10 great films about television

Best of frenemies, the relationship between cinema and television has always been… complicated. The goggle box has a habit of keeping the silver screen on the defensive, intermittently setting off alarm bells in Tinseltown about the imminent death of the seventh art. In the early 1950s, TV was seen as a veritable doomsday device for Hollywood executives, leading to ever-more imaginative means of enticing people out of their living rooms and back into the picture palaces. Thus, expansive new formats like 3D, VistaVision and Cinerama were born.

Beginning in the late 1990s, shows like The Sopranos, Sex and the City, and The West Wing ushered in a new golden age of prestige television, once again spooking studio bosses, as big-screen names began flirting with the creative possibilities of long-form storytelling.

In TV’s infancy, the UK was ahead of the US when it came to popular adoption, with 54,000 licensed television receivers dotted across the country by 1947. It didn’t last long. Just a year later, there were estimated to be 2 million TV sets in the United States, growing to 13 million by 1951. In a short time, television had become the 20th century’s preeminent means of disseminating information, for better or worse.

Here are 10 great films that put the small screen on the big screen.

Director: Tex Avery

Animation iconoclast Tex Avery might be best known for shepherding the likes of Daffy Duck, Droopy and Porky Pig to the screen, but he also had a sideline as a futurist, directing a handful of shorts that put emergent technologies in the satirical crosshairs. Following The House of Tomorrow (1949) and Car of Tomorrow (1951), Avery turned his attention to the television set, then in the decade-long throes of saturating American homes.

Packing more than two dozen sight gags into its seven minutes, T.V. of Tomorrow offers “modern solutions” to the problems then plaguing the idiot box. An anti-aircraft gun built into one set eliminates distortion from passing airplanes, while a live electrician housed in the cabinet of another does away with costly repair bills. For the 1950s housewife, there’s the hope of a combo TV-washing machine, and for peeping toms a screen in the shape of a keyhole. With westerns on every channel, the film ends with the promise of something new: the first live transmission from Mars. As the red planet expands into view, an extraterrestrial TV signal is picked up… showing another western.

Director: Frank Tashlin

Frank Tashlin was a colleague of Tex Avery’s in the animation department at Warner Brothers, where the duo put out some of the greatest cartoons in the history of the medium. While Avery never made a feature film, and barely dipped his toe into live-action filmmaking, Tashlin was quick to lend his signature Looney Tunes energy to the big screen. In 1956, he scored one of his biggest hits with The Girl Can’t Help It, a rock’n’roll industry satire starring pneumatic pin-up Jayne Mansfield.

A year later, Mansfield and Tashlin re-teamed for one of their finest films, an elaborately meta, fourth-wall busting burlesque on television and the relationship between art and commerce. Rock Hunter (Tony Randall) is the Madison Avenue adman on a downward spiral who hits the big time when he crosses paths with Mansfield’s TV starlet. Cue some mutual back-scratching: she’ll sign the contract for his lipstick commercial if he pretends to be her new fella for the publicity. Tashlin’s love-hate relationship with the boob tube is on full display, most notably in a mid-film intermission in which the screen shrinks in size: “We want all you TV fans to feel at home and not forget the thrill you get watching television on your big 21-inch screens.”

Director: Sidney Lumet

“The only truth you know is what you get over this tube. This tube is the gospel! The ultimate revelation! This tube can make or break presidents, popes, prime ministers. It is the most awesome goddam force in the whole godless world.” So proclaims Howard Beale (Peter Finch) in one of his nightly meltdowns. He was “a mandarin of television; the grand old man of news” before his fortunes began to decline. When he’s fired with only two-weeks’ notice, the esteemed anchorman announces that he’s going to kill himself on air in a week’s time. Suddenly, his ratings soar.

