These are the writers who defined Mulder and Scully, who established the themes of the show, who drove the mythology. The writing staff tends to attract a great deal of debate and discussion, and understandably so. There is a sense that The X-Files was ahead of the curve in this respect. Michelle MacLaren is one of the most highly regarded directors working today, to the point that she was originally attached to direct Warner Brothers’ Wonder Woman. Marvel has elevated veteran television directors like Alan Taylor or the Russo brothers to work on their blockbuster properties. When Fukunaga departed the show following its first season, the muted critical reaction to the second season invited critics and commentators to wonder whether credit had been correctly apportioned between writer and director.Įven outside of these particular examples, it seems like contemporary critics and audiences are more mindful of prominent television directors today than they would have been in the past. The same is certainly true of Cary Fukunaga, who directed all of the first season of Nic Pizzolatto’s True Detective. Steven Soderbergh has directed every single episode of The Knick, which allows the director complete control of the television show’s visual aesthetic. To be fair, there is an indication that some of this is changing. Directors are still treated as something close to hired hands, with celebrity directors like Neil Marshall or David Slade or Martin Scorsese stopping by to direct an episode or two before moving on.
#X FILES HOME AGAIN SERIES#
The television series is frequently treated as their vision. In terms of television, the auteur is generally the head writer or the executive producer. However, if recent years have seen the acceptance of television as a medium with artistic merit, most of that acceptance has been built around writers and producers rather than directors. In contrast, the revival demonstrates that modern television is more flexible to those sorts of creative concerns. As a result, he had to be written out of the show so that he only had to appear in a handful of eighth season episodes.
At the end of the seventh season of The X-Files, David Duchovny decided that he could not possibly do another twenty-odd episode season of television. Season orders have gotten shorter, which allows creative teams a great deal more freedom. To be fair, recent decades has seen television move away from that rigid scheduled approach. This is part of the reason why concepts like “bottle episodes” and “clip shows” exist, an acknowledgement that television was a schedule-orientated industry in a way that mainstream cinema was not. Producing something with depth or meaning was a secondary concern, at best.ĭiscussing the production of the original Star Trek, Leonard Nimoy argued that the most important lesson for a director working on the show was “get it done fast.” Television shows aired on schedule, and there were huge penalties for production teams that simply could not get new content delivered on time and on budget. The goal was to come in on-budget and on-time. Television was long driven by rigorous production schedules and a conveyor belt mentality. Traditionally, production teams have been required to produce a half-hour or an hour of television in roughly a week. In practical terms, television moves a lot quicker than film. Television has traditionally adopted a different approach to direction, owing to a number of different factors. Steven Spielberg has his own recurring sets of themes and motifs across his work, despite the fact that he is rarely credited as a writer on his own films ( Close Encounters of the Third Kind is the exception that proves the rule.) A Tim Burton film looks and feels like a Tim Burton film, no matter the screenwriting credit. However, it is quite apparent looking at the work of other directors. As such, it is the director’s sensibility that tends to be the common thread across multiple films.Īlfred Hitchcock is perhaps the most famous example, inspiring the auteur school of New Wave film criticism that treated the director as author of the text. It is not uncommon for a director to be attached to a project before a writer, or to dictate rewrites to a writer. As such, the director traditionally has the greatest measure of control over the project.
#X FILES HOME AGAIN MOVIE#
In film, the movie is treated as the project in and of itself. There are lots of historical reasons for this, mainly owing to the differences between film and television production. Television directors have traditionally been under-appreciated.
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