The following conversation was recorded on a November 2017 plane flight from Los Angeles to Newark.
TOM: Movies have melodramas. TV has soaps. A Summer Place versus
This is Us. Trouble is, I’ve only seen the pilot for This Is Us.
CAROL: You liked the pilot.
TOM: It was very ingenious.
CAROL: The show’s very soapy now. It feels like daytime.
TOM: A Summer Place had its soap elements—the sex-hating mom,
the sex-starved young couple, the drunken father, the adulterous romance.
All just on the edge of camp. But with such great colors.
CAROL: And the music. One of the great songs. One of the great scores.
You don’t get that kind of sweep on TV.
TOM: And the auteurship. It’s Delmer Daves. You could say he’s the poor man’s
Douglas Sirk, except he’s got his own thing. Parrish. Susan Slade.
They all go together, like a trilogy.
CAROL: Those old movies that we treasure, watch again and again, like A Summer Place,
like The Fountainhead, they’re very operatic. On the other hand, if you can take ten
hours to tell a story…you can get cliffhangers. Longer scenes.
TOM: The scenes on Downton Abbey weren’t long. They seemed to end
just as they were getting started. Four lines of dialogue and out.
CAROL: People are getting driven to TV. The more these franchise
spectacles dominate movies, with their one-note or no-note characters, the
more people crave the opposite.
TOM: And then the TV guys load up on the characters. Like The Deuce.
CAROL: Too many characters. You don’t know where to look.
Or whether to look away.
TOM: It’s like the opposite of old TV—something to help you recover from
a hard day at the office.
CAROL: Reality TV—that’s what passes for escapism today. People have actually
said to me, when I ask them why they watch The Bachelor, “So I don’t
have to think about anything.” I sort of feel that way about the history lessons,
like LBJ or Darkest Hour. They make you want to go home
and watch Curb. Or eat ice cream. Like an after-school snack.
TOM: Old TV had its share of history lessons. Roots. The Winds of War.
They got huge audiences. Event television. As opposed to the general run. Remember
Paul Klein’s theory? When there were only the three networks. People watched
the “least objectionable program.”
CAROL: I love movies where the writer has a voice: Sorkin, Noah Baumbach, the Coens.
But when I wake up at night, I don’t want to hear that from TV. I don’t need originality,
I don’t need to be challenged, I want something bland and soothing, something that will
help me get back to sleep. Like This Is Us.
TOM: I hear Jason Katims is taking that over.
FLIGHT ATTENDANT: Something to drink?
TOM: Orange juice, please.
FLIGHT ATTENDANT: Ice or no ice?
TOM: Ice, please.
CAROL: Water, no ice. Jason Katims, yes, he’s a master of the modern soap.
TOM: Would you call Friday Night Lights a soap? It wasn’t exaggerated.
It had very few false notes. And I think he only wrote for a couple of seasons.
But then Parenthood. Whatever you call it, it was fine.
CAROL: But would you recognize his voice?
TOM: No, and these writers don’t necessarily translate to movies.
Sorkin did, but who else? Not David Kelley.
CAROL: Much as we love him.
TOM: You know what’s the best history lesson? Mindhunter.
That serial killers didn’t use to be a thing. That the FBI wasn’t into profiling.
Until fairly late in the 20th Century. But you couldn’t watch that, basically.
CAROL: I had to leave the room.
TOM: The older I get, the more I react to painful things on screen.
Especially on TV. People getting limbs sawed off. Or even something minor,
like hitting their head against something. Alcohol being poured into a wound.
Not sure why that is. Gunfights, though, they don’t bother me. Or fist fights.
They just seem staged. Any action scene in a movie. I drift. The stuff isn’t
really happening. When actors are talking to each other, that’s really happening.
CAROL: You don’t need palate cleansers as much as I do.
TOM: Sure I do. Curb, that’s the ultimate palate cleanser. Vice Principals.
Because Danny McBride is so great to watch. I think he’s like my favorite actor.
CAROL: On TV.
TOM: Yeah, as the star of a movie? I don’t think I’d necessarily look forward to that.
CAROL: All these abusive characters in movies, I need a TV respite when I get home.
TOM: Wait till we see Wonder.
CAROL: We’ll probably want to come home and see something nasty.
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