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By contrast, today's TV characters, especially those in dramas, are allowed to grow, make mistakes, find themselves--all the touchy-feely things that make real people so endearing and insufferable. Unlike Joe Friday or Barnaby Jones, Sipowicz on NYPD Blue has a love life, one he must struggle to sustain. Unlike Ricky and Lucy Ricardo's marriage, the relationship between Mad About You's Jamie and Paul Buchman deepens and goes through its rough patches. Set in worlds that evolve from week to week, the best new shows almost seem to take place in real time, accreting day-in, day-out intimacy. Viewers can feel as though they're living with these programs in the same way readers live with novels--it's soap opera, really, but soap opera of a very high order. Put another way, ER is to General Hospital what John Coltrane's My Favorite Things was to Julie Andrews' version.
What's surprising is that it took so long for creative minds to take advantage of TV's distinctive narrative attributes. Inherited from radio, soap operas were originally designed to be messily open-ended--like life, as it happens--in the utilitarian hope that viewers would keep tuning in. Films and plays, by way of contrast, are designed to compress the defining moments of a character's life into a spare and extraordinary couple of hours. Thus the first Die Hard movie might be more gripping than a given episode of NYPD Blue, but NYPD Blue is still compelling after 45 episodes, whereas the Die Hard films--like most movie series--began wheezing halfway through the opening credits of the first sequel.
TV was once Hollywood's sorry stepsibling, creatively retarded by its need to appeal to the lowest common denominator, while movie producers were free to hire David Lean and convince themselves they were making art. Today the bruising economics behind moviemaking has nearly reversed those roles. With Hollywood budgets averaging around $35 million--not including marketing and distribution costs--movies increasingly have to appeal to the broadest audience possible. "Features have turned into exploitation pictures because that's the way to survive," grumbles director Barry Levinson, who should know, having recently made Disclosure. Fortunately, he's able to find creative fulfillment as an executive producer of Homicide.
The truth is, the general run of television series in 1995 is better than the general run of movies--and not just because so many recent films have been based on old TV shows. (Since so many Broadway shows are now based on old movies, does this make television the premier dramatic art form?)
Not surprisingly, many who work in television agree. "In movies, dumb and dumber is the goal," says Betsy Borns, a writer on Friends. "When film people get snobbish and say, 'Oh...you write for TV,' as if it's a step down, I look at them and say, 'It's getting late--you probably have to go home and write your next Pauly Shore film.'"