From newsrooms and talk shows to reality TV and live broadcasts, the inner workings of the world of television have fascinated audiences since the early 1950s, when the small screen first arrived on the scene for the general public and immediately sent the film industry into an existential tailspin about the future of its business.
But rather than surpassing cinema altogether, this new medium—and our culture’s obsessive, often troubling relationship with it—has served to fuel new generations of filmmakers toward thrilling, emotional and morally complicated considerations of the power television possesses and what effects it might have on the human psyche. Taut character studies, tense historical dramas, sharp-witted romantic comedies, satirical masterpieces and supernatural horror pictures—all manner of genres have been utilized for intelligent, probing explorations of our television-mediated culture.
Dramatizing the true story of TV host Chris Hansen and his controversial mid-2000s reality series, To Catch a Predator, as the program seeks to boost its ratings by any means necessary, Primetime is only the latest film to stare headlong into the static abyss of the television screen and consider what it sees reflected back at all of us. With the film in US theaters this month from A24, this starter pack assesses twenty movies that wrestle admirably with the myriad complexities of television production, media representation and the ethical considerations bound up in both.