The suits at Marvel Comics, in hiring small-screen golden boy Joss Whedon to helm their tentpole full-dress, multi-superhero, mega-budget Marvel Avengers Assemble, seem to be fully in agreement with the banner headline on this month's edition of Vanity Fair: "Admit It … You Love TV More Than Movies".
You betcha. TV has finally won the long war with the movies that started in the early-50s, and has won it on the grounds of quality, the one field on which no one expected it to prevail. TV used to be a talent farm, a place of apprenticeship en route to making "proper movies", or the place where aged movie stars went to die. Now it's where all the good ideas emanate from, and it's where all the good writers have vanished to, while the movies, increasingly archaic with their rigid screening schedules and unmodishly immobile picture "palaces", have continued their decline from special occasion or romantic rendezvous to homogenised fast-food experience.
And don't even get me started on the movies themselves. Scan the Best Picture Oscar-winners over the last 20 years and you'll see how long the rot's been setting in. There are TV episodes that I and many others wouldn't trade for almost any studio movie of the last five years: the Kennedy And Heidi episode of The Sopranos, Mad Men's The Suitcase – I could name 20 others. Among them, Whedon's all-singing, all-dancing episode of Buffy The Vampire Slayer …
And here comes Whedon to the rescue, the Midas of the small screen with Marvel's dollars behind him. By some serendipitous alignment of the release calendar, we get Big-Budget Whedon, with Avengers, at the same time as his low-budget Cabin In The Woods – the most fun I've had at a horror film in a decade – which went missing, presumed dead, when MGM went bankrupt three years ago. TV is having a really good week at the movies.
It makes me wonder what other franchises might be revitalised with the infusion of a little TV thinking, acquainting some of the long-form geniuses of contemporary television with the short-sharp-shock of the limited running time. Who do they call in to gussy up ailing franchises these days? JJ Abrams. And it works.
I'd pay good money to watch Mad Men's Matthew Weiner's in-period James Bond movie, drenched in full-bore 1957 male chauvinism, should he ever make it. Perhaps the calamitous John Carter could have used some New Age TV moxie, but they went with a Pixar director, which has worked well before (Mission Impossible 4), just not this time. David Chase is just sitting around on his ass these days – hire him! Dig up Gene Roddenberry! Unretire Norman Lear! Give David Simon a job!
TV isn't the farm team any more. It's starting to look a lot like the big leagues.
