Welcome to TV Week, my five-part series on the broad television kaleidoscope — with tips, explainers and insights into this vast landscape, including the hidden strategy of meetings and development. Today’s installment — my take on the eternal debate: TV vs. movies.
In the annals of Hollywood, no feud is more persistent, long-running or meaningful than the battle for prestige between TV People and Movie People.
For decades, that battle barely looked like a battle at all. Movies were the kingdom. Television was the servant class. Then Peak TV flipped the hierarchy — turning showrunners into auteurs, streamers into the industry’s creative center and film into the dreary place where franchises went to multiply.
Now the pendulum is wobbling again. As streaming retreats into safe bets and theatrical releases suddenly look like the home of big swings, Hollywood’s oldest status fight is back on. And this time, the question isn’t just who gets to claim prestige — it’s which medium still has the swagger to survive and grow.
Once, movies were where immortal artistic achievement took place. Hit movies were the unchallenged center of world culture from the water cooler to Cannes. The Oscar race was the industry’s highfalutin middlebrow imprimatur of quality in a way that the tinsel-lined, budget-ballroom Emmys couldn’t dream of rivaling.
If you worked in Hollywood, movies were what everyone aspired to do — movie stars, movie directors and film studio executives were the absolute apex predators. When actors like Clint Eastwood and Sally Field made the leap from the small box to the big screen, it was a crowning achievement. Those who made that journey in reverse were considered cautionary tales of downfall.
In the mid-’70s, when a young TV executive named Barry Diller was put in charge of Paramount, it was greeted as though a crossing guard had been made chairman of the Pentagon Joint Chiefs of Staff. As Diller recalled in his memoir, when he deigned to cast Welcome Back, Kotter star John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever, a publicist told Diller with contempt: “He’s a television person. You don’t put a television person in a movie. The kid just doesn’t put asses in seats.” Saturday Night Fever became the highest-grossing R-rated movie released in the 1970s.
Into the 1980s, the artistic achievements of shows from Miami Vice to Cheers were barely acknowledged, while grandiose mediocrity on the big screen was fawned over as though Proust had penned every ponderous syllable of Chariots of Fire.
Movie stars were royalty.
TV stars were entertainers, barely.
Well into the 1990s, the words of former FCC chair Newton Minow, first spoken in 1961, continued to represent Hollywood’s feelings about the business that was becoming the industry’s core:
When television is bad, nothing is worse. I invite each of you to sit down in front of your television set when your station goes on the air and stay there for a day without a book, without a magazine, without a newspaper, without a profit-and-loss sheet or a rating book to distract you. Keep your eyes glued to that set until the station signs off. I can assure you that what you will observe is a vast wasteland.
Then things started to change.
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