Joel Coen on movies vs TV

In my 2022 movie year-in-review I mentioned my exhaustion with TV and my preference for movies. Joel Coen, from a 2020 podcast with longtime cinematographer Roger Deakins on why he and brother Ethan have stuck to movies and not ventured into TV, explains a little of what goes into my preference:

[L]ong-form was never something we could get our heads around. It’s a different paradigm. Not to be shitty about it, but you can look at stories that they have a beginning, middle, and end. But so much of television has a beginning, a middle, a middle, a middle, a middle, until the whole thing dies of exhaustion. It’s beaten to death and then you find a way of ending it.

We’ve all watched TV shows like this. Even some of our favorites fit the arc Coen describes here.

One of the reasons I hope movies and movie theatres survive is that the discipline of the form makes moviegoing better than binge-watching even a good TV show. The discipline of the filmmakers to turn out a compact, well-crafted, self-contained jewel—rather than giving themselves permission, as so many TV showrunners do, to sprawl all over the place—and the discipline of the audience starting a story and not being able to stop it, having to receive it continuously in the form intended by the filmmakers; these are virtues that dissipate in the size and potential aimlessness of a TV series.

There are exceptions, of course, but who has time to find them? And I’ll carve out space for mini-series, which demand some of the same beginning-middle-end discipline as a two-hour drama. Not for nothing is the five-episode Chernobyl and the six-episode The Night Manager the best TV I’ve seen in the last few years.

I’m currently listening to the full Deakins-Coen interview on my commute between campuses. I discovered it and the passage above thanks to this short post from World of Reel.