Thursday, April 28, 2011

Hope Lies on Televions #4 - In The Shadow of 30 Rock

Here's my latest Hope Lies on Television column, in which I discuss the nature of acting for television versus acting on film. At least, that's what I started out trying to write about, but in the end I seemed to shift focus and make it about the way in which film and television acting are perceived, and how that has shifted over time.

I'm happier with that approach, really, since this column came about as a last minute replacement for my planned column on the HBO miniseries Mildred Pierce, which I just had not found the time to watch this week. This one wasn't difficult to write, since it's a subject I find really interesting and I've been thinking about it for a while as a potential column anyway, so bringing together the disparate threads was only the only real problem. I think I was largely successful, in the end.

I might revisit this subject in the future, with particular focus on the idea of an actor being able to examine the different facets of a character over time on television in a way that film does not allow, since it's a really big subject and I wouldn't even dare to think that I have covered it all in a single column, especially one that's fairly short by my standards.

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