Will TV Series Eventually Overtake Film? This Well-Worn Question Is Still Interesting

Behind every wave of television's advance on film lie changes in the industry, in talent, and in audiences. In the current wave, one side is rising as the other falls, and faster than before.

“We expect to pass 100 million members by this weekend.”

That is what Netflix, now the largest video streaming platform in the world, wrote in a letter to shareholders three months ago. With 100 million subscribers, 95% of them paying, the company has moved further and further from its beginnings as a DVD rental business, and is now impossible to ignore in the global entertainment industry.

Owning a new channel like the internet is only one reason Netflix succeeded. These days, the most common reaction when people talk about Netflix is probably something like “if Netflix made it, it must be good,” and they can reel off hits such as House of Cards and Orange Is the New Black without pausing. Among its subscribers in the United States, 57% say Netflix's original series are why they pay.

In its most recent annual report, Netflix's revenue for fiscal 2016 grew 36% year on year and net profit grew 55%. The report made a point of the power of its originals: of the 10 most Google-searched shows of 2016, half were Netflix productions. On the strength of what it makes in house, the company has become a power in content production that no one can ignore.

TV series won Netflix its place in the entertainment industry, and Netflix is plainly not the only company eyeing the TV business.

A month ago The Weinstein Company, known for films such as Django Unchained and The King's Speech, said it would put more resources into developing television based on true events. A24, the company behind Moonlight and Good Time, was asked whether it would keep its focus on film, and replied: “Our goal is to make good content, and good content includes but isn't limited to film — television is part of it too. Shifts like this are normal.”

Big directors and writers have also dropped the old view that television ranks below film. The Coen brothers, Steven Soderbergh and David Fincher all have new TV projects. David Lynch went further: after finishing the third season of Twin Peaks, he said he would very likely never direct a film again.

Both the number and the quality of TV series have shot up in recent years. In 2016 a record 455 scripted series aired, 71% more than five years earlier. John Landgraf, president of FX, the network that published the figure, had predicted the TV market would peak in 2015 or 2016, but he now admits it is nowhere near saturated.

Television's boom stands against film's slump. TV series are taking viewers' time and energy bit by bit, and the polish of the work leaves audiences unable to stop; the film industry, meanwhile, looks lifeless. Screens tied up by blockbusters and IP franchises have been attacked again and again, and admissions have slipped back, unevenly, to their 1995 level.

The scales are tipping. Even if television has not passed film in standing, it is fair to say that more and more money, talent and viewers are flowing toward TV series.

Will TV series eventually overtake film? It is a question that keeps coming up. In fact, counting from television's spread after the Second World War, TV has hit film in roughly three waves. Each time, the industry, the talent and the consumers had changed.

You have probably already sensed what marks this wave: Hollywood has settled into formula, the internet rewards the long tail, and TV series are finding audiences and creators with a precision they never had before.

In short, more and more TV series — and web series — have shaken off the charge of “amusing ourselves to death.” They are better made, and more interesting.

How Did TV Find Its Strategy Back Then?

In the United States, the decade or so from the late 1940s to the late 1950s is called television's first golden age. To Americans then, TV was an entirely new form of entertainment, and as a substitute for the movies it delivered Hollywood's first shock: box office receipts fell noticeably.

Programs with high cultural content were a mark of this golden age. Shakespeare's plays, for instance, were broadcast live on television for the first time. That was because at the time only people with more education and money could afford a set. Most TV drama of the period also reached viewers live; recording technology was not introduced until 1957. In those years, scene changes had to be rushed through during the commercials.

In the book The Television Industry: A Historical Dictionary, two shows mark the boundaries of this golden age. It opens with the 1947 broadcast of Kraft Television Theatre and closes a decade later with the last live broadcast of Ninety Minute Theatre (《90 分钟剧场》). Episodes ran about an hour, and in most cases each was a complete story in itself — the anthology format. Not having to start from episode one to follow the plot was a way of reaching the largest possible audience.

Even so, judged as art, TV series could not compete with film for a long time.

Few stations reached the whole country; NBC, ABC and CBS ran the early television market. Fox joined in 1986 to make up the “Big Four” of traditional broadcast networks. Advertising was their only source of revenue. In that situation, it is more accurate to say the networks were working out how not to offend viewers into changing the channel or switching off than to say they were working out how to win them.

That thinking left very little on television that could be called experimental. Plots could not be too complicated, because a confused viewer might give up. Under a one-episode-a-week production schedule, creative teams rewrote the direction of the story according to audience feedback.

And once a direction was confirmed as what audiences wanted, a show stayed with it as long as it could; 20-odd episodes a season became standard for American TV. With no money to spare, the sitcom, a cheap format, became the mainstream. Another feature was the ensemble: a group of leads rather than one, so that if circumstances changed, losing or replacing one or two characters would not do much damage.

A strategy this cautious naturally found no favor with film directors, who put invention first. Their own field was living through a golden age of its own — The Godfather, Jaws, Taxi Driver — as a generation of American movie brats shaped by the French New Wave left classics behind in 1970s Hollywood.

HBO's Rise Showed That Good Shows Always Have a Market

But at about that same time, change was brewing in television. On November 8, 1972, the cable channel HBO was founded, and from the 1980s it began making its own series. The age of cable had begun.

What HBO and the cable channels it stands for mattered for most was a new business model: pay subscription. Traditional advertising shrank as a share of revenue, and cable channels collected subscription fees straight from viewers. Because the money now came from somewhere else, “total subscriber satisfaction” (TSS) replaced ratings as the number companies watched most closely.

Because they needed a distinct style to build an audience loyal enough to pay, cable channels were readier than the broadcast networks to give experimental work a chance. Viewers stopped being the product a show sold to advertisers and became the buyer.

