![]() ![]() ![]() In 1984, Anthony Yerkovich’s Miami Vice didn’t just smuggle film style and grammar onto television : it was a television show that would prove to greatly influence feature filmmaking. ![]() This was a time when the idea of TV as being qualitatively analogous to cinema had nothing to do with aping cinema’s geometric shape, but instead involved negotiating with motion picture grammar, storytelling, picture, and sound-and furthermore with combining cinematic and television tactics to create something new. Rather than pursue an argument against the ascendancy of widescreen TV, or against television’s 21st-century golden age, I’d instead like to direct your attention to a time when ambitious television shows didn’t have recourse to the widescreen mode, distinguishing themselves within the 4:3 standard. But substitute, say, Two Broke Girls into this passage and his point is harder to dismiss. Are you ready to hear the real reason why The Sopranos is filmed in widescreen? Here's the secret: The decision to air a TV show in widescreen is an attempt to fool you, on a subconscious level, into thinking you are watching a superior piece of entertainment.” That Rowsdower cited a show as great as The Sopranos here is obviously unfortunate, not just in retrospect but at the very instant of his writing. Widescreen is great at showing the expanse of a landscape, but majority of TV shots are interiors and close-ups.” And in 2004, on a blog tellingly called “ Petty Annoyances,” blogger Rowsdower wrote: “So enough of the bullshit reasons for widescreen- Sopranos. It doesn't seem to matter that unlike movies, there is no technical reason to prefer the format for a TV show. In 2002, Eriq Gardner wrote in Slate: “Widescreen has become a great fad. Memory serves that just a decade ago the inverse was a problem, when many viewers loathed to watch “letterboxed” presentations on their 4:3 screens. Now that we’re fully used to widescreen TV presentations, it’s harder to accept the big vertical rectangles of black on each side of a 4:3 show. But now that TV has closed the visual gap that movies widened in the 1950s with Cinemascope-itself a survivalist ploy to counteract TV’s popularity-it’s as if no good shows can be left behind. Is there something now degraded about the original, intended aspect ratio? Is such an upgrade necessary in order to make The Wire more cinematic, less TV-like (or less what we once thought of as TV-like)? Of course the answer is no in both respects. ![]() The recent decision to “upgrade” The Wire to widescreen for reruns and a new Blu-ray package confuses matters even further. Of the two shows most cited in discussions of the arrival of this golden age, The Sopranos was presented in widescreen, even though for the majority of its run it was transmitted to predominantly 4:3-sized screens, while The Wire stayed with 4:3 throughout its run even though it bridged the old and new eras. There hasn’t been a perfect overlap between the current TV renaissance and the normalization of the flat widescreen monitor. Whether or not TV shows have gotten markedly better than movies, my naked eyes tell me that the screens they play on have gotten measurably reminiscent to the rectangles upon which contemporary movies are projected. The one thing that can be completely verified, and therefore productively explored, is that this perception of quality TV has coincided with the expansion of standard television sets from boxy 4:3 concave tubes to 16:9 flat LED screens. I’m not hot on this take-there are still many great movies and many terrible television shows, and in turn there have always been great television shows and terrible movies-but regardless of its supportability, or lack thereof, the prevalence of the narrative gives it an undeniable force. Many factors have played into the fashionable opinion that television is enjoying a creative peak, and that that peak is related, or at least coincides, with an inverse dip in cinematic quality. Eric Hynes on Miami Vice (1984-1989) and Miami Vice (2006) ![]()
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