October 5, 2008
Character Issues
An interesting read from Virginia Heffernan on the new genre of television dramas for The New York Times
"Television acting has long been dismissed as merely hitting marks and reading cue cards. But the arrival of “The Sopranos” in 1999 changed all that. Television fans had been waiting for something like this for a long time. ... Finally, we had our very own aesthetic paradigm shift. In a single bound, TV became cinema — understated, baroque, potent, adult.
Vincent Canby of The New York Times defined this emerging genre of TV-as-the-new-cinema as the “megamovie".
Today, nearly a decade after “The Sopranos” began, megamovies are what virtually all producers of hourlong TV shows strive to make: nervy, cinematic dramas with inventive soundtracks and ferocious, high-status central characters. “Mad Men” and “Damages” are just such megamovies.
... In the Chase paradigm, a show’s main character must be fundamentally evil, and this evil must undermine the tenacious American fantasy that there are morally responsible roads to power and moreover that the achievement of power is itself a moral responsibility."
Read full article
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