies, such as financial means and motivations, technological developments, demographic shifts, critical discourses, market forces, regulatory regimes etc. More specifically, I’ll focus on American TV drama, and mainly multi-season prime time shows, which have been at the center of “film vs. TV series” debates. On the timeframe is the period since the turn of the millennium, as that’s when the idea of a new golden age took hold, and I see HBO’s foray into original dramas in the late 1990s as crucial.

The broad strokes of the central claim—that the aesthetic gap between film and TV drama has grown less palpable—will surely be recognizable beyond US borders. But important causal mechanism are specific to the American context, as are the cultural connotations of television and television series. It matters that US series used to be practically exclusively ad-financed, thus incentivizing networks to court a largely undifferentiated mass audience through advertiser-friendly content (and prompting viewers to think of commercial breaks as innate to television). Also, the FCC’s regulations against obscenity, indecency, and profanity no doubt reinforced notions of television as a compromised medium, severely restricted in its ability to challenge audiences aesthetically, morally and politically. In countries with a dominant public service broadcaster, by contrast, TV drama was not just supposed to entertain, but also to educate and enlighten.

“Film” – the backdrop for the claim that TV series have become more cinematic–is harder to delimit empirically. On the one hand, the contemporaneous output of the Hollywood movie industry is sometimes an inescapable point of reference, simply because American film and TV drama continuously adapt to each other, and to each other’s adaptations. On the other hand, as will become clear, “cinematic” can also invoke rather elusive ideals about film’s expressive possibilities more generally. Thus, the parameters of cinema cannot be marked out precisely, but shift depending on the kind of cinematic-ness we are dealing with.

This article can be seen as part of what several scholars have called an “aesthetic turn” in television studies (Nannicelli 2017, 1). The discipline predominantly emerged within the cultural studies tradition, largely adopting its sociological and ideological preoccupations. Thus the field has not traditionally devoted itself nearly as much to aesthetics as film studies, and has been especially suspicious of evaluative aesthetics. The reluctance to attend to questions of quality and value was noted and problematized in an oft-cited article by Charlotte Brunsdon from 1990, though more explicit calls to pay attention to aesthetics gained traction after the turn of the millennium, with key contributions from scholars like Jason Jacobs (2001, 2006), Christine Geraghty (2003), and Sarah Cardwell (2006).¹

Subsequently, numerous books and articles have been published on television aesthetics (not just in TV drama but also comedy series and other programming). Two notable anthologies here are Jacobs and Steven (2013) and Thompson and Mittell (2013). The turn to aesthetics has also spawned more interdisciplinarity, as TV studies has become increasingly influenced by approaches and perspectives from other fields, like cognitivism (Nannicelli and Pérez 2022), analytical aesthetics (Nannicelli 2017), and film studies, especially Bordwellian neoformalism (Butler (2010) and Mittell (2015)).

Understandably, a number of prominent contributions have focused on narrative rather than visual style, i.e. on the formal conventions and dramaturgical possibilities of longform, serialized storytelling. Examples include Blanchet et al. (2012), as well as the aforementioned monographs by Mittell and Nannicelli. This work too is part of the aesthetic turn, as the temporal boundaries and the structuration of narratives bear upon everything that lies at the heart of aesthetics: experience, appreciation, taste, and value. Of course, film and television narratives are made up of images and sounds, so story and style are in practice inextricably linked. Nevertheless, narrative and stylistic conventions can be, and frequently are, described and analyzed in relative isolation.

My focus will be on style, seeing as the notion that American series have become more cinematic predominantly rests on visual characteristics. Narrative qualities are not entirely ignored, however. They will be relevant to my account of the initial critical elevation of TV drama, and also in the pragmatic sense that narrative scope significantly shapes key preconditions for stylistic refinement (like time and money).

The concept of cinematic-ness in film and TV studies

“Cinematic” is not a scholarly term, and has thus not received much scholarly attention. It’s probably been most explicitly brought up in debates about what Noël Carroll calls “the medium-specificity thesis”, which he traces back to the 18^th century and defines as the notion that “each art form should pursue those effects that, in virtue of its medium it alone—i.e. of all the arts—can achieve [or that] it achieves most effectively or best of all those effects at its disposal” (Carroll and Carroll 1985, 6–7).² However, these philosophical debates focus on larger meta-questions, such as what medium specificity is, whether the thesis is logically coherent, and whether it’s reasonable to see specificity as an aesthetic virtue. Also, “the cinematic” isn’t necessarily (or even typically) the preferred term in the literature presumed to buy into the specificity thesis, but rather an umbrella term inferred from this work. I will return to the specificity thesis later.

In television studies, there’s been a tendency in recent years to give “cinematic” rather unconventional meanings. In particular, two recent monographs, Rashna Wadia Richards’s (2021) Cinematic TV: Serial Drama Goes to the Movies and Angelo Restivo’s Breaking Bad and Cinematic Television, draw on the concept of intertextuality and refer to the cinematic past as a vast “archive” that modern series are embedded in, and in dialogue with. Richards’s account is the more idiosyncratic, as this dialogue with film history consists not just of knowing references (quotation, allusion, pastiche etc.) but also patently inadvertent semblances. Adopting a poststructuralist reading strategy that highlights polyphony and play, the cinematic déjà vus she detects in modern series are frequently quite associative, and many of the similarities and resonances she teases out are more focused on genre and theme than on style.

Restivo, meanwhile, sees cinematic-ness as “an interruptor of narrative logics” (2019, p. 9), which is a very narrow definition far removed from the question of whether the visuals of TV drama have become more film-like. Indeed, Restivo’s conception of the cinematic comes close to what Kristin Thompson calls excess – “those aspects of the work that are not contained by its unifying forces” (K. Thompson 1977, 54)—which isn’t typically seen as particularly pervasive. It’s mainly invoked in discussions of art films, seeing as classical cinema is characterized precisely by unity, such that style is so to say by definition narratively motivated. And Restivo acknowledges that his notion of the cinematic is “a rare achievement even in cinema” (2019, p. 11), which makes it unlikely that Breaking Bad is representative of some of some broader shift in TV drama.

