Cinematic Television Countdown, Day One!

I was having a conversation yesterday with a friend who had just started watching the first season of True Detective, and he told me that, to his mind, the show was getting by on two things: the obvious strength of the lead performances and the direction. This is not a novel observation. Nic Pizzolato’s prose occasionally made me think of the Hindenburg. As long as it was precisely contained within the structure provided by Woody Harrelson, Matthew McConaughey, and Cary Fukunaga it was the smoothest and most elegant way to travel, but even the tiniest slip, the smallest unintended spark, and the whole edifice immediately would have gone from majestic to farcical. Watching True Detective’s first season was a like watching Philippe Petit’s 1974 tightrope walk between the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center, you could only hope that skill in execution would override absurdity in conception.

And it is the execution that I want to think about a little more. It has become trendy, recently, to think about television as a cinematic medium, and to note the way that TV production is taking advantage of more complex visual vocabularies that were previously possible only in feature films. To be a TV director is no longer a title worthy of condescension from those in the know. Some of the best talent is either emerging from television (Michelle MacLaren, Adam Bernstein, Alex Graves, and Miguel Sapochnik), or turning to television as a place where their vision can be realized free from the constraints of the feature film market (Jane Campion, Steven Soderbergh, Rian Johnson, or the aforementioned Fukunaga). The result, in the last several years, has been some extra-ordinary small screen moments. Over the next five days, I’d like to take a look at five of my favorites.

So, without further ado, here is the first of Dave’s top five cinematic television moments:

5. The Knick season one, episode 8 “Working Late a Lot”

There are a number of flashier moments from The Knick, Steven Soderbergh’s pet project for Cinemax, which could have made this list. I picked the scene above for two related reasons. First, it isn’t focused on any kind of intense action. It is just a conversation between three men about the medical problem of the fourth (moaning) man. Second, because despite the mundane nature of the scene Soderbergh does not elect for the traditional television formula for how a scene like this one. Normal television procedure would be to use a series of shot/reverse shot cuts designed to focus on each speaker as they spoke. Instead, the camera maintains a close-up on Clive Owen (alternating between a standard close up from the shoulders up, extreme close up of just his face, and medium close up of his upper body) and moves around the conversation, establishing each character’s location in space relevant to Owen through a series of incidental two shots (momentarily framing Owen and one of the other characters in frame before continuing to rotate). The visual fixation on Owen’s character, who is, spoiler immediately pending, experiencing cocaine withdrawal shifts the narrative center of the scene from the medical question—whether or not the moaning man requires surgery—to the more significant question of whether or not Owen is in any condition to operate. That this kind of attention went into such a minor scene is, frankly, a miracle.