Expectations

You're going to battle with expectations. Audiences need to know what to expect when they sit down to watch something. Maybe you can't break too many rules at once.

That's how genre works, you need to fit into existing expectations in an interesting way.

Constraints can help creativity.

The Night Of

This is much more in line with what I'd like to do. I see a future for cinema away from 2hr films and 1hr episodic TV. 

Stories were structured as 90 min - 2 hours for audiences, that's the most they could take in one sitting. First for Greek plays, recently for theater owners. 

With digital there's a whole new opportunity to tell longer format stories. But TV series with 1hr episodes still isn't quite there. 

Mini-series is closer, but still set up with 1hr episodes. If you break that last rule, mini-series with episodes of varying length, you've gotten as close to a novel with chapters as possible. I'm curious if that would work in a visual medium. 

The Night Of does a lot of things right - stretching out a story to 8 hours, opening up many moments you'd have to cut for 2hr film. Letting those moments breathe, seeing people live life in those moments. And that's fantastic. 

But some moments aren't interesting and should be cut. Or they fall flat without dialogue. Sitting in the car with Naz while he watches the police find her body would be intense in a novel getting his internal thoughts, without those thoughts it's missing a lot. Largely silent. 

Linklater does a wonderful job of filling those moments with conversation and ideas. So you're not bored (unless you're not into him). 

Just like novels have many techniques for filling the spaces between action - I imagine creators will need to develop many techniques for filling those spaces in longer format mini-series. Conversation, action, flashback, montage.... techniques to be developed. 

That's what interests me, doing something that's never been done before. Longer conversations, that seem more human. Longer stories. Stories that don't fit in a 2hr film or 1hr TV episode.