Scholarship discussing the notion of “cinematic television” along more conventional lines has been largely critical. The most prominent examples, perhaps, are two articles from the same 2013 anthology, one by Brett Mills and one by Deborah L. Jaramillo. Some scholars have, however, stuck up for the concept, albeit quite guardedly. Trisha Dunleavy, for example, concedes that it’s sometimes “applied incorrectly”, but points out that “the question remains of what label other than ‘cinematic television’ can as effectively acknowledge the increased stylistic proximity between high-end TV dramas and feature films” (Dunleavy 2018, 127). Chris Comerford too grants that it’s problematic to refer to television as cinematic, but suggests that the “format deserves to be symptomised and its taxonomies questioned, if only so the ‘problem’ can be understood better” (Comerford 2023, 11).

The participants in these debates all tend to frame cinematic-ness as a largely homogenous phenomenon with various complementary characteristics.³ Jaramillo, for example, notes that it “connotes artistry mixed with a sense of grandeur” (ibid., 64), while Mills notes that it “can be seen to delineate programming that prioritizes the visual more than what is assumed to be typical for television” (ibid., 58). He also points out that it’s inextricably linked to the concept “quality television”, which in turn is closely connected to big budgets (and to looking expensive). Both stress that “cinematic” is an inherently positive word (Jaramillo 2013, 64, 67).

While, separately, these are all reasonable observations, the characteristics listed appear to be in tension with each other: To prioritize the visual more than what is customary for television does not necessarily suggest a very high bar, whereas “artistry” (and “the best of the best on TV”, as Jaramillo puts it (ibid., 64)), is high praise indeed. And while there’s often a correlation between “grandeur” and “money”, it’s not clear that there’s a particularly strong connection between expense and artistry. It thus seems to me that we need to distinguish between different kinds of cinematic-ness. The ambition in the following is not to present some detailed genealogy and rigorous taxonomy, but to propose some tentative and commonsensical distinctions, and to relate these to the claim that US series have become more cinematic. The aim is to sketch out important stylistic developments with particular causes in particular contexts, so as to put forward different but complimentary accounts of the aesthetics of contemporary US television drama.

Cinematic-ness as production values

Most loosely, it could be argued that TV series have become more cinematic in that it’s become gradually harder over time to tell apart your average TV series and your average feature film. Across television history, some of the most palpable differences have become progressively less noticeable for various purely technological reasons: the shift from black-and-white to color transmission; from live to pre-recorded (and then from kinescope to video to film to digital). Key recent changes include the adoption of the 16:9 aspect ratio and HD resolution. Certainly, for those who can afford high-end home entertainment systems, the difference between watching a film at the cinema and watching a series at home has become much less noticeable.

While this is rather trivial, it’s important to note that improved playback capabilities also shape what is worth pursuing aesthetically in the first place. For example, in TV: The Most Popular Art from 1974, Horace Newcomb (1974) celebrated the intimacy of the small-screen—an aesthetic of close-ups, emotions, and interior spaces—and noted that the overwhelming, panoramic landscapes of the Western movie was “meaningless” on television (248). This is clearly not the case today, as the epic vistas of Game of Thrones, Westworld, The Mandalorian and many other series demonstrate.

The point is that technological change doesn’t take place in isolation, but is liable to have ripple effects that bear upon such things as budgeting decisions, generic preferences, and creative practices. Thus the general shift towards a more accomplished overall look for TV series—more studied lighting schemes, more advanced visual effects, less studio-bound (or less obviously studio-bound) locations, etc. – is a function of gradual, multi-dimensional, and trial-and-error-driven adaptations that may not be observable “on the ground”, i.e. day-to-day or year-to-year. But from a bird’s-eye-view, it’s certainly striking that, since the turn of the millennium, the traditional multi-camera sitcom filmed in front of a live audience has largely been replaced by the more film-like single-camera comedy,⁴ while daytime soaps have been radically marginalized (both in terms of the number of shows and their popularity with viewers). Both formats are heavily dialogue-driven and characterized by rather imprecise framings, generic lighting, and static camerawork. Thus, the American television industry has largely turned away from those fiction formats that were always most immediately recognizable as television, and least in line with what passes for “good craftsmanship” in film.

Still, the claim that TV series have become more cinematic doesn’t primarily call to mind some vague notion of a more accomplished “median aesthetic”. Rather, it has to do with how the most expensive and polished TV series are no longer so visually distinct from the most expensive and polished mainstream movies. Invariably, technological developments have played a part. As the movie industry has abandoned celluloid in favor of ever more advanced digital cameras, the processes of moviemaking and series-making have become increasingly similar, with high-end shows using largely the same top-of-the-line production equipment and state-of-the-art post-production facilities (which offer not just attention-grabbing CGI effects, but also subtler color correction and color grading tools that are crucial to the slick look of contemporary series).

An observation from a 2017 article in Variety is telling:

Now that TV dramas routinely deliver cinematic visuals, the volume of equipment needed for a typical location shoot has grown considerably. A decade ago, the gear to produce a network TV drama would typically fit into one good-sized semitrailer. Today, it’s not unusual to have three trucks full of equipment on location. (Ryan and Littleton 2017, n.p.)

As this quote implies, there seems to have been a shift in American series aesthetics within the post-2000 period as well. To explain how and why, it’s important to place it in the context of the industrial transformations that were set in motion when HBO decided to try its hand at original series in.

Positioning cinematic series vs. “ordinary television” and film

Until the 1990s, the broadcasting networks had had the TV drama market largely to themselves. Revenues came from ads and leasing rights, and production was carefully structured around the traditional TV season: developing and pitching ideas in pilot season, premiering new shows in the early fall and ending in mid-spring, with reruns throughout the summer. The most attractive episodes would be scheduled for the sweeps periods; the 22–24-episode order was designed to fill the season; and syndication served as an incentive to hold out for a handful or more of such seasons. The status quo was thus somewhat analogous to the old Hollywood studio system in that production was embedded in an intricate network of fine-tuned, oligopolistic business practices.