David Chase pitched the idea for The Sopranos to Fox, CBS and ABC, and all three turned it down. Fox wanted a simpler plot, CBS could not see why the lead had to be a man in therapy, and ABC said the show had too much swearing. In short, none of them believed a mob boss as the lead could pull in a broad audience.

It was HBO that finally gave David Chase his chance. The Sopranos paid HBO back with 21 Emmy Awards, DVD sales in the millions and subscriber growth. The night the fourth season premiered, it drew 13.4 million viewers, a record for HBO.

Quality also became the core of a show's competitive edge. To secure it, budgets went up. In 2001 HBO spent $125 million on the 10-episode Band of Brothers, nearly twice the cost of the film Saving Private Ryan. When Game of Thrones premiered in 2011, the first season cost $6 million an episode; by the sixth, $10 million.

More important, art began to guide how shows were made. Television was willing to hand power to directors. In the past the writer was the backbone of an American show's creative team, and it was common for one season to hire several directors, each for a few episodes. Now directors and writers stand closer to equal. The industry produced the idea of the showrunner — not only the source of a show's creative vision but the person steering the shoot, much like the auteur director in film.

While making the pilot of Boardwalk Empire for HBO, Martin Scorsese told a friend: “I feel like I'm back in the 1970s, doing what I love in my own style.”

Shows started trying new tricks. Even a cheap sitcom could look new thanks to new shooting methods and a new visual language — single-camera shooting, for instance, or the mock-documentary form of The Office and Modern Family. Genres widened too, into territory television had rarely attempted, such as HBO's crime series True Detective. Matthew McConaughey won the Critics' Choice Award for best actor for his work in it.

Just as TV series were getting better made at the turn of the century, Hollywood's film business was moving toward the blockbuster. Auteur directors chasing art had nowhere to work inside the frame of the sequel. Special effects replaced acting as the thing a sequel sold. Film, once called the seventh art, lost its claim to art piece by piece.

Netflix's Biggest Contribution Was Changing How Audiences Watch — and Then How Shows Get Made

Just as the film industry was cutting off its own retreat, internet companies led by Netflix arrived. They are film's third wave.

The clearest sign is that more money is going into entertainment. In 2017 Netflix's budget for licensed and original content was expected to reach $6 billion, with plans for 1,000 hours of original programming, 400 hours more than the year before. Amazon's content budget for the year was expected to run as high as $4.5 billion.

That money produced a crop of series made outside the networks — Netflix's breakout House of Cards, Amazon's The Man in the High Castle, and others. By FX's earlier count, streaming services made 93 scripted series in 2016; in 2011 the figure was 6.

Of course, this money flows to film as well as television. But film is no longer an industry led by invention. In recent years it has lost its spirit under the rule of IP. IP franchises have not brought the profits people imagined: both Sony and Paramount lost money last year. In 2016 the North American box office grew 2.2%, but ticket prices rose 2.6% over the same period. Adjusted for that, the year's 1.315 billion admissions were still below the 1995 level.

TV series may use capital better. HBO's operating profit hit a record in the first quarter of fiscal 2017, and on the earnings call Time Warner singled out Big Little Lies and Silicon Valley for the result. HBO's operating profit rose 22.4%, ahead of the 15.9% at Warner Bros., also part of Time Warner — and that was with Kong: Skull Island and The Lego Batman Movie in Warner's reporting period.

Netflix also changed how audiences watch. Binge-watching became a habit. Viewers no longer had to suffer through one new episode a week; they could take a whole season at once. A Netflix survey found that even then 61% of respondents said they often binged, and 73% said that watching for long stretches on a streaming service felt good.

Binge-watching did not only change behavior at the viewer's end. Because a full season is made and then released at once, the thinking behind it holds together better: creators no longer adjust week by week to audience feedback, and instead decide where the story goes themselves.

That gave creators more room. Asked why his company was making more television, David Glasser, chief operating officer of The Weinstein Company, said: “We now have the ability to stretch a traditional documentary out to four hours, six hours, even eight hours. You can really get inside a story.”

Jenji Kohan, creator of Orange Is the New Black, Netflix's most-watched original, pointed to another effect of releasing a whole season. The plot, she said, can wander off whenever it needs to, and it does not matter if a major character disappears for a while, because viewers are bingeing and will see the character again a few hours later. Traditional weekly broadcast could hardly manage that: if the lead is missing from an episode, or the audience is lost, complaints follow.

Is China the Same? Not Quite

The move toward big budgets is just as plain in China. Actors normally thought of as film actors have started looking for roles in TV series. To win more viewers and to set themselves apart from rivals, video sites have also raised their spending on in-house shows. iQiyi is expected to spend 10 billion yuan on content this year, with original series and original variety shows as the priority.

But China's situation still differs from America's in many ways, even leaving quality aside. First, investment has indeed risen sharply, but much of the money goes to actors' fees rather than into production. General and I (《孤芳不自赏》), which aired at the start of the year, counts as a huge scandal.

Domestic series also still seem tied to IP. Announcing a project, companies still like to have “IP” and “film-and-TV synergy” on their lips. iQiyi's 288 million yuan and 420 million yuan investments in the web series of Journey to the West: Conquering the Demons and the TV series of The Mermaid are examples. The endless remakes are just as tiring.

But the last point matters most: film, TV series and web series in China face censorship that keeps getting stricter. When nobody can tell exactly where the line is, releasing a web series episode by episode lowers the risk — unlike a film, it can still be changed if it crosses the line, or the damage can be contained — which makes it the safer investment.

Here, caution matters more than story.

Cover image from: Douban Movie, Flickr