Sadly, classic movies are increasingly seen as fodder to fill the streaming era's insatiable desire for content. In our media-saturated culture, brevity is a virtue. But can you sit through an entire TV series of jittery found footage, or does that trick work best in a one-shot movie? Because without that signature gimmick, End of Watch is just another cop drama. So an updated End of Watch could say something insightful about the police (and maybe even the way we depict law enforcement on TV). In the intervening years, anger at police brutality has grown, and bodycam footage has played a crucial part in revealing heinous acts by officers. What made End of Watch exciting was a nifty found footage twist on the familiar LAPD action, anchored by crackling performances from Jake Gyllenhaal and Michael Peña. It absolutely, 100% does not need to be a TV series. Meanwhile, since I started writing this piece, news broke that Fox is adapting 2012 cop film End of Watch into a TV series. I loved Temuera Morrison's growling performance and the colorful sci-fi action, but it could easily have been compressed into The Mandalorian. Episodes of The Mandalorian were brisk, bite-size delights, but the first season of The Book of Boba Fett proved a ponderous and frankly superfluous eight episodes of filler. But Disney found itself stuck with two masked bounty hunters, and that's one too many. I contend The Mandalorian should have been about Boba Fett in the first place. I don't mean to bag on Reacher, so I'll move smoothly onto bagging on The Book of Boba Fett. This is not a show that needs to let its subplots breathe, y'know? I liked Reacher, but the only character arc in the first season is the succession of characters who arc through the air when Jack Reacher punches them clean out of their socks. But then there are shows you're enjoying just fine, only they've outstayed their welcome. You can (and should) quit any show you're not enjoying. But watching shows like Reacher and The Book of Boba Fett, to name a few, you start to wonder why they needed so many episodes - or even if they needed to be a TV show at all. There's now, however, an overwhelming tsunami of new TV releases, every week, across all the many streaming services currently jockeying for your attention. We've enjoyed many incredible TV shows that prove this point brilliantly, from Mad Men to Ozark, The Sopranos to Game of Thrones, Justified to WandaVision. A television series gives space and time to explore the depth and breadth of a story, developing character arcs over years and unfolding events without the time constraints of a movie. Television creators repeatedly tell us the beauty of our prestige TV era is the open-endedness. Seriously, not every story needs eight or nine or 10 episodes. No shade to either of these shows, but it feels like too many current TV shows are spun out of not enough story. Nine episodes? Sorry, but that's way too much. But first - and I know you do this too - we checked how long it was. It looked arch and irreverent, so we decided to keep watching. That same day, my wife and I watched the first episode of Inventing Anna, a Netflix series dramatizing the true story of infamous scammer Anna Sorokin. In other words, what takes Jack Reacher an entire season of eight hour-long episodes, the A-Team used to do in an hour (minus ad breaks). But in the 1980s, TV heroes walked into a whole new adventure every week. Season 1 of Reacher covers one novel from the series of books on which it's based, and season 2 will presumably do the same. To be precise, it's a single episode of The A-Team. The series is about a tough guy rolling into a small town and opening a can of whup-ass on the local bad guys. I was watching Amazon's action TV show Reacher when I realized something.
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