HBO, of course, operated on very different terms, as its subscription-based business model required series to stand out from those available on free-to-air channels.⁵ Because per-viewer revenues were higher, shows didn’t need to have quite as wide an appeal, but to convince viewers to start paying for TV drama they had to appeal all the more strongly. Most crucially, perhaps, HBO’s ambition to cultivate a quality brand made their TV dramas unprecedentedly dependent on critical praise. Executives at cable networks are thus not inherently more artistically ambitious or idealistic, though they do seek to capitalize on different dynamics between creative and commercial forces.

Independence from FCC regulation was the most obvious competitive advantage, one that HBO clearly sought to exploit for both artistic purposes and for self-promotion with its first hour-long show, the highly transgressive prison drama Oz (1997–2003). Moreover, because premium cable didn’t have to play by the traditional TV season rulebook, there was no need to adhere to the convention of a twenty-plus episode order. Accordingly, Oz was only 8 episodes per season (except season 4), while the 13-episode arcs of the next show, The Sopranos, became somewhat of an HBO norm. That norm was widely adopted by other cable and basic cable networks as well, allowing creators to put more time and money into each installment. Consequently, critics frequently noted the cinematic look of series like The Sopranos, Carnivale, Mad Men, and Breaking Bad,⁶ which were seen to stand out from shows on broadcasting networks, where a factory-style mode of production geared creation towards volume and regularity.⁷

What tends to be forgotten, however, is that there was already a pay option in place for screened entertainment, namely the cinema, from which it was trickier to stand out. The production values of the new cable series could hardly be said to measure up to those of the most lavish Hollywood spectacles; feature films had no ad breaks; and freedom from the FCC was a moot point as the Hollywood film industry had not been subject to comparable content regulation since the dismantling of the Production Code in the 1960s.

To compete with the cinema, then, it was the narrative virtues of cable dramas that were played up. For shorter seasons didn’t simply mean higher budgets per episode and more generous shooting schedules; it was arguably most beneficial to the members of the writers’ room. And the quality of the writing—a function both of cable networks’ independence from the FCC and of having fewer episodes to fill—could be said to differentiate high-end cable series from both “ordinary series” and the cinema. Indeed, for the first decade or so of the new millennium, comparisons to the novel were more prevalent than comparisons to the cinema. Over and over, critics and commentators pointed out that, in TV drama, as opposed to in film, the writer is king, the director merely a hired hand (or, to be more precise: a squad of hired hands, passing the baton from episode to episode).

This association between novels and TV series was not new.⁸ It had featured most prominently in the 1980s and 1990s, as prime-time dramas moved away from the episodic format towards serialization. But the shows of that era – Hill Street Blues, St. Elsewhere, Miami Vice, Homicide, The X-Files etc. – were predominantly workplace dramas. Police stations, hospitals, and courtrooms abounded, for the simple reason that they are rich in the kind of drama that reliably lends itself to case-of-the-week designs, thus supplementing longer serialized intrigues with at least one distinct episodic strand: a crime solved, a court case won, a patient saved, etc.

For the cable networks such procedural strategies smacked too much of convenience and convention—of “ordinary television” –– so they turned to what Trisha Dunleavy has usefully called “conceptual originality” (2018: 106–109). In short, cable shows substituted the story engines of broadcasting networks’ semi-serialized shows with dramatic premises that sought to unfold and sustain more overarching storylines. This was a much trickier proposition on broadcasting network shows, of course, as writers had more episodes to fill and shorter hiatuses. Admittedly, shows like The Sopranos, Mad Men, and Breaking Bad did occasionally feature (more or less) stand-alone installments that could feel quite episodic. Still, they were decidedly not case-of-the-week vehicles with some connective tissue, but more like accumulative stories with sporadic semi-episodic excursions. As such, it could be argued that—at the level of narrative structure—the longstanding analogies between novel/chapter and season/episode became more credible.

In short, the cinematic-ness of HBO and AMC dramas had little purchase in relation to cinema – at least initially—so critical debates focused more on the benefits of longform storytelling: the ability to foster psychological depth through long character arcs; to offer rich descriptions of time, place, and environment; to explore serious themes with nuance and ambiguity; and to tell finely crafted, panoramic narratives interweaving the epic and the intimate. Here the modern Hollywood blockbuster—the type of movie with the very highest production values—was a convenient counterpoint, simply because it seemed so profoundly different in important respects: Whereas discussions of The Sopranos et.al. highlighted creative risk-taking, artistic autonomy, and uncompromising showrunners, the big franchises that have become the lifeblood of Hollywood cinema can often seem not so much created by filmmakers as contrived by market research and tie-in deals. And the cable networks’ pursuit of original dramas and critical acclaim seemed practically the polar opposite of Hollywood’s approach to blockbuster filmmaking: acquiring the rights to an attractive pre-sold property; aiming the film at the widest possible global audience, with adolescents and twentysomethings at the core; and dropping it in as many theaters with as much fanfare as can be mustered, either to capitalize on hoped-for excitement or to immunize it from critical disapproval and audience dissatisfaction.

Consequently, the film vs. TV-debate in the aughts tended to revolve around certain familiar binary oppositions, like frivolous/serious, formulaic/innovative, and adolescent/mature. These contrasts certainly don’t reveal anything about the “essence” of either movies or series, though they are symptomatic of how the US film and television industries at the time adapted to each other, and to each other’s adaptations: As big blockbusters were becoming increasingly crucial to the bottom lines of the Hollywood film studios, cable networks invested heavily and exclusively in TV dramas that were very differently promoted to very different core audiences. As such, it seems reasonable to say that the US movie industry’s increasing preoccupation with the “bet big, win big” strategy of blockbuster filmmaking served as a foil for new premium and basic cable TV dramas.⁹

As I’ve alluded to, the relationship between TV series and the cinema seems to have changed once more in the 2010s. It seems reasonable to say that this, in part, has to do with the popular success of individual series, most prominently, perhaps, Game of Thrones. It’s tempting to draw an analogy to the shift in the US movie industry around 1980, as film historians habitually mention box-office hits like Jaws and Star Wars as contributing factors towards the “blockbuster era” (and the concomitant demise of the so-called “Hollywood Renaissance”).

