the greatest advert kodak never made...

alan doyle · Feb 8, 2009

i am sure you know best. ok it's all rubbish..
ask the people behind the office and they will tell you the best tv company in the world for original program making is HBO.

Andy K · Feb 9, 2009

alan doyle said:
ask the people behind the office and they will tell you the best tv company in the world for original program making is HBO.

I'm not sure Ricky Gervais, Stephen Merchant and the BBC would agree.

tim_walls · Feb 9, 2009

Andy K said:
I'm not sure Ricky Gervais, Stephen Merchant and the BBC would agree.

TO be fair, I think there is a certain amount of truth on both sides of the fence (dear God, not me playing the mediator - hell must've frozen over...)

In the UK, the art of the serial drama does appear to have been lost somewhat; both the BBC and Channel 4 seem to have been concentrating on film productions over recent years (C4: The Crying Game, Slumdog Millionaire, The Madness of King George, Elizabeth, East is East; BBC: The Other Boleyn Girl, Brideshead Revisited, Notes on a Scandal, in both cases to name very few.)

I presume this is at least in part because the revenue generating opportunities are that much greater with films - apart from anything else, British serials seem not to go down well in the largest English speaking market where if they do take them they seem to have a habit of re-making them (often badly - see The Office.)

That said, things seem to be stronger in UK comedy - Peep Show, The Office, The Thick Of It, all outstanding.

But, we haven't produced a decent crime drama in my opinion since Inspector Morse. I don't think anyone, anywhere has produced anything in the same league as Inspector Morse since to be honest, BUT shows like Law & Order (and its derivatives) or Bones which I find very enjoyable are uniquely a product of US television these days.

Incidentally, it's interesting to note from the HBO website that a number of their featured 'original series' productions are either BBC co-productions (The No1 Ladies Detective Agency) or straight imports from the UK (Da Ali G Show, Extras, Little Britain USA.)

One of the differenes though seems to be series length. The average UK series is about 6 half-hour episodes; longer 1-hour episodes are a relatively recent phenomenon, but series remain very short.

The standard US series seems to be about 20 hour long episodes or so. This can be a good thing and a bad thing.

On the good side, it does indeed allow greater character development and more time for characters' back stories as well as the fundamental plot.

On the bad side, it does also allow for an already thin story to be stretched to breaking point, and 'character development' which is not character development at all, it's just filler. The twin concepts of an episode which consists of 90% flashbacks to previous episodes with 5 minutes of original content to pull it together, or the episode which consists entirely of 60 minutes of "how one character broke her toenail" are unique to American drama.

My personal summary would be that I think popular drama serial making is indeed stronger in the US than the UK at the moment. BUT, on the other hand, US dramas do often suffer from the failing that they are *too long* and have *too many series* - the idea that if something is brilliant for the first 6 episodes then all you have to do is wash, rinse and repeat for another 60 episodes and it'll still be brilliant is somewhat flawed; too many US series seem to be allowed to somersault the shark backwards before they know it's the end.

wogster · Feb 9, 2009

Andy K said:
I prefer British drama to the formulaic crap that gets shipped over from the US. Shakey camera work (woo, how original) split screen (gosh, never seen that before), graphic violence (whoop de doo).

Six Feet Under was total crap, it was well named because that was where it belonged. Then you send us Lost, more crap that has no plot and is made up as it goes along. The Wire I've seen dozens of times in many different forms, nothing original there. Dexter, gosh its Monk but he's a reformed serial killer.

There was more originality in the opening credits of The Office than I've ever seen in anything that came across the Atlantic.

The problem with Lost, is that it only really had enough plot line for a single season, but as typical in US TV they like to flog the horse until it's not only dead, decomposed, fertilized the meadow and fed another generation of horses on the grass. So it got weird by season three, not even getting rescued, kinda, in season four was this dead horse spared flogging, they are into season five now, here in Canada the network that carried it, and shifted it around trying to figure out what to do with it, dropped it, so I don't know where it headed now. I kinda half followed it in seasons 3 and 4, and don't mind it going away now......

One of the greatest things was the US writers strike last year, because in order to fill their schedule the Canadian networks actually had to find some domestic programming, and some of these shows remained. Flashpoint is good, not sure how long the concept of following a SWAT team around will continue, as I can see them running out of stories after a couple of seasons, they are doing a good job of character development though, so that helps, there is a lot more plot work you can do on the back story, so as the front story wains, the back story can take precedent. The Guard, about a coast guard team doing rescues probably has the same problem, but again they are doing a lot of character development, so I expect the back story to become more important as time goes on.

John Shriver · Feb 9, 2009

Some of those slides don't look like Kodachrome to me! The art folks there just didn't get quite the right look for the images they "projected".

markbb · Feb 10, 2009

my comments were aimed at the clip and how, too often IMHO, US TV and film take the easy way out (the good guy gets the girl, everyone lives happily ever after etc.) That's not to say all US tv/film is like that nor that other countries output doesn't fall into the same category. I'm all for a bit of escapism, but sometimes reality is more challenging than the saccharine coated cop-out.

Andy K · Feb 10, 2009

wogster said:
One of the greatest things was the US writers strike last year, because in order to fill their schedule the Canadian networks actually had to find some domestic programming, and some of these shows remained.

Some of the most popular series imported to the UK in the last couple of decades have been Canadian. Maybe because we have a similar sense of humour and both 'get' irony.

