Are Those TV Movies Really Inferior to Theatrical Releases?

Are cinema and TV movies not only separate but unequal?

Some people think so. Take Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert, a couple of snappy guys who put out a crackerjack movie-review show that remains the standard for the genre. If only they’d ease up on gratuitously slapping television, the medium that put them on easy street and keeps them there.

Their putdown of the small screen usually goes something like this: A movie is flat, uninteresting, without redeeming value and the product of minor minds? Then it’s exactly like a TV movie. An actor is a block of wood? Then he must be some TV actor in over his head with the big boys while trying to step up in class.

From their comments, it’s obvious that Siskel and Ebert watch no TV beyond the show that bears their names. So their denigration seems to be misplaced when you consider what they encounter “at the movies.” You know, the cinema, where probably 75% of the new releases are creative stinkers that expand pollution, not entertainment?

This anti-TV bias also extends to the print world, where Leonard Maltin’s annual “TV Movie and Video Guide” employs separate ratings systems for theatrical and TV movies. They remind you of segregated drinking fountains for whites and blacks.

Maltin’s book rates theatrical movies by stars (four stars being the highest rating) while designating TV movies generally as either “below average,” “average” or “above average.” Thus, for example, “Promise,” an incredibly good TV movie that ran on CBS in 1986, is rated here as merely “above average” at the end of a review that also labels it an “outstanding special.”

“Outstanding” for TV, apparently, but only “above average” compared with theatrical movies. Oh, please!

TV automatically inferior to cinema? Hardly. They’re separate, all right, but also equal--equally bad and equally good. It’s true that “Lawrence of Arabia” would have lost more than just a little as a movie of the week. But it’s also true that the best of TV is as much an art form as the best of the big screen.

If NBC’s “Casablanca” with David Soul fell, uh, somewhat short of the original, for example, so did the theatrical movie version of “Pennies From Heaven” with Steve Martin yield infinitely fewer pleasures than the earlier BBC version with Bob Hoskins that aired on PBS.

As timid as TV surely is, moreover, it is still generally bolder than theatrical movies when it comes to dramatizing controversial topics. And what about accuracy? Yes, the fibbing that occurs in some TV docudramas is offensive, but no more so than the fictionalizing of some theatrical movies that are sold as factual.

Although “Born on the Fourth of July” is a swell film whose scope demands a big screen and a big sound unavailable on TV, for example, it’s unlikely that the largest of its fictional embellishments on the life of Ron Kovic would have been tolerated had it been a TV movie. Nor would the obvious revisionist history of “Mississippi Burning” have made the final cut as a TV movie despite the film’s other fine attributes.

Theatrical movies are not necessarily even the first on the scene.

Nineteen years before the release of the now-running “Mountains of Moon,” an excellently rendered NBC/BBC/Time-Life miniseries titled “The Search for the Nile” offered a far more vivid, layered and compelling picture of explorer Sir Richard Burton--despite the small screen’s limits in portraying Africa--than the one now available in movie theaters.

Featuring Oscar-winning performances by Daniel Day-Lewis and Brenda Fricker, “My Left Foot” did not reach theaters until almost 20 years after PBS first aired Craig Gilbert’s brilliant documentary “The Triumph of Christy Brown.” The movie is stunning work. But the documentary film celebrated the accomplishments and captured the spirit and humanity of this remarkable Irishman in a different and equally stirring and valid way.

Despite the presence of Meryl Streep, meanwhile, the recent theatrical movie “She Devil” was banal not only in its own right, but especially so in comparison to the scintillating earlier BBC production, “The Life and Loves of a She Devil,” that was based on the same novel and aired on the Arts & Entertainment network.

The fact is that, percentage-wise, TV soars as often as theatrical movies, stage, music and books. TV just seems to be trailing the pack because of its pervasiveness. Most of us don’t see every movie or play, hear every song or read every book. For better or for worse, however, we do spend a much greater portion of our lives in front of the small screen.

Should TV improve? Of course, just as the other arts should. So, enough with the TV abuse, already. The balcony is closed.