Crucially, the 2010s also saw the emergence of streaming services, which created a fiercely competitive market for high-end series with big budgets, big-name stars and directors, and even shorter seasons. Many commentators have noted the rise of “blockbuster TV”, characterized by an orientation towards fantasy, sci-fi, and superhero spectacles for a younger target audience (Lotz, 2017; Barton 2019; Herman 2022). Thus, while the critically acclaimed TV dramas of the aughts were framed as adult-minded alternatives to blockbuster cinema, TV series in the 2010s—or at least some series—have gradually assumed the role of competitor to Hollywood’s most expensive and profitable movies.

It’s telling that the adjective “novelistic” is being invoked much less frequently in debates about TV drama than it was in the aughts, and that the reference point for the adjective “cinematic” now explicitly includes film, rather than mainly “ordinary television”. It’s also telling that blockbuster series in the 2010s have begun adopting creative-industrial practices that were once reserved for films. For example, the final, six-episode season of Game of Thrones was shot over 10 months, and one particularly long and logistically challenging battle sequence alone took 11 weeks (Hibberd 2019). And ahead of season 5, writer-producer Bryan Cogman explained that the scripts have to be “complete well before shooting starts [because] we shoot all 10 episodes simultaneously, out of order, like a big, 10-hour movie, with two shooting units going at all times, sometimes in different countries (Collins 2015: n.p.). Previously, this would have been considered the exclusive privilege of films (and miniseries).

In summary, then, cinematic-ness can be understood as a function of higher/better production values, either “in general” or towards the high end of the spectrum. The latter is undoubtedly the most common association elicited by the claim that TV dramas have become “more cinematic”. Nevertheless, one could reasonably argue that this is a rather crude measure of aesthetic value. After all, film critics regularly turn their backs on glossy, big-budget movies brimming with advanced effects. And expensive TV commercials, too, are frequently cinematic in this sense, but here the term is liable to be considered entirely descriptive. High production values, one might say, is simply what’s expected when sufficient money and time meet relevant technology and expertise. It’s not—or at least not necessarily—commendatory in itself (which is probably why critics mainly single it out for praise when there’s reason not to expect a work to be up to standards: in low-budget films, for example, or—historically—most TV series). Consequently, I want to argue that cinematic has other meanings where it serves not as a modest, or even backhanded, compliment, but as more of an achievement.

Cinematic-ness as craft/skill

While high production values are liable to be fairly easily and immediately recognizable to most viewers, the remaining two meanings of cinematic require more foreknowledge, even training. The one I’ll outline in this section has to do with the recognition of craft and skill—both in the sense of “noticing and of “appreciating” – which is to say that it’s a matter of connoisseurship. TV scholar Jason Mittell captures this well when he writes that some of his colleagues in film departments, as well as some distinguished filmmakers, share what he calls “an intuitive mode of engagement with cinematic style” (Mittell 2006, n.p.), whereby they perceive not just the image, but also the decisions that go into its making: composition, staging, lighting, camera lenses, camera placement, and so on.¹⁰

Of course, high production values too involve craft, but the craft/skill perspective isn’t all that interested in style as “outward appearance”. It typically seeks to relate the visuals to something else, for example how style interacts with other elements, like character, story, theme, or mood (in which case it shades into interpretation). Or it relates style to the process of creation, reflecting on the purposes and effects of creative choices, as in David Bordwell’s poetics of cinema.¹¹ While Bordwell’s attention to constructional principles and practices is largely descriptive and explanatory, there has always been a prescriptive strand in his work as well. The study of, say, staging and blocking strategies—whether in general, in specific traditions or time periods, or in individual films or oeuvres—offers plenty of productive evaluative criteria: the degree to which choices are conventional or unconventional, clunky or elegant, dull or daring, overly didactic or subtle, or facile or difficult from a practical standpoint.

Bordwell’s writings on action cinema (Bordwell 2011) are instructive, as the overriding concern is how—and sometimes how well – set-pieces are orchestrated, for example in guiding viewers’ attention with precision and economy, or in maintaining spatial continuity and coherence. It’s the same sensibility that informs filmmaker Steven Soderbergh’s enthusiastic remarks about Mad Max: Fury Road:

I don’t understand how [director George Miller] does that, I really don’t, and it’s my job to understand it […] We are talking about the ability in three dimensions to break a sequence into a series of shots in which no matter how fast you’re cutting, you know where you are geographically. (Blair 2017: n.p.)

While Mad Max: Fury Road did have a substantial budget, its production values are not what sets it apart for connoisseurs. What matters is the display of a deep understanding of filmmaking, of knowing how, when, and why to turn to this tool rather than that for some aim or purpose. Thus the highest praise tends to be reserved for the work of “action auteurs” like Miller, John Woo, Kathryn Bigelow, or Lau Kar-leung.

Now, it would be absurd to try to “measure” the degree to which such cinematic-ness has become more prevalent in American TV drama over time. Still, it doesn’t seem unreasonable to think that certain demonstrable developments—technological advances, an influx of renowned film directors and cinematographers to television, and more generous time for planning and rehearsals—have given rise to more carefully crafted visuals. I’ll thus hazard two brief observations to hint at possible aesthetic evolutions.

