Susan Gerstein's Blog - Posts Tagged "the-night-of"
"The Night Of"
I have been watching the giant cultural shift that had taken place in recent years away from movies toward television with as much fascination as I watch the other momentous shifts in nearly all aspects of our lives; for those of us who have been around for as long as I have, much that surrounds us is often unrecognizable.
When young, I used to be an avid lover of movies, which, at their best, were riveting and emotionally involving visual entertainment. Television was considered a mindless pastime. There were the three networks dominating the field, with a sprinkling of smaller, local stations. With the rarest of exceptions, they provided cookie-cutter sitcoms, variety shows, and news programming, always, always interrupted by the ever-present commercials. Mostly I avoided it. Then there was, starting in the early sixties, the sole alternative: WNET Channel 13, New York’s only non-commercial station, that did provide such never-to-be-forgotten programming as the “Play of the Week”, an actual taped Broadway or off-Broadway performance that was then broadcast each evening for a full week; thoughtful, intelligent talk-shows, children’s programming, art films. It was unique then, and eventually became part of the Public Broadcasting System. While it remains non-commercial to this day, it has long ceased to be the beloved local cultural forum that it had been in those early days.
This remained the general order of things until the major shift occurred: cable television made its appearance barely perceptibly. Dismissed at first by the major networks as an unimportant sideshow, it had, slowly at first, then with increasing rapidity taken over the field, upending the status quo. In the last couple of decades cable channels and streaming services became the dominant presence in providing programming, pushing the networks into the background. The pioneer in this was HBO, at its inception a provider, for a subscription fee, of relatively recent movies on the television screen in the comfort of your home, then becoming a producer of its own shows, still of no major consequence. In 1999 however, it started to broadcast the “The Sopranos” and a sort of history was made. “The Sopranos” was a new kind of “serial”: seriously written, well produced, well acted, it garnered rave reviews and an audience that swelled as the first season developed. The subject matter involved the travails of a mid-level Mafia boss, his family life, his psychological issues and his brutal “profession”. The show continued for some eight seasons, ‘til 2007, to great acclaim. I did not succumb; I still felt, -- still do in fact – that the investment of time and intellectual energy into an ongoing, multi-season saga is one I cannot afford, for in my life it is a choice between it and reading books. However, after “The Sopranos” broke ground, there were many such serial dramas developed on various cable channels, HBO continuing to produce some of what had been considered the best of them. Subscription-maintained and commercial-free, it had the luxury of developing serious projects. According to reviews, information from people in my life who are viewers, and the very few instances that I would try to sneak a look at an episode or two of something much touted, over the past decade and a half many of these series had been in fact superior to movies. Top writers, directors and actors flocked to them, and a whole culture of watching “good” television grew up around them. Then came the next development: the on-demand availability of the component episodes in a series and, therefore, the possibility of “binge watching” when one could see two, five, or all eight episodes of a season in one sitting, at a time of one’s choosing. “The Wire”, “Breaking Bad”, "Mad Men" and their ilk were supposed to be superior entertainment, sort of the current equivalent of the 19th century novels that were published serially at first and then only at the conclusion of the serial form appeared as bound books. I began to feel that I was missing something; but the only one of these high-concept shows I managed to watch for the first of its many seasons was “Game of Thrones”, about which I had written earlier – and that experience only reinforced my feeling that ultimately, I was wasting my time.
This finally brings me to “The Night Of”. Someone whose opinion I trust called me and urged me with some fervor to under no circumstances miss the eight-episode show of that title, recently concluded on HBO but available still on demand. None of my arguments prevailed: my informant pointed out that I can watch at leisure on my own time, that it is free of commercials, that it is a one-season event, that it will not go on indefinitely, (one of my usual objections), and that missing it I would miss something shattering and brilliant. I succumbed. Last week I freed up enough time to see first two, then three, and again three segments. I can only say that I am deeply grateful to my informant. This is a show I would urge anyone interested in film, in any version of it, to see. On the face of it, it is a police procedural, but that is like saying that “The Magic Mountain” is a hospital drama. Written by Richard Price whose superb novels, in a similar vein, transcend the genre, directed by Steven Zaillian and acted with uniform brilliance by a large group of actors each of whose characters will long haunt me. John Turturro, Riz Ahmed, Bill Camp, Jeannie Berlin, Michael Kenneth Williams to name only a few of the large cast kept me riveted from the first frame to the last fadeout. I understood how the leisure afforded to the creators of the show by the eight hours they had at their disposal to tell their tale made it a different, perhaps better way of telling it than the usual two, perhaps three hours of a traditional film. It did indeed come close to the experience of reading.
