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roles of filmmaker and TV creator have
proved pretty fluid. The triumphs of
TV auteurs like Vince Gilligan, Amy
Sherman- Palladino and HBO’s three
Davids (Chase, Milch, Simon) in the
2000s opened the floodgates for movie-
makers on the small screen: Vallée did
Big Little Lies and Sharp Objects, while
Jane Campion made Top of the Lake. As
platforms proliferate and culture frag-
ments, even creative weirdos like Paolo
Sorrentino (The Young Pope) and Gregg
Araki (Now, Apocalypse) can sell shows
without selling out their oddness.
Meanwhile, an influential new
generation of creators—like Ava
Du Vernay, Cary Joji Fukunaga and
Jordan Peele—has used this moment
to carve out unprecedented careers.
Moving seamlessly between movies,
TV, fiction, nonfiction, realism and
fantasy, they’re building filmographies
whose common thread isn’t a form but
a set of styles or themes. DuVernay
has made a big- budget kids’ movie, a
prestige historical biopic, a straight-to-
Netflix documentary, a miniseries about
the Central Park Five and a Southern
family drama—each a meditation on the
Stagecoach, then David Milch’s brilliant
36- episode western Deadwood demands
the slower pace of television. A recent
spate of book-to-TV adaptations,
Big Little Lies included, has proved that
novels often fare best as serials too—
which is exactly what Harry Potter,
James Bond and the Marvel Cinematic
Universe all are.
David Lynch must have understood
all this 30 years ago, when he created
Twin Peaks, his warped riff on soap op-
eras and cop shows that would’ve made
no sense as a stand-alone film. So it was
dispiriting when, in the run-up to the
2017 revival Twin Peaks: The Return, he
described the new season as an 18-hour
movie. By the year’s end, the series was
popping up on film critics’ annual best-
of lists, implying that the real distinc-
tion between movies and TV is merit—
that when TV reaches a certain level of
quality, it’s not really TV
anymore.
Whether because
Lynch is in class by
himself or because
Big Little Lies was
originally understood
as the premium- cable
equivalent of a chick
flick, no one is trying to
claim the latter show as
cinema. Yet it also reflects
auteurist sensibilities. Known for gritty
realism, Arnold uses a grayed-out
color palette to subvert the glittering
California seascapes and real estate
porn of Season 1. When there’s sun, it’s
all glare and no shine. These choices
complement the new episodes’ most
intriguing theme: climate change, and
the extent to which adults must educate
children about it.
Once again, the result is a compelling
argument for the convergence of
film and TV. Big Little Lies’ episodic
structure mines soap-opera tropes,
building suspense over an extended
period. At the same time, Oscar-
worthy performances from its movie-
star leads sell characters that could, in
lesser hands, be momzilla stereotypes.
Big Little Lies doesn’t need Meryl Streep
for her cinematic prestige. It needs her
because it has a delectably passive-
aggressive grandmother character that
only Meryl Streep could play. intersections of race, gender and justice
that’s uniquely suited to its format.
Steven Soderbergh was a pioneer of this
eclectic approach, interspersing action
romps and micro- budget indies with
fascinating TV projects, from Cinemax’s
The Knick to the experimental
Washington- pundit drama K Street,
which aired way back in 2003 on HBO.
An influx of funds into the television
sphere, at a time when risk-averse movie
studios only have eyes for franchise
spectacles and supercheap horror
schlock, has certainly facilitated this
shift. Netflix—which is expected to
spend $15 billion on content this year—
dropped heaps of cash on shows by
Baz Luhrmann (The Get Down), the
Wachowskis (Sense8) and Frost/Nixon
writer Peter Morgan (The Crown), with
notoriously mixed ROI. While racking
up astronomical episodic special- effects
bills, Game of Thrones
opened the window to single-
episode shoots in excess of
55 days. Now Disney and
Apple, which will both
launch streaming services
this year, have their wallets
out. And if Spielberg—
who, incidentally, has an
anthology series in the
works with Apple—doesn’t
like watching movies on
Net flix, maybe he could persuade
the studio system that funded Ready
Player One to take calls about grownup
films from some of the great directors
the streamer has bankrolled, like Dee
Rees (Mudbound) and Tamara Jenkins
(Private Life). If the 2000s were the
golden age of TV, then in recent years
TV has expanded so dramatically—
and filled so many long- standing voids
in American entertainment—that
generalizations about its quality are now
impossible.The convergence of film and TV
isn’t just a boon to filmmakers who’ve
been elbowed out of the multiplex by
the blockbuster- industrial complex.
It’s also good news from a purely
artistic perspective. Increasingly, the
biggest difference between the two
forms isn’t quality, budget or screen
size; it’s length. If brevity is key to the
genius of the classic 96-minute western‘When they set
the bar high,
we just called
Meryl.’
REESE WITHERSPOON,
on how Big Little Lies
addressed daunting
expectations for Season 2,
on Good Morning America