First, and to stick with action sequences, I’d point to the unusually drawn-out, meticulous, and darkly funny fight scene in the “ronny/lilly” episode of HBO’s Barry, and note that it seems hard to think of comparably idiosyncratic and well-orchestrated sequences from the pre-2000 era. For a more subdued example, I’d point to The Wire, a show which has received far more praise for its novelistic than for its cinematic qualities. In a videographic analysis, Erlend Lavik (2021) has examined the very first scene, where Detective Jimmy McNulty questions a possible witness to a murder. Comparing an earlier draft of the script to the final version, it’s clear that a fair amount of exposition and dialogue was cut, giving the final result less text and more subtext. Crucially, in some instances it was the level of care that went into the mise-en-scène that made it possible to tighten up the scene. The finely tuned interplay between compositions, shot scales, camera angles, rack focus, looks, and gestures help bring out character motivations and power dynamics by visual rather than verbal means. It’s evident that the scene is not simply the result of a desire to proficiently “capture what’s there on the page”, but of a highly discerning, cinematic interpretation of the script. While it would be ridiculous to say that the scene’s visual sophistication is in any way unprecedented in the context of American television history, it’s perhaps not so far-fetched to suggest that it’s symptomatic of how TV creators on premium cable were allowed and encouraged to pay more attention to style in order to distinguish shows from prime time serials on broadcasting networks.

It should be noted that there’s a considerable grey area where it’s hard to pry apart cinematic skill and production values. The long take is a case in point. On the one hand, a great many arthouse films rely on long takes throughout, often with quite static framings, requiring careful consideration of what is to be inside and outside of the frame, and placing great demands on actors, directors, and cinematographers. To cineastes, the measured pace and stylistic self-restraint suggest a willingness to explore some of the less common, but arguably bolder and more rewarding options available to filmmakers. This belongs squarely in the craft-and-skill category.

On the other hand, it’s become increasingly common for mainstream films with generally rapid editing to feature one or more bravura long takes with tricky camera moves and character movement. As Bordwell notes, there seems to have developed something like “a competition among directors to see how lengthy and intricate they can make their traveling shots” (Bordwell 2006, 134). In other words, long and sophisticated takes have become increasingly common as a stand-out element within mainstream cinema, deliberately designed to attract attention and admiration. While they are certainly challenging to pull off, such shots can be quite “show-offy”, and don’t require too much in the way of cine-literacy to notice and appreciate. Thus, it can be somewhat ambiguous–or a matter of taste, or of finer distinctions–whether they involve “real” cinematic skill or are “merely” a feature of high production values.¹²

Here I’d note that something like the celebrated, unbroken opening sequence of Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil would once have seemed practically inconceivable in TV fiction. Over time, however—with the introduction of dollies, cranes, zoom lenses, the Steadicam, and smaller digital cameras—flamboyant long takes have come within reach (Gibbs and Pyle 2017, 8–10). That didn’t happen overnight, of course, and several well-known shows from the 1990s like The X-Files and ER featured various long-take experiments. Since then, however, they have proliferated radically, and by 2014 the True Detective episode “Who Goes There” included a complex and stunningly intense tracking shot that, as one scholar notes, “instantly became the most celebrated long take in the history of American television” (O’Sullivan 2017, 239).

From this craft-and-skill-centered perspective, then, cinematic-ness is more of an aesthetic feat, and not as explicitly and exclusively tied to grandeur and costs. There is, however, a conception which frames it as an even higher compliment, where it revolves around film’s expressive possibilities. In other words, the final category springs from the ideas that underpin Carroll’s specificity thesis.

Cinematic-ness as specificity

Relevant ideas and ideals for this perspective can be traced back to the first decades of cinema, to debates about whether the new medium was art or merely a mechanical recording device. To legitimize cinema, it was important to demonstrate that film possessed certain artistic means that were not available to comparable art forms (such as the close-up and editing). The first half or so of the 20^th century saw many efforts to think through what film is, both from intellectuals like Georg Lukács, Rudolph Arnheim, and André Bazin and from filmmaker-theorists like Sergei Eisenstein and Jean Epstein. These writings typically weave together ontological and evaluative speculations, such that different ideas about the nature, potential, and purpose of film art gives rise to different ideas about which cinematic practices and virtues are most valuable.

These writers’ essentialist, teleological, and prescriptive leanings have largely given way to more pluralistic mindsets. Today, their work is mostly familiar to film scholars and their most eager students, so it seems eccentric to suggest that it informs contemporary debates about cinematic-ness in TV drama. I do think, however, that something about this way of thinking still reverberates, though the auteur theory has probably been more influential than the aforementioned thinkers. It too prized films that sought to explore and exploit “the cinematic”, but without promoting any filmic resources in particular. Unlike Eisenstein, Epstein, and Bazin, who understood the “essence” of cinema differently, and so championed radically different notions of where the cinematic truly resided (in montage, photogénie, or total cinema), the concept around which the auteur critics based their conception of cinematic-ness – mise-en-scène – was radically more open and utopian. As Fereydoun Hoveyda wrote in Cahiers du Cinéma:

the originality of the auteur lies not in the subject matter he chooses, but in the technique he employs, i.e., the mise-en-scène, through which everything on the screen is expressed. … As Sartre said: “One isn’t a writer for having chosen to say certain things, but for having chosen to say them in a certain way.” Why should it be any different for cinema?. (quoted in Hillier 1985, 8–9)

There was a mystique to auteurism’s notion of the cinematic that could be frustratingly elusive, but also highly evocative. It came, perhaps, most sharply into focus when cinematic-ness served as foil to terms like “literary” or “theatrical”, as in Francois Truffaut’s famous attack on the so-called “tradition of quality” (1954).¹³ What the auteur critics took issue with was the tradition’s stuffiness and literariness, its willingness to merely furnish respectable stories with pretty pictures without interrogating film’s expressive capabilities.

The cinematic utopianism that auteurism cultivated has been voiced by many filmmakers over the years, as in Alfred Hitchcock’s avowal that:

I want to put my film together on the screen, not simply to photograph something that has been put together already in the form of a long piece of stage acting. This is what gives an effect of life to a picture—the feeling that when you see it on the screen you are watching something that has been conceived and brought to birth directly in visual terms. (Gottlieb 1995, 255–256)

This way of thinking will be familiar to many contemporary viewers, resonating for example in many textbooks and handbooks on “visual storytelling”, or in the industry mantra to “show, don’t tell”. The veneration of the visual is even evident in the documentary tradition, where events aren’t as fully and elaborately staged for the camera. Whenever a documentarian calls a film “radio with pictures”, it serves the same rhetorical function as labels like “literary” and “theatrical” do in the context of fiction film: it’s an accusation that the makers have failed to exploit the medium’s specific possibilities. The is quite explicit in Alan Rosenthal’s comment that in heavily interview-based documentaries”one senses a director who is more interested in the polemics of the printed page than in the excitement of a visual medium” (Rosenthal 2007 [1990]: 171).

