The "one-continuous-shot" folks need to chill
Like half the world, I was engulfed by the craze surrounding Netflix's Adolescence, a limited series about incels and violence against women and...well, I'm not sure what else; I got about 1.333 episodes in. It wasn't that the show was "bad" – whatever that means – but, from the opening sequence, I sorta thought it would resemble the alluring mystery in The Night Of, another limited series about a seemingly innocent young man who wakes up in a stranger's apartment covered in blood after an uncharacteristic one-night stand. But it wasn't. It was something else entirely – and that's okay! There are lots of people who could probably benefit from watching a show that confronts the toxicity of adolescent boyhood. Hell, I may have even finished it myself if it weren't for the show's most stifling cinematographic feature: the increasingly trendy "one-continuous-shot" (I was told they call this a "oner" in the industry). Except, in Adolescence, it's not just isolated scenes but entire hour-long episodes that are captured in one go. The amount of precision required, the coordination, the choreography, the focus pulling – it's all very impressive! But so was Hendrix playing a guitar solo with his teeth (it sounded like shit)! So is juggling a bunch of on-fire chainsaws! Logical fallacies abound, I know, I know, but still...it's pretty damn gimmicky.
Worse yet, I couldn't discern how the singular take in Adolescence complemented the show – its plot, its ostensible message, or even its aesthetic – in any way. It seemed to me that they did it because...it's cool to say you did it? Because film bros on Letterboxd will say it's cool that you did it? "It made me feel so claustrophobic!," you might contend. Okay, and how did that contribute to your understanding of the narrative, or the fact that young men often turn to extreme violence when their masculinity is questioned? I'm no cinephile but I'm confident that a different approach – with cuts! many of them! – would have better captured the nature of both contemporary adolescence and law enforcement. Show us a shot from the cameras that constantly monitor students at school and suspects in police stations. Show us a close-up of the detective trying to hold it together while on the phone with his wife the morning of the arrest. Show us a still frame of an apple rotting on the dashboard of the squad car. Show us anything!!
Look, there are tons of great examples of uber-long takes (or at least scenes and movies that are edited to appear that way). 1917 comes to recent memory. That one scene from the first season of True Detective. At least in those cases it seems more artistically calculated: we may gain a better sense of the proxemics of trench warfare, or how adrenalic it is to go undercover as a Nazi biker gang sympathizer after smoking a bowl of meth. It's intense, and it makes narrative sense!
The funniest part of watching the episode-and-some-change of Adolescence was that I pay for the cheapest Netflix subscription – the one with ads peppered into every program. So, even if I was locked in to the continuity of the camera, I was frequently interrupted by Progressive teaching new homeowners how to not become their parents. According to CNBC, more than half of Netflix subscribers have this same ad-supported plan. It shows a hilarious lack of foresight that a show made for Netflix would employ this type of cinematography, taking roughly 100 million potential viewers out of the experience every handful of minutes. Or maybe they just don't care, which might be worse.
The sad truth is that there just isn't very much good TV being made right now, for reasons not dissimilar to what's been discussed above. It seems like the reception of something, especially its potential for virality, is considered in the utmost. Call me old-fashioned (am I becoming my parents?), but I miss when TV and movies were focused on the thing itself, largely unconcerned with the ways they will exist within internet discourse. In the meantime, I'll keep tuning in for new episodes of The White Lotus and titrating off of what was a gnarly Survivor addiction.