A Quick Hot Take On Why Movies And TV Are All Terrible Now

I’m probably wrong, but I might be right

Modern life is full of paradoxes.  Unemployment is down and the stock market is up, but the economy feels like it’s doing terribly.  Human beings are more connected than we’ve ever been, but everyone feels alone.  There are more movies and TV shows than ever before, and yet we feel like there’s nothing to watch.  Numbers and reality are not matching up.

That last one, about movies and TV, is one that really interests me.  I don’t have any theories about the global economy, nor can I offer guidance on how we might collectively pull ourselves out of our smartphone-induced spiritual black hole, but I like to think I know something about movies and TV.  

I’m not saying anything novel here when I claim that movies and TV are almost all uniformly terrible now.  Everything feels emotionally inert and looks visually unappealing.  Sometimes, they lack anything resembling coherence.  I recently watched Marvel’s Secret Invasion on Disney Plus (I know that admitting this is a self-own, but I’ve watched everything Marvel has made up to this point so I figure I might as well keep going.  The completist in me is hard to tame) and at any given moment in the series I could not tell you who was on screen, what they were doing, or what their motivations were.  

Even so-called “good” movies and TV have left me wanting more.  I saw Oppenheimer in IMAX and left the theater thinking, “That was pretty good, I guess.”  I just finished Shogun on Hulu, which currently boasts a 99% on Rotten Tomatoes and an 8.8 on IMDb, and I think it’s totally and completely serviceable but not overwhelmingly great.  When it comes to these kinds of movies and TV shows, I don’t hate them, but I don’t like them either.  I simply feel nothing after I finish watching.

Emily Dickinson once said, “If I read a book [and] it makes my whole body so cold no fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry.  If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only ways I know it.  Is there any other way?”  My problem is, I can’t seem to find many movies and TV shows that are taking the top of my head off.  

A few from last year stand out. Saltburn was incredible, although the Internet’s response to it proved that they’re not willing or able to hear what it has to say about envy.  Season 2 of The Bear was one of the most inspiring seasons of television I’ve ever seen, but again the Internet turned it into a meme instead of taking its lessons to heart. The rest of the field, however, are either completely terrible or just fine enough that they feel good in comparison to everything else out there.

The question is, why is this happening?

Many have said that it’s a result of corporate moviemaking.  Instead of diversifying their lineups with original mid-budget films, studios instead focus on a few tentpole releases every year, all of which revolve around superheroes and pre-existing IP.  The budgets for these things are so bloated that executives feel compelled to meddle in the creative process to ensure they get their money back on the investment.  Of course, their meddling always backfires and the movie comes out terrible.

There’s also the impact of algorithms and mathematically based thinking when it comes to TV shows.  Studios have all this data, down to the millisecond, of what people watch and what makes them turn it off.  They then use this information to reverse engineer a TV show out of millions of points of data, optimizing it for maximal attention.  My wife recently watched The Summer I Turned Pretty on Amazon Prime.  Every time I was in the room and caught some of it, I felt like I was watching a bunch of TikToks strung together instead of an actual television show.  It was completely soulless.

Both of these are great theories, and are probably true.  But I think there’s something more fundamental going on here.  It’s a big logical leap, and most likely very wrong, but I’m just going to go with it.  What’s the Internet for if not making big pronouncements with nothing to back them up?

I think most movies and TV shows are terrible now because the newest generation of directors never learned to shoot on film.  Digital has been the only medium they’ve used their entire careers.

There are a lot of benefits to shooting on film.  First, it just looks way better than digital.  There’s something about it that’s more vibrant and alive.  Watch And Just Like That… and compare how it looks to the original Sex And The City.  And Just Like That… is a truly awful show, but its problems run way deeper than Che Diaz.

I recently watched The Idol, which was not a great show, but it looked absolutely phenomenal because it was shot completely on film.  There were certain shots that stopped me in my tracks and made me realize what I was missing in other pieces of entertainment.  It was so obviously better than everything else out there, there was no arguing against it.  It was like watching Caitlin Clark on the basketball court.

The benefits of film don’t stop at the merely aesthetic (Although the aesthetic does go a long way).  More importantly, film is a limited resource.  You can only shoot what’s in the roll before you have to stop and change it out, and there are so many rolls that you have access to, depending on the budget.  This means you have to be precise in what you’re shooting.  And what does being precise mean?  It means taking the time, thought, and care to set up a shot, light it properly, and get the best performance from the actors.  The level of attention and intention has to be so insanely high, and it pays off in the end product.  

Now, I’m not saying everything shot on film is a masterpiece, but the conditions are certainly more favorable. Due to the material constraints, you’re much more likely to think and plan ahead to be sure that you’re capturing what you need.  There are no such constraints when shooting on digital.  You can shoot as much as you want, as many times as you want, with your only limit being storage space, and you can always get more of that on the cheap.  It almost invites a type of carelessness or lack of focus. 

I’m willing to bet some of the more incoherent movies and TV shows I’ve seen recently were the result of the director filming a bunch of stuff and thinking they got the right shot, only to wind up in the editing room to realize they have nothing.  What ends up getting put together is this dog’s breakfast of a final cut that nobody enjoys, from the executives to the creators and all the way down to the audience.

Shooting on digital doesn’t always lead to a bad final product.  You can put a digital camera in the hands of an experienced director and they'll turn out something good enough.  But the kinds of directors that I’m thinking of, the Linklaters and the Tarantinos and the Scorseses of the world, all learned to shoot on film first. Film honed their skills to the necessary levels.  They developed the mechanics, fundamentals and sense of care required by film.  This new crop, the ones who are now handling all of the superhero movies and buzzy streaming TV shows, all came of age in a time where digital was widely available to everyone.  They never had to work the film muscle, or at least not long enough for the habits to take root.  That’s why their stuff is coming out so garbled.  They didn’t have to focus the way the earlier generations did.

Again, I don’t know if this is right, but I feel like there’s something to this.  I’m sure the meta-factors I mentioned above, studio balance sheets and algorithms and whatnot, are major deciding factors in the low quality entertainment we’re being served.  But the lack of mental and artistic focus that comes out of the digital style seems to be the bigger culprit here.  

Sure, digital does allow you to do certain things you wouldn’t be able to do on film, but more is not always better in art.  Freedom doesn’t always produce the best result.  Sometimes it’s operating within a confining set of limitations that forces you to really dig deep and pull something honest out of your soul, all in order to make the best out of a tough situation.  This kind of work is what resonates with an audience.

Older generations were forced into these limitations by the technology that was available to them at the time.  Younger generations have to find a way to impose limitations on themselves to get the same result.  This is incredibly difficult to do.  You have to actively make things hard for yourself and ignore the things that would make it easier.  It’s a heavy lift, and I hope this younger generation is up to the task.  Otherwise, we’re going to lose everything that made movies and television such a meaningful medium in the first place.