Originally published in print February 2021.
The worlds of film and television haven’t always gotten along too well. For the longest time, it was a sign of decline for a bigshot Hollywood actor to take up work on the small screen, whereas nowadays any show without a star in the credits is likely to be dead on arrival. The rapidly increasing favour afforded to television in the twenty-first century can of course be traced back to certain tentpole, critical darlings like The Sopranos (David Chase, 1999-2007) and The Wire (David Simon, 2002-2008), but the most recent factor in this development is indisputably Netflix (the founders of which disappointingly are not also named David). Famously, Netflix introduced the ‘binge format’, dropping every episode of each show on a single launch date as if it were a movie premiere, and giving the audience total control over their rate of consumption. Inevitably, this approach has started to seep into the creative process behind these shows, as more and more television writers are being expected to consistently achieve the standards of singular narrative film while still producing multiple episodes or even seasons of content.
Shawn Levy, one of the executive producers of Stranger Things (The Duffer Brothers, 2016-present) has gone so far as to say that: “with every key decision, we really tried to think of it like a very long movie that would be parceled into eight sections. That was our guiding mandate.” Stranger Things has since been promoted by Netflix as an “eight-hour movie”, and each subsequent season has been subtitled as if it were a sequel: Stranger Things 2, Stranger Things 3, etc. This trend has since taken the industry by storm, as every streaming service has sought its own flagship “x-hours movie,” with Disney Plus’ WandaVision (Jac Schaeffer, 2021) being the latest. Whereas film and television were once at odds, now the industry-wide goal appears to be to force them together.
There are a number of likely reasons for this. The first is budgetary; Stranger Things 1 had a reported budget of approximately $6 million per episode, to a total of $48 million for eight hours of content. The similarly themed feature films It: Chapter One (Andy Muschietti, 2017) & Chapter Two (Muschietti, 2019) on the other hand, had a combined budget of approximately $114 million for an overall runtime of just over five hours. As viewers in the comfort of our own homes, we accept a slower, more financially conscious pace from television; characters can talk in recycled hallway sets for minutes at a time, while VFX monsters can lurk invisibly in the shadows until episode six of eight without complaint. Film does not have this luxury, burdened instead with the expectation of cathartic entertainment compressed into a single cinema viewing. When one considers that the Netflix business model depends on a show’s ability to keep audiences watching in order to remain profitable, the opportunity to create cheaper equivalents to the biggest blockbusters on the market, while also maintaining engagement for a considerably longer stretch of time, must seem like a modern-day miracle.
But while this development is evidently beneficial from a business standpoint, it is starting to look like the “eight hour movie” approach is taking a toll on the writing teams behind your favourite shows. Whereas a film tends to be developed creatively by a single director and one or two writers (unless you’re part of the small army who wrote for Spider-Man: Homecoming (Jon Watts, 2017), in which case, why are you reading a student publication), television tends to be more of an impulsive process between a room full of writers, evolving storylines naturally over time with only a loose end goal in sight. To refer back to the Stranger Things example, there appears to be something of a disconnect between the show’s television-formatted pre-production and film-scaled production procedures, as was hinted at by Levy when he said that the COVID-19 pandemic “impacted very positively by allowing the Duffer brothers, for the first time ever, to write the entire season before we shoot it.” In television, making the story up as you go along is perfectly natural: it’s part of the process. But if Stranger Things is being treated like a franchise of “eight hour movies” serialised as a single arc rather than an episode-to-episode journey, then the improvisational nature of television simply isn’t sustainable. So if you’re wondering why Eleven (Millie Bobby Brown) joined that goth gang at the tail-end of Stranger Things 2 out of absolutely nowhere, this is probably the reason why.
I do not believe this trend is going to become the new normal; already shows like Succession (Jesse Armstrong, 2018-present) and Schitt’s Creek (Dan & Eugene Levy, 2015-2020) are wrestling their way into critical and public favour with distinctly episodic storylines unadaptable to film. The issue is prevalent predominantly in the streaming wars between Netflix, Amazon Prime, Disney Plus and the hundreds of doomed copycats, and it is the opinion of this author that it will ultimately result in a sense of fatigue that will hurt their biggest brands irrevocably. Remember when Netflix had six Marvel shows? Me neither.
Image credit: Netflix.
