"But when you’re in your first season, your goal is to get a second season, and when you’re in your second season, you just don’t believe you’ll get a third. Nobody up top believes that statistics are on your side. This is where it usually ends. If we have to promise free ice cream to get to a third season, then we will and then we’ll deal with it." - Dan Harmon on CommunityWith apologies to Mad Men, Breaking Bad (two shows whose most recent seasons I haven’t seen), Boardwalk Empire, and Parks and Rec, Community is the best show currently on TV and the one that is doing the most to innovate and move the medium forward. So it’s surprising to hear its creator, a man who seems to come from outside "the system", echo the long-standing sentiment inherent to television production in this country - that deep down the core mission of his show is simply to stay on the air and keep people watching.
But also, it’s not surprising at all.
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The night before reading the Dan Harmon interview from which that quote was pulled, I saw The Tree of Life, or as the woman introducing it at the Arclight Theater called it - "Terrence Malick's Tree of Life". Throughout most of the running time of the movie I found myself acutely aware of the fact that I was in a theater filled with other human beings all watching this same strange, beautiful, challenging piece of ART unfold. How did something this ambitious, this innovative, this personal, this difficult, this uncommercial ever get made is the question I kept thinking to myself. But sure enough it did. And it filled me with hope and inspiration and joy that it not only saw the light of day but that actual people paid actual money to sit there and watch it with me. And whether they loved it, or hated it, or thought that the Sean Penn stuff was pretty unnecessary, and that the disparate parts of the movie weren’t integrated as well as they could have been, and that the ending was probably a little more drawn out than it should have been but that ultimately it was one of the most beautiful, original, ambitious, thought-provoking, well-made movies they are ever likely to see, all that really matters is that The Tree of Life is a movie that exists. It was allowed to be made. And I can pretty much guarantee that at no point in its making did Terrence Malick ever think – “I hope this does well so that I can make another movie. In fact, what can I do to make sure that people will like this movie? Whatever it is, I will do exactly that.”
Now I realize that it’s unfair to compare an established director making an art house movie to a first time show runner making a network TV sitcom. And I also don’t mean this as any slight on Dan Harmon who in his own way is as creative and innovative and genius as Terrance Malick is. It’s not his fault that the “product for product’s sake” mentality is so deeply entrenched in the very fiber of American TV production that there is perhaps no way around it. With that in mind though, it is fair to ask if TV will ever be able to truly compete on the same artistic level with film. Because while there are a great many film directors who worry a great deal about the commercial success of their movies and make the audience their primary concern (probably most film directors do in fact) there are also plenty that don’t. Just down the hall from the theater showing Tree of Life was one showing Midnight in Paris. And if you think Terrence Malick don’t give a fuck about his audience or how his movies do commercially, Woody Allen makes him look like Ron Howard. And there are plenty of more directors like them. The film industry is massive soul-sucking corporate money-making machine, but it also still allows true artists to lurk on its fringes making their personal passion projects that aren’t remotely concerned with box office or audience approval. They make movies only when they want to and entirely on their terms or they don’t make them at all. The fact that these difficult, provocative, challenging, uncommercial movies exist is what makes film an art form rather than just an entertainment form. Visual art, dance, theater and music all have whole movements and styles and genres devoted to being, in addition to all of those other qualities, openly antagonistic towards their audience. But other than (occasionally) The Sopranos, name a TV show that could even be described as “difficult and challenging”*, let alone antagonistic towards its audience. Twin Peaks? John From Cincinnati? Homeboys in Outerspace?
There are certainly TV shows that have great artistic merit. And there are shows that are clearly labors of love for their creators. And there are shows that aim to provoke, to challenge, to push the medium forward. But as of yet there is no real TV equivalent to The Tree of Life.
For all their walking, they're not getting any closer to the light.
(*The Wire is of course the exception to all this. But it doesnt count because it's its own thing. Also because it would invalidate my whole arguement. So let's just pretend like it doesnt exist. Everyone involved in TV production seems to...)
