All TV can do is capture the spirit of a book because the medium is so utterly different. But I'm very grateful for the readers that Masterpiece Theatre has undoubtedly brought me.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
Films for TV have to be much closer to the book, mainly because the objective with a TV movie that translates literature is to get the audience, after seeing this version, to pick up the book and read it themselves. My attitude is that TV can never really be any form of art, because it serves audience expectations.
I certainly grew up seeing more movies and television than I read books, but when it came time to do the thing itself you don't have to hire a lot of people to sit down and write a book, so that was the story-telling medium that was available to me.
Television and film are such streamlined story mediums. You can't really meander about, whereas a novel is an interior experience.
Television has some lovely aspects to it - and some ghastly aspects - but the theater itself was a wonderful invention.
TV is a writer's medium.
I didn't watch much TV as a kid and I don' t watch it now. I don' t find anything beautiful or unique to the medium, and the only thing you can do on TV that you can't do in film is make a continuing story - which is so cool!
The beauty of cinema is that it can do some things that novels just can't.
There's no doubt that some of the greatest films ever made have come from the theater. It's all a matter of finding a way to make the theater experience watchable on film.
TV is such a great medium in what it can do in terms of enlightening an audience. We can really inspire and teach people about other people. That's a powerful tool, and that's something that the arts has always been capable of doing.
TV does a thing that film can never do. It takes you to a place that no novel written after the late 19th century can. You can just go through people's lives; it's like a marriage.