I don’t believe that I am converted to watching lengthy, protracted serial shows on television in principle, but I am extremely glad I saw this one. I would be the poorer to have missed it. I would as enthusiastically persuade anyone I cared about to see it as my personal expert was in persuading me, and I am grateful to her.
When young, I used to be an avid lover of movies, which, at their best, were riveting and emotionally involving visual entertainment. Television was considered a mindless pastime. There were the three networks dominating the field, with a sprinkling of smaller, local stations. With the rarest of exceptions, they provided cookie-cutter sitcoms, variety shows, and news programming, always, always interrupted by the ever-present commercials. Mostly I avoided it. Then there was, starting in the early sixties, the sole alternative: WNET Channel 13, New York’s only non-commercial station, that did provide such never-to-be-forgotten programming as the “Play of the Week”, an actual taped Broadway or off-Broadway performance that was then broadcast each evening for a full week; thoughtful, intelligent talk-shows, children’s programming, art films. It was unique then, and eventually became part of the Public Broadcasting System. While it remains non-commercial to this day, it has long ceased to be the beloved local cultural forum that it had been in those early days.
This remained the general order of things until the major shift occurred: cable television made its appearance barely perceptibly. Dismissed at first by the major networks as an unimportant sideshow, it had, slowly at first, then with increasing rapidity taken over the field, upending the status quo. In the last couple of decades cable channels and streaming services became the dominant presence in providing programming, pushing the networks into the background. The pioneer in this was HBO, at its inception a provider, for a subscription fee, of relatively recent movies on the television screen in the comfort of your home, then becoming a producer of its own shows, still of no major consequence. In 1999 however, it started to broadcast the “The Sopranos” and a sort of history was made. “The Sopranos” was a new kind of “serial”: seriously written, well produced, well acted, it garnered rave reviews and an audience that swelled as the first season developed. The subject matter involved the travails of a mid-level Mafia boss, his family life, his psychological issues and his brutal “profession”. The show continued for some eight seasons, ‘til 2007, to great acclaim. I did not succumb; I still felt, -- still do in fact – that the investment of time and intellectual energy into an ongoing, multi-season saga is one I cannot afford, for in my life it is a choice between it and reading books. However, after “The Sopranos” broke ground, there were many such serial dramas developed on various cable channels, HBO continuing to produce some of what had been considered the best of them. Subscription-maintained and commercial-free, it had the luxury of developing serious projects. According to reviews, information from people in my life who are viewers, and the very few instances that I would try to sneak a look at an episode or two of something much touted, over the past decade and a half many of these series had been in fact superior to movies. Top writers, directors and actors flocked to them, and a whole culture of watching “good” television grew up around them. Then came the next development: the on-demand availability of the component episodes in a series and, therefore, the possibility of “binge watching” when one could see two, five, or all eight episodes of a season in one sitting, at a time of one’s choosing. “The Wire”, “Breaking Bad”, "Mad Men" and their ilk were supposed to be superior entertainment, sort of the current equivalent of the 19th century novels that were published serially at first and then only at the conclusion of the serial form appeared as bound books. I began to feel that I was missing something; but the only one of these high-concept shows I managed to watch for the first of its many seasons was “Game of Thrones”, about which I had written earlier – and that experience only reinforced my feeling that ultimately, I was wasting my time.
This finally brings me to “The Night Of”. Someone whose opinion I trust called me and urged me with some fervor to under no circumstances miss the eight-episode show of that title, recently concluded on HBO but available still on demand. None of my arguments prevailed: my informant pointed out that I can watch at leisure on my own time, that it is free of commercials, that it is a one-season event, that it will not go on indefinitely, (one of my usual objections), and that missing it I would miss something shattering and brilliant. I succumbed. Last week I freed up enough time to see first two, then three, and again three segments. I can only say that I am deeply grateful to my informant. This is a show I would urge anyone interested in film, in any version of it, to see. On the face of it, it is a police procedural, but that is like saying that “The Magic Mountain” is a hospital drama. Written by Richard Price whose superb novels, in a similar vein, transcend the genre, directed by Steven Zaillian and acted with uniform brilliance by a large group of actors each of whose characters will long haunt me. John Turturro, Riz Ahmed, Bill Camp, Jeannie Berlin, Michael Kenneth Williams to name only a few of the large cast kept me riveted from the first frame to the last fadeout. I understood how the leisure afforded to the creators of the show by the eight hours they had at their disposal to tell their tale made it a different, perhaps better way of telling it than the usual two, perhaps three hours of a traditional film. It did indeed come close to the experience of reading.
I don’t believe that I am converted to watching lengthy, protracted serial shows on television in principle, but I am extremely glad I saw this one. I would be the poorer to have missed it. I would as enthusiastically persuade anyone I cared about to see it as my personal expert was in persuading me, and I am grateful to her.