To “demonstrate” that series have become more cinematic in this higher-order sense is obviously exceedingly difficult. It becomes somewhat more manageable, however, if we think of it instead as a space that has gradually opened up, first around the turn of the millennium, then again in the early 2010s.

An expanded space—from writer-auteurs to directors

It’s important to note the extent to which visual style in TV fiction is shaped by the sheer amount of story that is called for. There’s a world of difference between daytime soaps and miniseries, for example. The former typically air five times a week throughout the year, so the pressure on everyone—from producers, to writers, to technicians, to directors and actors—is immense. As Robert C. Allen has noted, for shows with hour-long installments, this comes to some 260 hours of television in a calendar year, and considering that soaps routinely run for ten years or more, that represents the equivalent of at least 1300 feature films (Allen 2010[2010]: 108). Thus in the course of a decade a single crew may churn out more screen content than many national movie industries. Miniseries, on the other hand, have been the exception in the TV industry in that they, like feature films, are one-off productions with pre-written scripts and pre-defined endpoints.

Multi-season prime time dramas have occupied an intermediary position, but have been closer to the soap opera model in the sense that the parameters of the story are open-ended. When shooting starts, there is typically just a handful of scripts that act as a buffer, so the writers are constantly striving to stay ahead of the production machine. As Howard Gordon, showrunner on 24, has put it: “It’s like driving at 65 miles per hour on the highway and you’re building the highway as you’re driving» (Sepinwall 2012, 235).

Generally, the complex logistics of longform storytelling tends to impose a more script-driven approach, with the writer’s room feeding scripts to the crew on set to “execute” in quick succession. Film narratives, by contrast, are shorter and finite, and pre-production typically much longer, which makes it more feasible to work holistically, summoning the visuals as elemental materials of story-telling, as opposed to merely the means for telling-the-story. Takeshi Kitano, for example, has described how he’s happy to let a couple of powerful images serve as the foundation for his films:

[I]n Kikujiro’s Summer, I knew even before writing the screenplay that I wanted to include the moment when the character I play walks off alone along the beach and the child runs after him to take his hand. This image as well as a few others, was my reason for making that particular film. With that in mind, I invented a plot and wrote scenes to create a link between the images. But in the end, the story is almost an excuse. (Tirard 2002, 167–168)

Roy Andersson is another filmmaker who seeks to integrate the visuals into the very conception of his work. His tableau aesthetic is characterized by long shots meticulously framed in wide and static compositions, almost giving the impression that the plots are structured around not having to move the camera. Indeed, Andersson has explained that in conceiving his films he combines scriptwriting and watercolor painting (Champagne 2015: n.p.), while one of his producers has explained that:

Perhaps there is a draft, but there is never a completely written script with full dialogue. Before the production starts, Roy sticks sketches and drawings that he has made on the wall in the order that he thinks they will appear in the film, and this acts as a kind of a storyboard. That is his main “script”.¹⁴

While Kitano and Andersson’s creative processes are hardly typical, these examples do call attention to how film has been able to accommodate idiosyncratic practices where the visuals are pivotal. Such approaches would clearly be exceedingly impractical to pursue over the course of a multi-season series In general, as longform, open-ended narratives tend to call for plot and character as motive forces. But creative preconditions—time, money and the length of narratives—matter.

As I’ve argued, the creative space of multi-season TV series in the US expanded when HBO came on the scene due to such things as shorter seasons, freedom from FCC regulations, and reliance on critical acclaim. As I’ve also argued, it was initially the writing process that most obviously benefitted from this expansion. Thus, whereas the auteur theory had singled out the film director as the individual consciousness through which other creative contributions were filtered, discourses around acclaimed series in the aughts highlighted the creative authority of the showrunner, i.e. the executive producer/head writer.

Somewhat paradoxically, perhaps, this began to change around the same time as blockbuster television began to emerge. The figure of the commanding writer-auteur has not quite disappeared in the 2010s—it has persisted, for example, on prominent shows like The Americans (Joe Weisberg) and Succession (Jesse Armstrong)—but several developments have complicated the picture. For one thing, showrunner duos have become more commonplace on critically acclaimed series, like Game of Thrones (David Benioff/D.B Weiss), The Good Wife (Robert and Michelle King), The Leftovers (David Lindelof/Tom Perrotta), Stranger Things (Matt and Ross Duffer), and High Maintenance (Katja Blichfeld/Ben Sinclair).

Also, the names of several high-profile film directors have loomed large over major series, even as their level of artistic control and contribution has been somewhat ambiguous. Many viewers no doubt associate House of Cards (2013–2018) and Mindhunter (2017–2019) with David Fincher, though he was neither the creator nor the showrunner on either (he served as executive producer on both, and directed two episodes of the former, seven of the latter). And Martin Scorsese’s name figured heavily in the lead-up to, and launch of, Boardwalk Empire (2010–2014) and Vinyl (2016), though his role too was that of executive producer and director of both pilot episodes. Steven Soderbergh, meanwhile, was unquestionably deeply involved on The Knick (2014–2015), serving as director, producer, cinematographer, and editor on every episode, yet not as series creator or showrunner.

Most importantly, in the past 10–15 years there’s been significantly more continuity in the director’s chair in American TV drama. Many shows have employed just two or three directors per season, or even just a single individual: Greg Yaitanes directed all episodes on Quarry (2016), for example (cancelled after one season); and Jean-Marc Vallée directed the whole first season of Big Little Lies (2017–2019), while Andrea Arnold took over for season two. Also, there has been an influx of showrunners who are writer-directors, often well-known filmmakers (albeit with varying levels of commitment): Frank Darabont (The Walking Dead, 2010–2022), Neil Jordan (The Borgias, 2011–2013), The Wachowskis (Sense8, 2015–2018), Baz Luhrman (The Get Down, 2016–2017), Ava DuVernay (Queen Sugar, 2016–2022), and David Lynch (Twin Peaks: The Return).

