[COLUMN] Why Are Movies Suddenly Obsessed with Television? | by Darren Mooney

This awards season, it feels like the movies have television on the brain.

Two of the “on the bubble” contenders are Saturday Night and September 5. Jason Reitman’s Saturday Night depicts the premiere of the iconic sketch comedy show Saturday Night Live in October 1975, while Tim Fehlbaum’s September 5 is set in the ABC studio over the course of the hostage crisis during the 1972 Munich Olympics. Both movies are about television production; September 5 unfolds against a terrorist attack, but it focuses on the television coverage of that tragedy.

These are far from the only recent notable prestige pieces focused on the importance of live television. This year saw the production of two separate streaming movies about Prince Andrew’s disastrous Newsnight interview about his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein, Scoop on Netflix and A Very Royal Scandal on Amazon. This is to say nothing of more esoteric television-centric fare, like Jane Schoenbrun’s I Saw the TV Glow.

This is arguably part of a larger trend that has only accelerated in recent years. Nominated for Best Picture in 2009, Ron Howard’s Frost/Nixon was a portrait of one of the most important interviews ever broadcast. In 2021, Aaron Sorkin’s Being the Ricardos seemed to be a potential contender, a movie about the production of I Love Lucy. That same awards season, Jessica Chastain won her Oscar for The Eyes of Tammy Faye, a biographical film about the eponymous televangelist.

It is perhaps notable that the past decade has seen two separate films about the moon landing, both of which pay particular attention to the importance of the live broadcast of the event: Damien Chazelle’s biopic First Man and Greg Berlanti’s conspiratorial romcom Fly Me to the Moon. It does seem like the movies are increasingly preoccupied with television, with the medium’s history and with its place in contemporary popular culture.

It is tempting to write this trend off as part of the larger tendency of pop culture to fixate upon pop culture, to see it as part of a broader movement that combines the recent “auteur-biographies”, the brand-focused “buy-o-pics” and even the modern hyper-commodified popstar hagiography.  However, the relationship between film and television has always been somewhat fraught, in large part because the two mediums have long been understood to exist in competition with one another.

When television first emerged, there was a fear that it would destroy the vibrant theatrical market. This pushed Hollywood studios to embrace a variety of gimmicks and genres that really pushed the power of cinema, offering scale and spectacle that viewers could not get at home. This anxiety about the existential threat of television could be seen sublimated into the story of the arrival of sound in Singin’ in the Rain and in the righteous fury about television’s corrosive power in Network.

This skepticism was deeply ingrained in the film industry. Even approaching the new millennium, Hollywood remained wary of television’s toxic influence. EdTV and The Truman Show seemed to predict the emergence of reality television with a deep cynicism. Robert Redford’s Quiz Show traced the roots of America’s moral decay to a cheating scandal on early television game shows. Movies like 15 Minutes and more recently Nightcrawler explored the crassness of the 24-hour news cycle.

For years, it seemed like the obligation to celebrate television well to mediums other than film. Saturday Night is being released to launch the 50th anniversary celebrations for Saturday Night Live, but it follows on the heels of a celebrated oral history, Live From New York, and two separate television shows that are barely-fictionalized peaks behind the scenes, Aaron Sorkin’s Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip and Tina Fey’s 30 Rock. Reitman’s film is arguably late to the party.

Even recently, it would be rare for long-running television shows to celebrate big anniversaries with earnest theatrical docu-dramas about their creation. Such efforts were reserved for the smaller screen. When Doctor Who hit 50, the BBC produced the making-of drama An Adventure in Time and Space for television rather than film. When Star Trek turned 30, it settled for a special broadcast on UPN. There were theatrical components of these anniversary festivities, but those weren’t celebrating television as a medium.

In contrast, these recent movies are about television as a medium, not just televised properties. While some of that wariness of cable news survives in contemporary Hollywood, particularly in the films of Adam McKay like Anchorman 2 or Don’t Look Up, both Saturday Night and September 5 are essentially love letters to television as an artform. They both depict teams working under intense pressure to deliver something incredible to audiences, whether an avant-garde comedy show or coverage of a hostage crisis unfolding in real time.

Scoop and A Very Royal Scandal both depict a piece of current affairs news coverage that had a very real impact on British politics. Indeed, September 5, Scoop and A Very Royal Scandal treat television  journalists with the sort of veneration that earnest prestige cinema has long reserved for print reporters in movies like All the President’s Men or more recent Oscar winners and nominees like Spotlight and The Post.

Even less weighty fare, like Being the Ricardos or I Saw the TV Glow, makes the case for television as a valid mode of artistic expression. Being the Ricardos treats the production of I Love Lucy with the same earnest sincerity that television miniseries The Offer bestowed upon The Godfather. I Saw the TV Glow is a love letter to the literally transformative (“trans-formative”) power of television, the story of two teenagers who connect with each other (and perhaps themselves) through a fictional television show.

