The many "Oners" of prestige Television

I find it very fascinating, that two of the most prestigious limited series of the year, Netflix’s “Adolescence” and Apple TV’s “The Studio” implement “the oner” or the long take, as an integral part of those two shows’ style and visual identity.

Disney plus’s “Daredevil: Born Again” continue a decade old tradition of every season having an important action as a oner, Apple TV’s second season of “Severance” also has a oner as its opening sequence. This is interesting for many reasons, but we could mention two.

First, the fact that, for example the first two shows have different intended emotional responses (One is a comedy, the other is a gut-wrenching drama), and theoretically, different shows should implement different styles. And secondly, Is the nature of a TV show having a style itself. So the presence of Oners in different shows airing at a similar time is an indication of two trends of modern filmmaking: Prestige Television, and the popularity of the oner.

Arguably, for most of its runtime, TV wasn’t a medium for visual style, from the soup operas to the sitcoms, TV’s camerawork and visuals were always “functional” and minimal, simple camera setups that make it financially reasonable to shoot many episodes and shows. But the rise of prestige TV, with HBO and Netflix, with shows like “House of Cards”, “Mad Men” and “The Wire”, changed how seriously people look at TV as a serious artistic medium.

And the streaming wars have led each big streaming service to produce their own big budget TV projects. It’s interesting to note, however, that purely financially, the old model had a point, as more and more news come out that NONE of those streaming services are getting in profit, Disney+ and Apple TV lose millions of dollars every year, and Netflix has been raising their prices progressives. For decades, Streaming Services as a business model ran on the “promise” of soon breaking even or making a profit, of assuming cultural domination and pop culture impact translate to money. (I have to be clear, I am not complaining, nor do I care if any of them make a profit, on the contrary, I believe making culture is more important than making money, and that most prestige TV have a longer lifespan and effect on art, fans, and culture).

So, this is how TV became prestige, how did “the oner” become prestige? Cause most of the time this is what it is, a symbol, a signifier of artistry, of value, of “We are making a big important show”. (I thought the best way to watch Adolescence was to watch it with my father, but he found the long takes to be irritating and pretentious, I loved it obviously, and isn’t that the generational divide the heart of “Adolescence”?) I could (and would love to) get pretentious, and discuss Alfred Hitchcock’s “Rope” (1948, the same year as the Nakba) is a landmark of American long takes, I could be even more pretentious, and talk film theory, We could , very generally, divide the concept of time in Cinema into two methods, The montage, and the long take, both pioneered by Russian filmmakers, it’s the difference between Eisenstein using montage to spread, condense, and expand time, he shifted between the perspective of different character in the same elongated moment in time, This turned into the “Rocky” training montage condensing a long training process to a single scene, and two Kubrick showing the entire human technological progress in a single cut.

It’s cinema’s most beautiful, most magical lie. Another Russian Master, Tarkovsky, rejected that lie, using his signature long takes to “sculpt in time”, to make the camera move through time itself, showing the weight or weightlessness of it, in a famous long take, a man believes in order to save the world from doom, he has to cross a bond with a candle without its fire going away, we say a very long take of him walking slowly and carefully through the lake, the candle going out halfway, him going back again, lighting it again, then trying again.

In a way, long takes are about the act, about the process, the Rocky training montage makes you just assume that Rocky must have trained hard, without making you feel the effort, the famous cut in 2001: A Space Odyssey doesn’t actually “explain” human evolution, it’s a cut about science that has no science (in the book, this cut is pages and pages of explaining), the montage was always a lie, a handwave, Like the scene in “Inception”, where Coup sits on a cafe with his protegee, and asks them “how did we get her?” and whether they remember them walking into that Café. You can frame the divide between the long take and the montage as a divide between Alfonso Cuaron and Christopher Nolan. (The two franchise auteurs who went on to make the two definitive space films of the 2010s)

But I can’t take sides, the montage is cinema’s most unique feature, the thing that differentiates it from any other medium. But the long take is also uniquely cinematic. Use, a theatre plays or an opera or a ballet show don’t have “cuts” and do show the action uninterrupted, but that’s just “the nature” of those mediums, you don’t notice it, but a cinematic long take is an exception, a shout, it draws and demands and ears attention. But the modern long take, as popularized by the two Amigos: Alfonso Cuarón and Alejandro González Iñárritu, (You can argue that both the long take structure of “Birdman”, and “The Studio” are Spiritual successors of Robert Altman’s opening scene for “The Player”, became a symbol of status, of prestige, of hard effort, a flashy show off of coordination, a dance.

The rise of “stitched together” fake long takes is also very interesting, as you can argue if that loses a lot of the appeal of the modern long take, that of the effort and appreciation, and treats the long take less as a way of showing off, but as an aesthetic, a signifier, but if not pointing at Its own effort and construction, what does it point at? Well, you can argue that the act of stitching together many takes to make a single long take (whether the stitching uses digital double or is just manual) still has the same function of “pointing at the construction of the shot”, it still points at the effort and the choreography even if the effort here is in perfectly lining shots, hiding the cuts, sustaining the illusion, but wait? I thought long takes were about realism, where against the illusion, why did they become another illusion?

Do long takes, after turning into signifiers of prestige, (That even the two recent God of War games had a one take gimmick) still have artistic and emotional value? Well, they are still about the act and the process both inside and outside the text (pointing simultaneously at the process of creating at, and the process, effort and the act of the character inside the sequence itself), they (even when stitched together) signify real passage of time, grounding the story even more, but long takes can do the opposite, make things feel more otherworldly and dreamy (I’d say the long takes of Cuaron ground the story while those of Iñárritu make things more otherworldly), and let’s not forget perhaps the original purpose of long takes, before slow meditative cinema masters like Tarkovsky, Akerman, Haneke, or Tsai Ming Liang used long takes to make cinema more grounded, Hitchcock’s Rope and Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil used it to create tension, suspense, those early long takes where about the audience literally knowing there’s a bomb with a countdown, and about the anticipation of it going off.

Anyways, in our modern landscape of media discussion and analysis, long takes become some to the most talked about aspects of movies and TV, which made them over time, less special and more repetitive. So, they better have more meaning than being a marketing gimmick.