Summary
For what it’s worth, I like The Boys as well, butcool CGI and stunts aside, its cinematography isn’t what makes it special. In fact, it looks a lot like every other straight-to-streaming show I hate: utterly uninteresting and poorly lit. It’s always the same excuse when showrunners talk about why their show looks like that. It’s gritty, it’s realistic, blah blah. I am sick of hearing it. I am sick of every TV show looking the same, being colour-graded the same, using the same shot lengths and angles and camera movements.
That’s why I couldn’t help but groan when watching the new trailer for Amazon’s Fallout series. It’s a pretty faithful interpretation of what Fallout would look like as a TV show, and it doesn’t look particularly egregious in its writing or shot composition. It shows a vault dweller leaving her home behind to explore the wasteland that awaits outside, encountering cities, mutated beasts and maybe the Brotherhood of Steel. There’s also a ghoul and a dog. It’s all very Fallout.
But my god, it looks just like everything else on Prime Video. It’s got the same three-second shot lengths, the same dull colour grading, and the same angles and panning that every streaming show uses these days. I wish that more directors were getting the opportunity to be creative with the television shows they direct, but the trends and styles that audiences are used to will always be safer bets than the evocative worlds of Euphoria, Dark, or Mindhunter. Plus, it’s faster to make shows when you aren’t being too artsy-fartsy about it.
I love artsy-fartsy interpretations of scripts, though. Too often, ‘realism’ is used to excuse a lack of care for aesthetics. Very rarely do any of these generic-looking television shows make me do that thing where I gasp and say, “Damn, that was a great shot.” Mindhunter is grounded in realism, and it’s still astonishingly beautiful. Euphoria is about high schoolers, and it’s still vibrant with moments of abstraction. In the age of content and hastily churned-out shows that can get cancelled for no reason at all, it’s all the more crucial that these shows be cost-efficient in order to make as much profit as possible. And too often, cost efficiency is at odds with aesthetic considerations.
Here are some shows that actually look good.
I’m not saying everything on streaming platforms is bad. I’ve just used a bunch of shows on streaming platforms as examples of actual solid artistic direction. But the majority of the stuff that’s pushed out all have a specific look and feel, and I’m sick of it. Fallout is just the latest to join the ranks of generic-looking TV shows, and I’m not surprised. I just wish the studios that made these shows were brave enough to take big creative swings.