There are, perhaps, a couple of reasons why film’s relationship to television has changed. The first and most obvious is that the kinds of people making these films are part of a generation that came of age at a moment where television was maturing and so have a stronger relationship to the medium. For example, I Saw the TV Glow is very obviously the work of a filmmaker who used to list every episode of Buffy, the Vampire Slayer to help themselves fall asleep at night.

Television production is also more closely intertwined with filmmaking than it used to be, so many of these filmmakers have a strong personal ties to the medium. Jason Reitman is essentially an extended family member for Saturday Night Live. His father, Ivan Reitman, worked with Saturday Night Live veterans Dan Ackroyd and Bill Murray on films like Meatballs, Stripes and Ghostbusters. Indeed, Jason arguably inherited the Ghostbusters franchise, directing Murray and Ackroyd in Ghostbusters: Afterlife.

Aaron Sorkin began his career as a playwright, but he also oversaw the first four seasons of The West Wing, one of the shows that – along with Buffy, the Vampire Slayer – helped to make the argument for television as a significant artform. Sorkin followed The West Wing with two very earnest and sincere shows about the art of making television – Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip and The Newsroom. In essence, Being the Ricardos is just a cinematic extension of that mythologizing of the medium.

However, there is also something inherently nostalgic about this recent wave of movies about television. Just like cinema, television finds itself in the midst of an existential crisis. The old traditional forms of broadcast television have been challenged by the emergence of streaming as a medium and the fracturing of the audience. Linear television is in clear decline, with viewership and advertising rates falling year on year, but with no credible replacement.

This puts studios in a strange position. Bob Iger, CEO of Disney, has had to state that the company’s broadcast channel, ABC, is “not for sale.” Iger contends that, even with income decreasing, linear television remains “highly profitable.” However, Iger has also conceded that Disney plans to manage the decline in value by “dramatically” lowering the content spend. The stakes are pretty high: just this year, Warners realized its linear networks are worth $9.1bn less than they thought.

Paramount, the studio distributing September 5, has faced similar issues with its own television channels, in the middle of a very public acquisition. In March 2023, Bob Bakesh had to explain why the studio declined a $3bn offer for Showtime. In August 2023, the studio decided that it wasn’t selling its majority stake in BET. However, the market is volatile. Less than a year later, Paramount found itself in negotiations over BET, considering a buyout.

Television is a pressure point for many of these studios, as they pivot towards streaming. Streaming revenues are not where they need to be, and many of these companies are relying on television to make up the difference, hoping that their income from streaming will increase faster than the revenue from television decreases. As such, it makes sense that there is a palpable anxiety over the future and the sustainability of television as a medium.

Setting aside financial concerts, the emergence of streaming and the splintering of the modern audience has arguably fractured the monoculture. There is a sense of loss, with Matt Zoller Seitz writing about Game of Thrones as “the last show we’ll watch together.” In this framing, television is no longer merely television. It becomes a metaphor for the idea of a shared cultural experience, an appealing concept in an era of echo chambers and rabbit holes. Many of these films specifically celebrate television as a mass medium.

The opening voiceover announcement in September 5 informs viewers that these Olympics were “the first in history to be broadcast live via satellite around the world.” Both First Man and Fly Me to the Moon focus on the moon landing as a shared communal experience, the most watched televised event in history. In September 5, Roone Arledge (Peter Sarsgaard) boasts that “more people watched [the hostage crisis] than watched Armstrong step on the moon.” At a time of heightened polarization, these films appeal to shared cultural moments.

Scoop and A Very Royal Scandal are about a television broadcast that seemed to truly shake the foundations of British society. Even I Saw the TV Glow is a movie about how television serves to connect Owen (Justice Smith) and Maddy (Brigette Lundy-Paine). Perhaps making these movies about television allows cinema to displace some of its own anxieties about the decline of film as a shared cultural experience in the age of streaming.

These movies are also about the immediacy of television – appointment viewing – a feature that distinguishes television from the unstructured sense of time on streaming platforms. September 5 and Saturday Night aren’t just about television, they are about live television. The ABC ident at the start of September 5 promises “this is the place to be.” In Saturday Night, Lorne Michaels (Gabriel LaBelle) is fighting NBC over the live scheduled broadcast, refusing to air the rehearsal tape.

Even the streaming services themselves seem to concede this. Scoop and A Very Royal Scandal are both movies made by streaming services that, having broken television, have found themselves trying to recapture some of that immediacy with streams of live concerts, comedy specials and sporting events. As much as these movies celebrate television, they also mourn it. There is a palpable sense that something has been lost.