Random
BOARDWALK PLEASINGNESS / THE HOME OF LONG-FORM STORYTELLING
And here’s the glorious second, extended trailer. I may be more excited to see this than I am to see almost anything else on the horizon.
This is because the advent of DVD allowed the form to breathe. Once it was no longer necessary for shows to make episodes be mostly self-contained (because with DVD viewers could get caught up on the story later, at their leisure, and appreciate an enormously complex story in its totally rather than in glimpses through the interstices of a rigid schedule), artists who wanted to tell evolving and sophisticated stories could use the medium to do things that films simply can’t, and that novels can do but often don’t. Obligatory namechecks to The Sopranos, The Shield, Mad Men, The Wire (overrated in my opinion, but still remarkable), Lost, Deadwood, Arrested Development…
And look what’s coming from HBO alone: Boardwalk Empire, Game of Thrones, Luck, Treme. I have extremely high expectations for at least three of those, and one may pleasantly surprise me.
With the epic failure of the Jay Leno experiment, five hours of TV just opened up for scripted prime-time TV. That’s potentially a good thing. The network may very well fill those hours with yak shit–but there’s something in the air right now that is hospitable to creative intelligence and the construction of rich, elaborate narrative.
Tags: boardwalk empire, tv
I love TV way too much, but the “argument” that TV is undergoing a creative renaissance because of serialization and HBO and DVDs, etc. etc. has been made so many times–as if it’s a novel thought–that I almost wish TV would start getting shitty again. Anyway, the 90s TV renaissance doesn’t get the recognition it deserves: Twin Peaks, Northern Exposure, X-Files, all that awesome, quirky shit. I like TV that’s good but knows it’s TV. A lot of this HBO stuff is basically long-form films.
Also: I was at the bookstore the other day and they had like six copies of the fake novel by Hank Moody, the fake writer that David Duchovny plays on the awful, awful Californication, and only one copy of anything by Rick Moody.
I love TV way too much, but the “argument” that TV is undergoing a creative renaissance because of serialization and HBO and DVDs, etc. etc. has been made so many times–as if it’s a novel thought–that I almost wish TV would start getting shitty again. Anyway, the 90s TV renaissance doesn’t get the recognition it deserves: Twin Peaks, Northern Exposure, X-Files, all that awesome, quirky shit. I like TV that’s good but knows it’s TV. A lot of this HBO stuff is basically long-form films.
Also: I was at the bookstore the other day and they had like six copies of the fake novel by Hank Moody, the fake writer that David Duchovny plays on the awful, awful Californication, and only one copy of anything by Rick Moody.