Bad Education premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in the fall of 2019 and swiftly earned raves and awards buzz for Hugh Jackman’s career-best performance. A year later, it won the Emmy for best TV movie, but maybe only by default—the other 2020 nominees were an episode of the anthology series Dolly Parton’s Heartstrings, a critically derided play adaptation (American Son), and extensions of the TV shows Breaking Bad and Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt. Jackman didn’t even win his category. Contending against actors from four buzzier limited series, he didn’t stand much of a chance. As the director of Bad Education, Cory Finley, concedes, the competition at the Emmys that year looked like a “grab bag.” TV movies, he says, are in “a very postmodern state.”
In 2021, everything and nothing is a TV movie. The streaming age was already blurring the lines between television and film before the COVID-19 pandemic accelerated things. This year, Netflix and Amazon Studios fielded Oscar nominations for movies viewed mostly or entirely online, and Warner Bros. began same-day debuts for all theatrical films on its streaming service, HBO Max. There’s an understanding in Hollywood, communicated in off-the-record whispers and the occasional joke, that studios are playing this confusion to their advantage—dividing their slates via razor-thin technicalities that determine who goes to the Oscars and who may not even make it to the prime-time Emmys.
At HBO, which picked up Bad Education in a splashy festival deal, this signals the end of a remarkable era. The network pioneered the prestige TV film by taking up the “movie of the week” mantle from broadcast networks, elevating the formula with higher-end talent and glossy marketing. From 1993 to 2020, HBO’s movies won 22 times, establishing a class of films between the ever-shrinking indie sphere and the studios drifting away from midbudget productions. Writer Danny Strong had never sold a screenplay when he first took 2008’s Recount, a dramatization of the 2000 election, to the network. “The term [TV movie] at the time had a connotation of a B-level project, something that was inferior,” he says. “But the adult drama was considered dead by all of the major studios.” Adds Oscar winner Barry Levinson (Rain Man), who directed three character-driven HBO movies in the 2010s: “You really couldn’t make those films unless you did it [there].”
Visionary filmmakers, including Steven Soderbergh (Behind the Candelabra) and Dee Rees (Bessie), also migrated to HBO. The network had reach: Political films like Jay Roach’s Recount and his 2012 small-screen follow-up, Game Change, played as major events in Washington, D.C. (and each won the top Emmy). “It was the beginning of an extraordinary run,” says Paula Weinstein, who produced films at HBO over three decades. “People wanted to be a part of it.” Movie stars among them: Julianne Moore signing on to play Sarah Palin in Game Change “was a great gift to that film,” says casting codirector Richard Hicks. “It said to everybody, ‘Pay attention to this. This is something of great cultural currency.’ ” And Strong, who wrote Game Change, says, “If she had said no, I thought it was very likely the film wouldn’t have gotten made.”
But slowly, Hollywood lost interest in TV movies. In 2011, the Television Academy combined miniseries and movies into one field, attributing the decision to a “general industry downtrend” of both forms, only to reverse course three years later, as the rebranded limited series began to surge. The television-movie category was left on its own, diminished. In 2015, it was booted from the main Emmys telecast to the lesser creative arts ceremony; feature-length TV episodes and anthology programs started popping up more often opposite the usual HBO fare. Roach’s third HBO movie, the Lyndon B. Johnson portrait All the Way, lost to an installment of BBC import Sherlock in 2016. Last year, Bad Education broke a three-year winning streak for Black Mirror entries. (This year, the Television Academy finally clarified that anthology series should compete with limited series, not TV movies.)
Why the sudden chaos? For one, streamers were now busy working on film slates; in 2015, Netflix and Amazon Studios both released their first auteur-driven films in theaters, making it clear that they were in the business of making movies, not TV movies.
Though HBO kept chugging along, it got swallowed up in AT&T’s tumultuous 2018 acquisition of its parent company, Time Warner. The focus had turned to limited series, where FX suddenly dominated with Fargo and American Crime Story. HBO needed to keep pace. For its movies, however, the network started looking to acquisitions, paying hefty seven- to eight-figure sums for titles like Bad Education and Jennifer Fox’s The Tale—straying from its brand.
Thing were in flux. “You go, ‘Well these people at AT&T can’t possibly know anything about the entertainment division,’ ” Levinson says. “It’s bizarre…. They [had] a good operation and it [was] functioning well. [But] they came in and began to mess around with everything, and next thing you know, it’s beginning to come apart.” After only three years, AT&T announced in May that it would spin off its WarnerMedia assets into a deal with Discovery.
Bad Education premiered in the early days of the pandemic in April. “It struck me how similar that release, instantly dropping on HBO, felt to any film that would release on Netflix or any of the other big streaming platforms,” Finley says. Why was a festival pickup like Bad Education getting lumped into the TV movie wasteland, when so many other 2020 films that also bypassed theaters were competing for Oscars? Evolving Academy rules may establish a firmer separation—the Oscars will require a qualifying theatrical run eventually—but this still exposes a core definitional problem. “If this had been going on when I made Game Change, I wonder what its label would even be,” says Roach. “The idea of a TV movie is very vague…. There are definitely questionable delineations now between what is a TV movie, what is a streaming movie, and what is a movie movie.”
Or, as Weinstein puts it when asked to define a TV movie: “The trouble is, it’s movies now. There really is no difference.”
Even firmly into the streaming revolution, Levinson’s HBO movie The Wizard of Lies, starring Robert De Niro as Bernie Madoff, garnered an audience of millions over its 2017 opening weekend. Meanwhile all of this year’s best-picture Oscar nominees were available to watch at home, but based on the ceremony’s record-low ratings, it’s unclear how many people did. “I hope it’s easier than ever to find that audience for good stuff,” Finley says. “But there’s just so much stuff out there and so many places to access it, and so many things that aren’t film and aren’t even TV competing for that attention. It’s going to be interesting to see how it all shuffles out.”
Streamers are learning to maximize awards chances between the Oscars and Emmys. Disney+ entered Hamilton as a motion picture at the Golden Globes and a variety special at the Emmys but made its actors eligible at the latter under a TV movie umbrella. HBO Max, which develops its own streaming-exclusive movies, submitted Soderbergh’s Let Them All Talk for the Oscars; its teen road comedy Unpregnant—released in identical fashion—was made eligible for the Emmys. An HBO Max representative tells Vanity Fair that Talk had been “campaigned…as a theatrical release,” even though it was not released in U.S. theaters, while Unpregnant was pushed for Emmys “where we believe it is more competitive.”
Inside sources say that Amazon Studios, meanwhile, granted the Borat sequel an Oscar campaign because, like Talk, it met the wishy-washy Oscar threshold for COVID-era eligibility due to mere theatrical intent—yet positioned Sundance acquisitions Sylvie’s Love and Uncle Frank as TV movies. The pair were well reviewed, but less so than Amazon Studios’ Oscar nominees—and fellow festival premieres—One Night in Miami… and Sound of Metal. It seems as if studios are turning the Emmy field into their good-not-great burn-off zone. It’s a cynical strategy for a time of great change, but then, this is uncharted territory. Until new rules dictate otherwise, a TV movie can be whatever Hollywood says it is.
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