Now, a strong directorial presence in television is nothing new per se. Some of Europe’s most renowned auteurs made some of their best work for television. Ingmar Bergman wrote and directed all the episodes of Scenes from a Marriage, as did Rainer Werner Fassbinder of Berlin Alexanderplatz and Krzysztof Kieślowski of Dekalog. But these are miniseries, i.e. shorter and finite stories that can be approached much like a long movie. In the US, too, such productions have typically featured either a single writer and a single director (Shogun, Lonesome Dove, Angels in America, John Adams, Chernobyl) or a single writer-director (Todd Haynes on Mildred Pierce, Scott Frank on Godless and The Queen’s Gambit, and Olivier Assayas on Irma Vep, to name just a few notable examples).

However, the serialized, multi-season prime time drama with around twenty episodes per year was never a staple of European TV fiction, and in the US it was the head writer/EP who came to serve as the creative fulcrum. This was principally a pragmatic solution to the two main challenges of open-ended storytelling: First, churning out lots of scripts without a clear grasp of how or when the stories would ultimately conclude. And second, the logistical challenges that arise from the fact that the processes of writing, production and post-production overlap. These complexities require creative oversight—a show-runner – whose task it is to make sure the members of the writers room generate scripts at the required level of speed and quality, to handle communications with studio/network executives, and to act as a link between the writers room, the set, and the editing room.

With the further shortening of the season in the 2010s—and increasingly long hiatuses between seasons for high-end shows—the multi-season drama has become more analogous to the miniseries, paving the way for showrunners who both write and direct. It’s surely no coincidence that the roughly half-hour dramedy format has been particularly dominated by writer-directors: Louis CK on Louie (8–14 episodes per season), Lena Dunham on Girls (five 10-episode seasons, one 12-episode season), Joey Soloway on Transparent (10 episodes per season), Pamela Adlon on Better Things (four 10-episode seasons, one 5-episode season), and Spike Lee on She’s Gotta Have It (9–10 episodes per season).

But writer-directors have also become increasingly common on hour-long, multi-season dramas: The Duffer Brother directed over half the episodes of Stranger Things (8–9 episodes per season) and Sam Levinson directed 15 of 18 Euphoria episodes over two seasons. Remarkably, Mr. Robot creator and showrunner Sam Esmail directed all episodes of seasons 2–4 (respectively 12, 10, and 13 episodes). With shorter seasons it’s also become increasingly common to turn limited series into continuing series, i.e. to add new seasons to shows originally conceived as auteur miniseries: Jane Campion’s Top of the Lake, Paulo Sorrentino’s The Young Pope/The New Pope, and Mike White’s The White Lotus.

There are thus many shows from the 2010s where it could be argued that creative authority is even more strongly focused in a single individual than in the aughts, though the creator supreme is no longer identified exclusively or primarily as a writer, but as a director. Crucially, then, the creative fulcrum is less often someone with dramaturgical expertise and more often someone with visual expertise. And I believe a case can be made that the stronger directorial presence in US TV drama has manifested itself in more cinematic shows. It seems to me that many of the series mentioned above (and others, like Nicolas Winding Refn’s Too Old to Die Young) do give the impression of, in Hitchcock’s words, having been “brought to birth directly in visual terms”. This requires further study, and I’m not suggesting any strong and straightforward causality here: A writer-director is no guarantee of cinematic-ness, of course, and there are several writer-led show that seem just as concerned to “show a story” as to “tell a story”, such as Better Call Saul, The Leftovers, The Handmaid’s Tale, and True Detective.¹⁵ And season orders have gotten shorter on broadcasting networks as well, and NBC’s Hannibal (13 episodes per season) is very much a show where style comes across as “constitutive” rather than in the service of the scripts.

It’s not feasible to specify exactly how much the space has expanded. An unorthodox production like Showtime’s Twin Peaks: The Return might indicate some of the possibilities that have emerged, as well as some of constraints that remain. On the one hand, David Lynch and co-creator Mark Frost had the benefit of an uncommonly long writing process. According to Frost, it took four and a half years to complete the script, and the duo did so without the aid of a writers’ room and without episode outlines. Instead, they wrote “the entire thing together as one long novel-like script”, the purpose being “to let intuition play a larger role and leave room to discover material along the way” (O’Falt 2018: n.p.). The writing process also sought to make room for Lynch’s trademark surrealist sequences, where moody images and sounds take precedence. In Frost’s recounting, the highly unconventional (and widely praised) eighth episode was made on the basis of just 12 to 15 pages of script.

Still, even as that episode represents a—for American TV drama—extraordinary excursion into sheer avant-gardism, Lynch was often frustrated at how hard it was to integrate into the series spur-of-the-moment ideas and chance events. In a recording from a production meeting, he complains that, had he been granted more time in a specific location, he would have been able to “dream up all kinds of stuff”. Instead, he grumbles: “We never get any extra shots, we never get any time to experiment […] It’s just bang-bang-bang, it’s like a fucking machine”.¹⁶ Here it’s worth noting that Twin Peaks: The Return was unusually long for a premium network series in 2017: 18 episodes, all directed by Lynch. And while it was very much a prestige production—a “prestige brand”, so to say, from a “brand director” – it was not the kind of blockbuster series that might be afforded high-end budgets and movie-like shooting schedules. The series was shot in 142 days (Hazelton 2018), which comes to just under 8 days per episode on average. It thus seems likely that a high-stakes production of an 18-hour story with a large cast and crew called for a certain streamlining that was hard to reconcile with Lynch’s fondness for an openness to the unpremeditated. That particular aspect of his creative method seems—for now – (still) better served in the space of feature filmmaking.

