There’s a curious mutation spreading around the entertainment industry, altering form and tampering with time. TV series, it seems, keep turning into movies. They’re probably not patient zero, but the showrunners of Game of Thrones are undoubtedly superspreaders for this current wave, having ignited controversy by describing their show as “a 73-hour movie” back in 2017. Soon, the TV landscape was swarming with series rebranded as films of varying yet uniformly hefty length. The idiom was repurposed frequently enough to reach “bane of all existence” status for TV critics, and to inspire a Shouts and Murmurs piece in the New Yorker. Now, to quote a show that ignited a powder keg of debate over the difference between cinema and television not so long ago, “It is happening again.”
Miles Millar and Alfred Gough, co-creators of the upcoming Addams Family reboot Wednesday for Netflix, uttered the magic words in an interview with Vanity Fair earlier this week, stating that “the ambition of the show was to make it an eight-hour Tim Burton movie.” (Burton is on board as executive producer and director for four of the eight episodes.) They’ve dusted off the old soundbite during a period of increased critique for it, with The Boys head honcho Eric Kripke having recently thrown down the gauntlet on the matter. Of TV directors who claim to have conceived their series as a manner of movie, he said: “Fuck you! No you’re not! Make a TV show. You’re in the entertainment business.” In Olivier Assayas’s new miniseries reimagining his 1996 showbiz satire Irma Vep, the director of the show within the show invokes the “eight-hour movie” adage in an interview as if to poke fun at the phrase’s inescapability. Speaking with me at Cannes earlier this year, he confirmed that he doesn’t share the mindset, and that this line shares the soupçon of caricature accenting the rest of the series.
