I’ve been doing something startling to myself over the past few years - I’ve been watching TV. And I rarely, if ever, watch movies. And from talking to friends and audiences, it seems I’m not the only one. And this isn’t necessarily an issue of the hassles of “driving to the theater” or theater prices, etc  - but more of storytelling in general.

This is most surprising to me. As a filmmaker, I’ve always loved film, and for me, TV was always in the backseat, or at least riding shotgun. But over the past five or six years that has completely changed. I enjoy the long, drawn out story arcs. I love getting lost (no pun intended) in a multitudes of characters’ lives. With the rare exception, from a writing perspective, even the best movies are quite easy to see the strings of the narrative structure behind them, and where they are going.

Of course this is nothing new - serialized content has been around for decades on film, and even before that. Star Wars was a reworking of a lot of Flash Gordon serials, and was in it’s own way, a log story arc.

Yet in TV I am constantly surprised. Surprised both in narrative - with many twists and turns, but even in more straightforward shows, surprised in the different type of characters, with various degrees of morals, who are more true to life and fascinating than most movie characters.

I always find it frustrating in even the most laugh out loud comedy feature films where the characters have to change in the end to become “good.” While sometimes this works, often times in a very funny broad movie it throws the tone off - and yet filmmakers and studio execs feel compelled to do this because they have only two hours with the characters, and they need to please the most amount of people.

I certainly don’t mean to say that TV is the death of film - but the many amazing shows should force filmmakers to be more unique and innovative. And I wonder where will audience’s tastes be in ten years from now? Will we all be loving watching ten second story arcs? For my part at least, I’ll continue to try to go to films, but my true joy is spending a weekend burning through a season’s box set worth of my favorite shows.

And I don’t think I’m the only one that feels this way.