For example off the top of my head, Due South, Kids In The Hall, Lexx, Stargate to name a few.

wogster · Feb 10, 2009

John Shriver said:
Some of those slides don't look like Kodachrome to me! The art folks there just didn't get quite the right look for the images they "projected".

They probably are not projected, you need a lot of light to do video production, even a dark room is relatively bright, anyone who has seen a video production, even on the brightest sunny day, the amount of supplemental lighting is quite high, it would wash out the screen. So they probably digitally added the images afterward,

2F/2F · Feb 10, 2009

wogster said:
They probably are not projected, you need a lot of light to do video production, even a dark room is relatively bright, anyone who has seen a video production, even on the brightest sunny day, the amount of supplemental lighting is quite high, it would wash out the screen. So they probably digitally added the images afterward,

Pay people thousands upon thousands (upon thousands) of dollars to do something that could just be done in camera quite easily? I think not. Shooting projected slides is not a difficult situation compared to some. They probably paid one person a grunt's wage to pull off the carousel and put it back on at the first frame after each take as opposed to paying to digitally insert the slides, and paid another person a better wage to hold a Sekonic Studio Deluxe up in front of one of the slides and shout out an f stop to the camera operator. At any rate, far cheaper and less nonsensical than digitally inserting the slides.

Not to mention the fact that this if this is a studio-shot drama series, as opposed to a documentary/reality show, it is likely shot on 35mm film, not video.

wogster · Feb 10, 2009

tim_walls said:
TO be fair, I think there is a certain amount of truth on both sides of the fence (dear God, not me playing the mediator - hell must've frozen over...)

In the UK, the art of the serial drama does appear to have been lost somewhat; both the BBC and Channel 4 seem to have been concentrating on film productions over recent years (C4: The Crying Game, Slumdog Millionaire, The Madness of King George, Elizabeth, East is East; BBC: The Other Boleyn Girl, Brideshead Revisited, Notes on a Scandal, in both cases to name very few.)

I presume this is at least in part because the revenue generating opportunities are that much greater with films - apart from anything else, British serials seem not to go down well in the largest English speaking market where if they do take them they seem to have a habit of re-making them (often badly - see The Office.)

That said, things seem to be stronger in UK comedy - Peep Show, The Office, The Thick Of It, all outstanding.

But, we haven't produced a decent crime drama in my opinion since Inspector Morse. I don't think anyone, anywhere has produced anything in the same league as Inspector Morse since to be honest, BUT shows like Law & Order (and its derivatives) or Bones which I find very enjoyable are uniquely a product of US television these days.

Incidentally, it's interesting to note from the HBO website that a number of their featured 'original series' productions are either BBC co-productions (The No1 Ladies Detective Agency) or straight imports from the UK (Da Ali G Show, Extras, Little Britain USA.)

One of the differenes though seems to be series length. The average UK series is about 6 half-hour episodes; longer 1-hour episodes are a relatively recent phenomenon, but series remain very short.

The standard US series seems to be about 20 hour long episodes or so. This can be a good thing and a bad thing.

On the good side, it does indeed allow greater character development and more time for characters' back stories as well as the fundamental plot.

On the bad side, it does also allow for an already thin story to be stretched to breaking point, and 'character development' which is not character development at all, it's just filler. The twin concepts of an episode which consists of 90% flashbacks to previous episodes with 5 minutes of original content to pull it together, or the episode which consists entirely of 60 minutes of "how one character broke her toenail" are unique to American drama.

My personal summary would be that I think popular drama serial making is indeed stronger in the US than the UK at the moment. BUT, on the other hand, US dramas do often suffer from the failing that they are *too long* and have *too many series* - the idea that if something is brilliant for the first 6 episodes then all you have to do is wash, rinse and repeat for another 60 episodes and it'll still be brilliant is somewhat flawed; too many US series seem to be allowed to somersault the shark backwards before they know it's the end.

The hour long 22 episode American television series is done for several reasons, one is that they can replace the front/end credits with more advertisements, and you need fewer fresh ideas then you would with a shorter program and season. In Canada a relatively new idea is the mid-season replacement, it used to be that you would throw in a few repeats around Christmas when nobody is watching anyway, they are all at the mall spending money they don't have. And then after the season finale you would show repeats until September, because few people watched TV in the summer, when it was nice out. Now they often add some new shows later in the season, to compete better with the cable channels, and service those people who seem to be inside watching TV, even when the weather is nice.

Unfortunately character development is something they often do not do, when was the last time you saw on a show where a character was missing, because they were on vacation, when that vacation wasn't part of a plot line. Ever notice how many American crime dramas where the same police officer characters seem to work 24 hours a day, seven days a week. This is also why so few characters are married, unless the spouse is part of the story line. Mind you "Columbo" managed to go years without ever introducing his wife.

This is one of the things I have noticed with some of the newer Canadian shows, the characters have off duty time, and families and lives, which are sometimes as much of the program as the on-duty story line, this filler material allows them to develop the characters more completely and because their may be one on duty story per episode, the back stories mean the program will have a longer life span.

Andy K · Feb 11, 2009

wogster said:
This is one of the things I have noticed with some of the newer Canadian shows, the characters have off duty time, and families and lives, which are sometimes as much of the program as the on-duty story line, this filler material allows them to develop the characters more completely and because their may be one on duty story per episode, the back stories mean the program will have a longer life span.

Old shows now do this too. In Britain 'The Bill' used to be a really good cops and crime drama. Now it is just a crappy soap.

the greatest advert kodak never made...

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