Things have changed, and changed drastically. It used to be that there was a clear separation between television and film production, and television and film talent. Television was clearly the inferior medium, and someone crossing over the divide into film was a big deal. If you were a fan of Ryan Gosling or Johnny Depp or George Clooney, it was safe to ignore most of the work that they did in television. Sure, it was fun to look up the old episodes of "Breaker High" and "21 Jump Street," but you didn't treat the performances as anything on the same level as what they did later on in the movies.
In 2019, the divide between film and television is almost totally gone. In fact, I think there's a good case to be made that prestige acting gigs are more consistently found on television and web series than they are in the movies. "Bohemian Rhapsody" may have gotten Ramy Malek an Oscar, but there's no question that "Mr. Robot" made him a star. Most steadily working actors these days are constantly going from one to the other. Take Dan Stevens, who simultaneously starred in the FX series "Legion" and appeared in seven different films over the same time period, including starring roles in "Apostle," "The Man Who Invented Christmas," and "Beauty and the Beast."
So if I want to catch up on the work of someone like Jessie Buckley, who was fantastic in "Chernobyl" and last year's indie film "Beast," I need to pay attention to her television roles. She's had major parts in the BBC "War & Peace" an "The Woman in White" miniseries, and the BBC/FX series "Taboo" with Tom Hardy. There are still actors who start in the movies and stay there, like "Crazy Rich Asians" newbie Henry Golding, but they're rare birds these days. His co-star Constance Wu made that massive faux pas a few months ago when she complained about her sitcom being renewed, thus limiting her ability to take on other work. However, it's easy to sympathize when most TV no longer requires actors to commit to a show to that degree.
And it isn't just actors, of course. Cary Joji Fukunaga has done his share of features, but his best work is arguably the first season of "True Detective." Ditto Jean-Marc Vallee and "Big Little Lies." We're a bit past the point where the streaming services were getting behind things like Baz Luhrmann's "The Get Down" and Woody Allen's "Crisis in Six Scenes," but nobody is batting an eye at Jon Favreau making "The Mandalorian" for Disney Plus or Ava DuVernay making "When They See Us" for Netflix. It still feels like a bit of a step down, when David Fincher is unable to get any project off the ground except Netflix's "Mindhunter," but it's not like he's expected to only be a TV director from here on out.
However, the new elevation of longform television does worry me a little, because series and miniseries have been more difficult to track and access than films. The older ones tend to disappear into the ether quicker. There are so many cases of series that seem to drop off the face of the earth, never put on home media, or only licensed piecemeal. With the industry in so much turmoil, and content libraries changing hands so often, there are always titles that end up falling through the cracks. "Veronica Mars," for instance, disappeared from streaming for a while until Hulu acquired it in the lead-up to the revival.
Also, as television gets more prominent, movies are feeling the squeeze. It worries me that we're seeing major auteurs going many years between projects, often devoted to raising funds. It worries me that the rom-com revival is happening on Netflix, and that big budget films are so absurdly lopsided toward genre fare. We're not at the point where the theatrical business model is in danger of collapse, but it's certainly changing. There are certain genres and audiences that the movies seem to have simply abandoned.
But television hasn't. And the talent goes where the work is.
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