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Television has taken its place as an art form, thanks to an era of acclaimed shows from The Sopranos to Game of Thrones. This ascent has stimulated interest in older TV series. In 2012, for example, Heather Havrilesky published an astute appreciation of Dallas as a distillation of 1980s America, comparing it favorably to its relatively meaningless 21" century remake. As much as anything in the review itself, it's a sign of the times that it was published not on a personal blog or even a film magazine but in The New York Times Magazine (June 3,2012 issue).
In addition to landmark shows, there are technological factors driving TV's rehabilitation. DVD releases erase the biggest mark against the medium-commercials, and the edits made to cram in more of them. Of course, TVs themselves have gotten bigger and better, and now that film (celluloid) seems endangered and our theatres increasingly play host to high-def video and 3-D eyesores, the television dramas of the 1960s and 1970s seem increasingly cinematic.
This makes sense, because as TV switched to color broadcasts in the 1960s, the two industries overlapped. According to The Hollywood Story, as theatre box office declined in the 1960s, movie companies "expanded into other areas of entertainment such as recording, publishing and, especially, TV production."1
It gets trickier in the late 1970s and 1980s, as TV producers learned they could cut corners. This damaged the legacy of some shows. The 1987-1988 series Max Headroom is a sharp satire of the television society, but it was shot on video, and looks it.
It remains to be seen whether today's TV critics will become renowned creators of TV and film, but nevertheless, the current boom in TV criticism bears similarities to the French Nouvelle Vague of the 1950s:
* The film critics of Cahiers du Cinema attended marathon screenings at Paris's Cinémathèque Française; today's TV buffs are known for "binge-watching" worthy series.
* The French critics played offense, boldly asserting cinema as art. Today, it's routine to compare the best serialized television to Dickens and Balzac, writers originally published in serial form.
* Before sanctifying world directors such as Fritz Lang and Ingmar Bergman (and joining them), the French New Wave insisted on auteur status for Hollywood...