During the late 70's and 1980's, a large volume of cinematic output in the U.S. began to seem more formulaic and focus-group driven, less auteur-driven. Special effects, horror, big romance, suspense, buddy flicks, adolescent comedy. It all seemed pretty much the same after awhile. At the same time, network television drama couldn't approach the big screen in production values, or int the complexities of character or plot. It was bound by the 1-hour (or 47 minute) limits of scheduling. The prime-time soaps, like Dallas, Dynasty, Falcon Crest & Knots Landing had broad popular appeal, but audiences finally grew weary of catfights, big hair and cardboard characters.

Miami Vice really was one of the first TV dramas to employ the newer cinematic techniques and production values in the service of the story and the look. If you remember when it came out, you remember how different it looked from everything else, and what a giant leap forward it seemed at the time. I was so blown away by it that I needed to write a TV column in my friend's graduate design-school underground magazine. The "no earth tones" policy single-handedly elevated pink and teal to the top of the 80's color charts and style sheets. Men moussed their hair and sported stubble. Drug dealers got shot while lying on the decks of their swimming pools, their heads lolling back, slow-motion, into the water. The producers wanted the look of MTV, and Michael Mann, a signature visual stylist, gave it to them. For a year or two, it was a great television, but, face it, where was the substance?

The next great leap forward in cinematic television production might have beeen David Lynch's Twin Peaks, which opened in spectacularly eccentric fashion–a serial about the aftermath of the murder of popular young woman in a small town in Pacific northwest. I love David Lynch–nobody has ever come closer to making movies seem like dreaming. But Lynch never seemed interested in conventional storytelling, nor in the tightness of his plotting. Episodes spilled over, too many plot threads were left dangling, and a demise in ratings doomed it. Still, I think that Lynch's images of wind-buffeted branches in twilight, or a traffic light changing from yellow to red on a dark and desolate road conveyed such a profound sense of place, even after only 30 episodes, that we all knew the town of Twin Peaks, and we'd know it today–and that's hard to say about a lot of places in television land.

There have been other shows that evolved and sharpened the concept of cinematic television–The Sopranos, the whole HBO dramatic oeuvre, and of course, Mad Men. The fact that each episode now stands alone (well, mostly) by itself is a convention of dramatic television storytelling, as distinct from soap opera–that every chapter has its own arc–and could be seen a shortcoming imposed by the format of television programming, but I think it is a very natural way to tell a long story. Every saga is a collection of stories, with a common cast of characters, but which moves ahead, in ebbs and flows, in big spectacle (a foot in the lawnmower) and in small and private conversations.

I'd like to know what anyone else thinks of about the way television both resembles and is different from film in the way that it tells a visual story.