A combination of television’s ongoing Golden Age and the streaming era may have undoubtedly combined to make episodic storytelling more cinematic than ever, but at the end of the day it’s still TV. Don’t say that to Shawn Levy, though, because he can’t seem to reconcile with that fact.
The executive producer and occasional director of Netflix’s behemoth Stranger Things has repeatedly offered that the cultural juggernaut is cinema, overlooking the obvious fact it’s split into individual chapters that coexist to form an overarching story arc commonly referred to as “a season.”
And yet, despite his latest offering All the Light We Cannot See being listed among the streaming service’s “Series” section and consisting of four episodes, in an interview with People he once again couldn’t wrap his head around the concept of directing a TV show.
“I wanted to approach it like a long movie, in this case, a four-hour movie. It looks unlike anything I’ve ever made. The performances have a very different tone than anything I’ve made. It’s a straight-up period drama.”
While the production values, cinematography, visual effects, and no doubt the budget are easily comparable with a feature film, if All the Light We See wanted to be a movie then it probably would have been seeing as the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel won’t have been short of suitors since first being published.
Levy is currently working on Deadpool 3, which is very much a movie because it’s a single contained tale set to be released exclusively in theaters, but he’ll also be directing an episode of Stranger Things 5, which is a TV show. Just don’t expect him to say that out loud when it finally arrives, though.