Paul Thomas Anderson is a master filmmaker, that much is certain. But even though he has won a ton of awards and been nominated for quite a few Oscars, the writer-director has yet to sign that big streaming deal to create a TV series. We’ve seen folks like Luca Guadagnino do it. Jane Campion has already done it. Even Park Chan-wook made the leap already. And more and more prestige filmmakers are getting those limited series deals each day. So, why hasn’t Anderson jumped on the TV bandwagon?
In a recent interview with The New Yorker, Paul Thomas Anderson was asked if he’d ever make the leap into TV filmmaking, like so many of his director friends have done in recent years. While he isn’t against the idea of making a TV series, Anderson admits that he doesn’t have the television acumen to make it work.
“I wouldn’t say no, but I wouldn’t know where to begin,” said Anderson about the realm of television. “I had this conversation with Quentin [Tarantino]: I think neither one of us has a problem with writing material. Sometimes the problem can be cutting material, you know? Sometimes you’re in the middle of writing something and you have way more than you need and you go, Well, maybe this should be a TV show, you know?”
He continued, “That’s not the solution. The solution is not to just use a lot of B-material and make a longer-form thing. The solution would be cut down, get to your good material, tell your story properly, and make a film. So, I’ve never thought about it in a very serious way. I don’t watch a lot of it, so I don’t know exactly how it works. The structure is something I’d have to learn, you know. I don’t mean to sound like an idiot. Of course, I’ve seen episodic television, but there’s a rhythm to that writing and a structuring of how you pull a story over multiple episodes, which at this point would be a huge learning curve. The people who do it, do it incredibly well. I think I’d feel a little bit like a tourist trying to step into that.”
Obviously, when you talk about a filmmaker at the level of Paul Thomas Anderson, you have to give him the benefit of the doubt when it comes to any sort of career move. Even saying that he’s not capable of making a quality TV series, that doesn’t mean he wouldn’t be able to actually do it if he tried. At this point, you just have to assume that anything he works on is going to be better than most other things being produced.
All that to say, even though Anderson doesn’t have the confidence to make a TV show right now, we’d still be anxious to see what a show he writes and directs would look like. And we’re confident it would be pretty damn great. So, go get that streaming money, PTA!