While Netflix might not be the only guilty party when virtually every major streaming service trots out the same verbatim line ad nauseam, it’s nonetheless infuriating to hear the producers, actors, directors, or writers behind a TV series saying “we’re not making a show, it’s a six/eight/10/12/delete where applicable-hour movie” nearly every time a major episodic original rolls around.
Not to be pedantic, but for some reason these creatives seem incredibly averse to saying they made something for TV, even though that’s precisely what they did. Secret Invasion director Ali Selim was one of the more recent offenders and we all know how that turned out, with Stranger Things executive producer and occasional director Shawn Levy hopping on the bandwagon in an interview with Total Film when hyping the long-awaited fifth and final season.
“There’s no way to be contiguous with season 4, and not, frankly, expand scale and depth. It’s major, major, cinematic storytelling that happens to be called a TV series. Stranger Things 5 is as big as any of the biggest movies that we see.”
Again, not to split hairs, but will Stranger Things 5 play in theaters? Bar a few exceptions, no it won’t. Is it split up into episodes? Indeed it is. Does it tell a season-long arc indebted to what came before across several previous runs of shared storytelling? Of course it does. Was it made with the intention of being watched at home first and foremost, with a handheld device the secondary format? Yep. By that logic, then it’s not something “that happens to be called a TV series,” it’s a TV series.