How I Became a Better Film Watcher by Watching More Television

I had always loved films but starting in college I had far less time to watch them. Not only that but there was much less easily accessible film content in the college setting. Television became an alternative to films largely out of convenience.

However, I was watching television shows at a great time to be watching television. In the wake of The Sopranos, television had the creative ambitions to match and occasionally outsize its prestigious film cousin. This coupled with easier ways to watch this content through online streaming services, and I suddenly found myself much less interested in films and watching a lot more television shows. 

I caught up on Breaking Bad, Mad Men, Battlestar Galactica, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and I was left wanting more. 

But eventually I felt like I was neglecting watching movies and so I decided to jump back in began watching films. But my experiences with television watching had actually proven really useful. Watching and analyzing television, you’re constantly assessing a show’s aims and whether they’re succeeding at them. 

Movies and television are different mediums with different goals, but they’re both playing around with similar structural concerns on the whole. You’re constantly much more aware of whether an episode of television does its job well or not. If its structure is out of whack, it’s much more noticeable because it stands out from well-crafted episodes. But in turn that made me stop and wonder what makes a well-structured episode and why do certain episodes prove good at achieving what they set out to do.  

It might seem odd to say so, but watching television made me a better movie watcher.  Once I got back into viewing films, my paucity of film viewing made me lap up every film I had been neglecting to get around to. I became re-obsessed with the medium that had made me such a pop culture devotee. But I was also much more hypercritical of it and that made me get more out of my experience.  

Oddly enough, now film watching is pulling a similar awareness on my writing and my viewing of television. Writing television reviews can get repetitive and sometimes it’s like grasping at straws to find some new angle to take on a show. But writing about films reminded me that the most important thing is to tackle what does or doesn’t work in the simplest and most direct terms. Just tackle what’s there. 

Our understanding and awareness towards other mediums can help make us better viewers of content, and we don’t have to treat films and television as mutually exclusive. They both are good at different things and though films are typically seen as the better of the two; films just can’t match tv shows for their ability to form a bond, develop characters, and build up its story. Television has the time to do that. Film doesn’t, but films also can usually get away with a spectacle that television simply can’t and certain stories just don’t warrant the large amounts of screentime television requires.  

Neither is better. They’re just different. And until I understood that and the things they’re trying to accomplish I couldn’t truly appreciate or properly analyze either. Granted, I’m a long way from being really good at this whole reviewing thing, but I’m working on it and using television to understand film and vice versa, and is a good place to start.