Concluding remarks

To close off, I want to offer two important observations. First, my account of burgeoning cinematic-ness in US series is not meant as a teleological account of straightforward progress. It does suggest that high-end American TV dramas have become more visually advanced as seen through the prism of cinematic-ness, but this prism is not the only one available. While I think it usefully brings a story into view, it’s obviously not the whole story or the only storyand Stylistic sophistication is just one of many evaluative criteria, and to say that a work (or an era) is more cinematic than another is not to say that it’s “better”, full stop (for example, though I’ve argued that American TV dramas have become more cinematic in the 2010s, most of the US shows that I personally hold in highest regard are from the preceding decade).

My framing of “cinematic” as a space that has opened up is an effort to offset the concept’s elusiveness and overly evaluative connotations. It offers a somewhat more descriptive take, and shifts the point of emphasis from aesthetic “manifestations” to creative preconditions. One way to characterize the new space is to say that the 2010s has seen a further de-homogenization of creative and financial practices. There is now room for both blockbuster series comparable to blockbuster films and visually distinct shows where one gets the sense that style informs—and not merely “executes” – story ideas (though the two are, of course, not mutually exclusive).

Second, while I’ve focused on American TV drama since the turn of the millennium, the aesthetic shifts I’ve sketched out are surely not confined to the US.¹⁷ The Hollywood entertainment industry exerts considerable influence on production in other countries, and technological developments are not territorially restricted. And with the rise of streaming, the TV industry has grown increasingly transnational in terms of everything from media ownership and regulation to production, distribution, and audience reception (see for example Iordache, Raats, and Afilipoaie 2022). In recent years, traditional European broadcasters and subdivisions of powerful media conglomerates have pooled resources to create visually striking shows like Babylon Berlin. Crucially, the US streaming giants are part of this increasingly transnational media landscape, and have themselves commissioned, produced, or co-produced numerous series around the world, both to attract subscribers in other countries and to meet quotas for “local” content.¹⁸ These efforts have given rise to a number of stylish series, both global hits like Squid Game (South Korea) and Lupin (France) and critical favorites like I May Destroy You (UK) and Ethos (Turkey).

Cinematic-ness in non-US series is a topic for further study, and far beyond the scope of this article. Still, the conceptual distinctions I’ve outlined ought to be relevant to grasp the aesthetics of, say, European or Asian TV dramas as well. At the same time, studies of stylistic and narrative shifts in other countries/regions would have to consider the specifics of other contingent creative, financial, and industrial practices and traditions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. For useful summaries and discussions, see Zborowski (2016) and Walters (2023).

2. Carroll discusses the specificity thesis in several books and articles. For a recent summary of debates, see Carroll (2019). While Carroll rejects the thesis outright, other thinkers have sought to rehabilitate at least some weaker versions of it. See in particular Gaut (2010). An entry in these debates that is particularly relevant to this article is Smuts (2013).

3. The one exception I’ve come across is Restivo, who makes a useful distinction between what he calls “analogical” and “conceptual” meanings of cinematic-ness.

4. For a useful discussion of the differences between multi-cam and single-cam comedies, see Levine and Newman (2012, 59–79).

5. Much has been written on HBO’s efforts to distinguish it’s TV dramas from “ordinary television”. See for example Santo (2008) and Gillette and Koblin (2022).

6. Nochimson (2003) is an example of an early scholarly discussion of cinematic series. She rejects the tendency to label The Sopranos cinematic, and proposes “televisuality” as an alternative term to “to indicate the aesthetic capability of television” (n.p.). Nochimson thus invokes the specificity thesis, and formulates a critique that several other TV scholars would present later.

7. For useful discussions of television style, see Butler (2010) and Dunleavy (2018, 124–154).

8. Print ads in the 1960s described Peyton Place as a “television novel” in an effort to distinguish the series from daytime soaps (Newman and Levine 2012, 83). The same label made the rounds in the 1970s in discourses about the new miniseries format. For a detailed and frequently cited article from the 1990s, see McGrath (1995). Since the turn of the millennium, writings on the novelistic qualities of TV drama have exploded (partly, no doubt, because discussions of TV series has proliferated online). One especially prominent article, which coined the phrase “arc TV”, is Doherty (2012). It’s worth noting that many articles have also criticized the numerous analogies to literature. See for example Adams (2015).

9. For more on the development and state of blockbuster cinema in Hollywood around the turn of the millennium, see Shone (2004). For more on the rationale of the “blockbuster logic” across a wide range of industries, see Elberse (2013).

10. Without presuming to know what Mittell means by “intuitive”, I’d see it not as some innate faculty, but rather as an evaluative perspective that has been cultivated and internalized over time.

11. The approach is most comprehensively outlined in Bordwell (2008).

12. Aaron Smuts offers a useful perspective here. He notes that, contrary to conventional wisdom, “cinematic” is not invariably a term of praise. Pauline Kael, for example, used the term sparingly in her film criticism, but when she did it was typically to denote a flaw (2013: 83). Smuts takes Kael to mean that films can be gratuitously cinematic, which nicely sums up the ambiguity I have in mind. That is, some aspect of a film (such as a dazzling long take) might be technically impressive, but at the same time come across as superfluous, or as a cheap trick.

13. For more on the French quality tradition, and Truffaut’s attack on it, see Hill (2008).

14. See https://coproductionoffice.eu/assets/films/a-pigeon-sat-on-a-branch-reflecting-on-existence/presskit/ANDAPI_-pressbook_Aug25_1.pdf.

15. It’s worth noting that some of these shows nevertheless did enjoy a fair degree of directorial clout and continuity: Filmmaker Cary Joji Fukunaga directed every episode of the first (and most critically acclaimed) season of True Detective, while notable names like Carl Franklin and Mimi Leder directed half of The Leftovers’ 28 episodes.

16. See the special feature “Impressions: A Journey Behind the Scenes of Twin Peaks”, on Twin Peaks: A Limited Event Series, Blu-ray release, CBS Home Entertainment.

17. Most directly when it comes to scriptwriting. See Novrup Redvall, Eva (2013).

18. Most prominently, the European Parliament passed legislation in 2018 stipulating that at least 30% of the streaming services’ catalogs in Europe must be European. The criteria for this are not entirely clear, however (see Parc and LaFever 2021).