“I see Howard Beale as a latter-day prophet, a messianic figure inveighing against the hypocrisies of our times,” says Faye Dunaway’s exec – a showrunner who smells ad revenue in the commingling of news and entertainment, giving Beale his own live show on which to rant and rave. If the apocalyptic fixations on the industry’s mercenary number-crunching and power-consolidating machinations can’t help but feel a little quaint in the face of our current media landscape, director Sidney Lumet brings texture to the bloviating force of Paddy Chayefsky’s Academy Award-winning screenplay. Network certainly looks the business, and took three of the four big acting prizes on Oscar night.

Director: Albert Brooks

You might not think it from the scourge of cheap schedule-fillers that have proliferated since the millennium, but reality television once had nobler ambitions. In Britain, Michael Apted and Paul Almond’s ongoing Up series (1964 to 2019) followed a dozen or so subjects from childhood to their early-60s, while Stateside, An American Family (1973) did what its title suggests, capturing the everyday life of a Californian nuclear unit.

It’s the latter that served as inspiration for Albert Brooks’ feature debut, a scabrous reality TV satire two decades ahead of The Truman Show (1998). Boasting one of the all-time great movie trailers, Real Life sees Brooks playing a version of himself – a filmmaker who hopes to document a year in the life of the “perfect” American family. Naturally, chaos reigns, as Brooks’ narcissist becomes engaged in an elemental struggle to reconcile objectivity and the pursuit of “truth” with the needs of his own flailing ego. Shockingly funny and formally innovative, this early mockumentary is one of the best.

Director: Werner Herzog

“Do you understand that God’s work hangs on 600 miserable dollars? And you sit there glued to your chair. How long must I teach you the principles of spiritual warfare?” screams Gene Scott, televangelist and subject of Werner Herzog’s 45-minute documentary portrait. The ordained minister of a congregation numbering some 15,000 members, Scott presented a late-night religious telethon from his Los Angeles studio for 30-odd years, railing against the authorities – who were after him for alleged tax evasion – while encouraging his flock to phone in with donations.

Any other filmmaker might simply have handed the loquacious Scott enough rope to hang himself, but Herzog digs for, if not quite the humanity, then at least the complexity of his ruthlessly avaricious subject. “You seem very lonesome,” Herzog observes, pointedly, as he cuts between interviews with Scott and interludes from the pastor’s terrifying house band. But it’s Scott who provides the Herzogian flourish of the film’s climax, setting off dozens of abject Jolly Chimps in a maniacal tirade against the Federal Communications Commission.

Director: Piotr Szulkin

28 December 1999: it’s 12 days since the martians landed and “humans ceased to be lonely”. The popular broadcaster Iron Idem has his own news show, and values his editorial autonomy. “Your independent Iron Idem who you trust! Whom you should trust! Whom you must trust!” he signs off every night. But with the extraterrestrial takeover comes a new, collaborative agenda, and Idem finds himself a mouthpiece for martian propaganda.

Dedicated to both H.G. Wells and Orson Welles – whose 1938 radio adaptation of the former’s novel caused quite the stir – Polish filmmaker Piotr Szulkin’s noir-inflected sci-fi wears its allegory on its sleeve. Completed the same year that the Polish government declared martial law (but pulled from the Cannes competition by the authorities, and only released two years later), War of the Worlds is pitched somewhere between Network, Terry Gilliam’s Brazil (1985) and Paul Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers (1997), while drawing as much on George Orwell’s 1984 as the Wells classic. Eerily prescient in its premonitions of “fake news” and Trumpian politics, it’s a disquieting satire of totalitarian coercion and media manipulation.

Director: James L. Brooks

Writer-director James L. Brooks knows a thing or two about television. He started his career in the CBS newsroom before turning his hand to comedy with the likes of The Mary Tyler Moore Show, The Tracey Ullman Show and, most famously, The Simpsons. Nominated for seven Oscars (but winning none of them), Broadcast News is one of the great romantic comedies of its era, a sharp-witted behind-the-scenes look at the political pressures of running a nightly news show.

