i was reading an interview with chris carter by a DVD website and noticed an interesting paradigm. the interviewer said that televison from the X-Files onward had a decidedly film-like appearance. i began to think about how many TV series before XF took itself more seriously and i thought really hard and long and couldn't think of much. Twilight Zone (an example), as good as it is, still knew itself to be a TV show. it never surpassed the TV medium. can you think of a TV series that took on an hour long "film of the week" format?

think about Lost, Alias, West Wing, Desperate Housewives, they all look like they could be a film each week good or bad. what do you think?

Absolutely. Production standards are very high for the top shows.

I do remember when you could peg "the TV look" and know instantly what was TV and what wasn't.

I wonder how much of this is also due to people's screens getting bigger and demanding more from what they put up on it.

do you attribute to The X-Files or simply technological advances?

i think it's a bit of both. that show is very groundbreaking in many, many ways =). it's 2bad the DVD video quality for the first few seasons suck terribly.

My memory isn't so good. X-Files certainly was filmmic. But actually "Miami Vice" was way before the X-Files and was very cinematic in composition and scope.

I think you have to compare apples to apples in this discussion. Compare the major mini-series and drama's to the films OF THEIR ERA. The seventies incessant use of zoom and high key lighting... yeah, it's on TV as well as in the Cinema. The workflow in television has always mimiced low-budget filmmaking. Remember episodic television was/is still shot on film, it just had incredibly small budgets and time constraints for each episode. Hell, some elements of "Wagon Train" or "Bonanza" looked as good or better than early "B" westerns.

What I think you are referring to as a 'more filmic' look... is simply more money being spent on some television series, as well as the abilitiy to get more bang for the buck out of some of the new technology.