Miniseries, Film, and Television as Art Forms

January 24, 2023

In which I discuss miniseries as an art form in comparison with feature films and television shows; and then digress into contrasting films and television in general.

Written on a MacBook Pro in Neovim while listening to the Bugsnax Original Soundtrack (2021) by Seth Parker.

So the other day on Fedi I posted a random poll that came to mind, but it ended up really getting my thoughts going:

Are miniseries as a format a subset of television shows or a long-form variant of feature films?

https://tilde.zone/@nytpu/109742349838442004

First off, despite them being episodic I'd say miniseries are much closer to films in terms of structure and general scope. Generally they tell film-like stories (doesn't matter if the story is fictional or documentary) in a film-like way with a film-like production; just with a scope larger than one you could have with a 1.5–3 hour film.

Whereas TV shows generally (but by no means always) tell more open-ended stories, with an average episode being even partially self-contained rather than being entirely dedicated to the overarching story. TV shows also substantially reduce the prominence of the director, they rarely have a single director for more than a small handful of episodes; with the screenwriters being the primary artistic vision behind the project instead. Conversely, miniseries seem to generally have a single director and that director typically seems to have a similar level of artistic control afforded to film directors.

Also, for some reason people do not expect film-level production value out of TV shows; this likely also explains the relative deprioritizing of the director and important but already less prominent crew. I believe it's due to the perceptual distinction in classiness when deliberately going to see a film in theaters—or going to Blockbuster and renting a tape—versus turning on your TV and watching whatever show happens to be on. Not that that's the only factor, TV shows generally have a much smaller budget per unit of final screentime, have more demands from the production company, and I'm sure an infinite number of reasons that you'd need to be involved in a production in order to understand. But as a consumer of media it sucks that TV is so often much crappier quality all around; especially when there's no way a general audience would accept the quality of some popular TV shows if they were films instead.

Luckily the rather artifical distinction between TV and film quality is thankfully starting to reverse lately, I personally believe due to streaming services placing them both on an even playing field for the average viewer. Also production companies aren't demanding thirty episode seasons so the screenwriters don't have to stretch and pad a limited story, plus no commercial breaks so stuff can naturally flow together instead of having deliberate interruptions. Although I don't see the rather inherent format differences like self-contained episode arcs or writing style differences going away any time soon, not that those differences are all a bad thing.

And of course there are exceptions to the general TV vs. film trends, like everything Sam Esmail's directed that I've feels like a real film. But reinforcing my point, it appears he's made primarily miniseries other than Mr. Robot.

I don't know what direction I'm going with this now… I've had lots of thoughts relating to this topic that I should've written about when I had them; but I don't feel like waiting for those ideas to recur before publishing this post because otherwise it'll never be published. Hopefully readers who endured my writing this far will be astute enough to form their own ideas and then maybe write a response post? ;)