The TV Plan

The democratization of digital cinema is merely half of a revolution. Everyone is so hyped up on the fact that anyone can make a movie for practically no money that they become shortsighted to the other possibilities. The next logical step is television.

Since the 1946 film and television have been at odds with each other. This is primarily due to the arrogance of the film industry. For over 50 years these two mediums have come to exist as islands unto themselves. TV does its thing while the movies do their thing and never the twain shall meet…or so we thought.

It seems that today people are hipping to the fact that film and TV are not as different as we thought. The traditional three-camera sitcom has given way to an abundance of high quality single-camera shows like “The Sopranos”, “Freaks and Geeks” and “Veronica Mars.” It has come to the point where a laugh track is just as anachronistic to a TV program as a musical number is to a film.

In spite of all of this there are essentially no independently produced television programs out there. Film schools are filled to the brim with people trying to express themselves with digital cameras and laptop computers yet almost none of them even consider TV as a possible outlet for their passion. Thanks to technology it is now just as easy to make a TV program, as it is to make a movie. It is with that in mind that I propose the formation of a collective for the purpose of creating independently produced television programming.