Aaron Altman (Albert Brooks) is a reporter with dreams of landing a coveted anchorman gig. Holly Hunter is the brilliant producer to whom he’s hopelessly devoted. Enter William Hurt’s smooth operator, a good-looking but superficial newsman – camera-ready but lacking Altman’s commitment to editorial standards. With the love-triangle machinations in place, director Brooks zips between comic set-pieces – Albert Brooks’ sudden attack of on-air sweats is one for the ages – while offering a clear-eyed commentary on the necessity for decency and journalistic ethics in television news.

Director: Marlon Riggs

Best known for his landmark work of queer cinema Tongues Untied (1989), Marlon Riggs was a razor-sharp political thinker. With the award-winning Ethnic Notions (1986), he had anatomised the racist stereotyping of Black Americans in popular culture, and six years later he returned to adjacent territory with a documentary examining Black representation on primetime television.

Narrated by Ruby Dee, Color Adjustment posits that TV is a vessel for selling the American dream, “and at the heart of the dream, the mythic American family”. Examining some 40 years of mainstream programming from The Amos ’n Andy Show (1951 to 53) – an indescribably popular sitcom that was “primitive in its use of stereotypes and clichés” – to the “powerful seduction” of The Cosby Show (1984 to 1992), Riggs invites a cast of actors, journalists and historians to interrogate media narratives that ran a complex gamut of representation. From the “model of assimilation” Nat King Cole to Bill Cosby in I Spy (1965 to 1968) – “a hero designed to overcome the received images of Black people from all forms of media” – this invaluable film lays bare the failures of television: less an instrument of progress than a mirror to immutable power structures.

Director: Lesley Manning

The story goes that when Orson Welles broadcast his Mercury Theatre on the Air adaptation of War of the Worlds on Halloween night in 1938 – written to sound like a real news broadcast – panic ensued, with many a listener convinced that an alien invasion was actually taking place. Fifty-four years later to the day, the makers of this British mockumentary pulled a similar trick. Constructed to look like a live television broadcast, and hosted by a gaggle of familiar faces, Ghostwatch purported to be a real-time investigation into the spooky goings-on at a Northolt suburban home.

Based on the story of the Enfield Poltergeist, a real-life case in which two young girls were similarly subjected to alleged paranormal activity, Ghostwatch earns its all-hell-breaks-loose finale by virtue of its early credibility. With lead presenter Michael Parkinson lending an air of reassuring authority, it’s a persuasive simulacrum of 90s primetime telly, and truly nerve-jangling in the home stretch. A TV movie that effectively plays with its audience’s willingness to swallow anything piped into their living rooms, it’s little wonder that the BBC switchboards were jammed with calls that night.

Director: Jane Schoenbrun

Having burrowed into the viral recesses of the internet with their deeply unsettling debut We’re All Going to the World’s Fair (2021), writer-director Jane Schoenbrun turns their attention to a different screen with this haunting follow-up. Maddy and Owen are a pair of high-school loners. He’s barely in his teens, she’s a couple of years older. Both are obsessed with a TV show called The Pink Opaque, a Buffy-ish supernatural melodrama that airs late on a Saturday night – “the last show in the block before they switch to black-and-white reruns for old people.”

The pair bond over their shared infatuation, before real life intervenes, forcing them apart. When the two reconnect years later, their perception of the show has changed. “The whole thing felt cheesy and cheap,” says Owen, “dated and not scary at all.” Bathed in a woozy phosphorescence of purples and pinks, I Saw the TV Glow invites an abundance of readings. At once a coming-of-age enigma à la Donnie Darko (2001) and a metaphysical mystery in the vein of Twin Peaks (1990 to 1991), it’s a film about the slipperiness of identity. With its just-so facsimiles of 90s YA programming in The Pink Opaque, it’s a culturally nostalgic work about the dangers and limitations of cultural nostalgia.

Network is back in cinemas, including BFI Southbank, from 28 June.