A Quote by Michael Chabon
There's something inherently more appealing about the idea that you could reveal and tell stories about characters over the course of a TV season - 13 or 26 episodes, whatever it might be - than in the course of one two-hour movie. You can do so many more novelistic kinds of things on a TV show - with time, with gradual development of relationships, and so on - than you could possibly do in a movie. And that is very appealing.
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What's neat about TV is you get really rich, an opportunity to tell really rich stories over the course of 20 hours. Film is cool because it's an hour and a half to two hours. You go on an adventure and by the end it's all cleaned up. Maybe in a franchise you have three chapters of a great story but in TV you can really get deep. You have more time to tell stories so I would definitely not rule out doing television in the future because I think it's a great medium for telling stories.
TV has become long-form now. A season can be like a 13-hour film, separated into episodes, so you can analyse a character for five years and talk about the things that films used to talk about but don't any more.
Some TV shows are like really good novels in that there are enough episodes that you start to have your own feelings about how the characters should act. When the scriptwriters go slightly wrong, when they make the character make a left turn that he or she wouldn't do, you know enough about the characters to say, "No, that's not what she would do there. That's wrong." You can actually argue with a TV show in a way that you can't do as much with movie - you inhabit a TV show in the way you inhabit a novel.
TV is an extraordinary medium. You can do things with TV that you just can't do on film. There's so much more time, there's the opportunity for development, and you can let things lay dormant for a period. You can't really do that in two hours or three hours in a movie, that often, I would say.
Of course, on a job, you have a shared common interest in the fact that you're there making a movie or making a TV show, and that creates unification within a group. There has to be something more than just the work for that to continue on, for that friendship to continue on.
In TV, you can really get into not only great characters, but also the relationships. There are all of the backstories and all of the relationships that you have with every person in your life, and the relationships those people have with each other. It's just more dense and there's more time to tell stories.
Maybe if I'd gone in younger, I wouldn't have had that feeling, but I've seen an enormous amount of changes since the early-'70s in how this stuff is shot. I did the first TV movie ever shot in 18 days; before this film the normal length of shooting a TV movie was between 21 and 26 days. We shot a full-up, two-hour TV movie in 18 days with Donald Sutherland playing the lead, who had never worked on television before.
Having now been on three different soap operas was more than I could have hoped for. Then going on to doing a movie and being on prime time TV, to my own show on Netflix - I couldn't have dreamed of what this has snowballed into.
I like the idea of doing a little movie every week. When you do a movie, you don't know when it's going to come out. In a year, you forget about it. I forget stories that happened on set. I forget who I worked with. I forget my lines, my characters' names. This is so fresh. We make it, and it's on TV. It feels more like a living, breathing thing.
I'd like to do more TV; TV is completely different than working in movies in a lot of ways, it's like making a really compact movie. Because you don't have as much time, especially hour long shows, they move so quickly.
What's so great about TV is that you can get an opportunity to tell really rich stories, over the course of so many hours. It's like a novel of this type of medium.
Stuff that happens to you in your life when you're shooting a TV show, you have to be careful, because it might end up in the show. And that's what I think is the neat thing about TV: how alive it is, and how the writers respond to the stimulus that they're getting from the actual actors. Whereas a movie is more hermetically sealed.
When answering questions over the years about film and TV adaptations of my books, I have always maintained that no movie or TV series could ever change or damage my work.
There is something spurious about the very term 'a movie made for TV,' because what you make for TV is a TV program.
An eight-hour movie is definitely not a two-hour movie. An eight-hour movie is really like five independent films, if you think about it, because each is usually an hour and a half. In some ways, it is like making a movie. It's just a lot more information.
I'd say there's more of a difference between a play and movie to TV than there is between TV and movies. But there's something involved in the repetition of things that require something different from me in order to sign onto a script.
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