Why is TV getting so dark? No seriously, why is it?
Dr Mumbo was delighted to see Fairfax Media’s video team tackling one of those questions which, while click-baity, is something which bothers most TV viewers – why exactly is TV getting darker?
Interest piqued the video link was clicked. Sadly, two minutes later Dr Mumbo was still none the wiser.
After sitting through a 15 second ad for…something or other, possibly soup?…the video proper started, and turned out to be several clips from shows like Game of Thrones, True Detective, Daredevil and even Home & Away all strung together.
Maybe for the expected viewing time? i.e. evening/night, when the lights are out.
Modern TV’s deliver much better contrast ratios that previous generations, and can better delineate between ‘shades of grey’.
Coupled with better tech, most of these types of shows are viewed at night, possibly with lights out – extreme bright images could hurt eyes – hence the move to darker content?
There used to be a time when cinematographers would provide at least some rim-light or back lighting kick out the shapes of what the viewer is supposed to be looking at.
Unfortunately the ease of capturing an image with new digital cameras these days has led to a decline in the level of attention being paid to the fundamentals of film-making – LIGHTING. (Yes, even night-time images require some kind of lighting).
It seems a real shame that so many TV dramas (like Game of Thrones) spend so much money on staging a lavish spectacle and the allow it all to disintegrate into a murky mush.
In fact, as the old-school masters of film making have demonstrated so many times, lighting can actually be a powerful tool I helping to tell a story.
In my opinion, a major opportunity is being lost.
An example of lighting down well on a ‘dark’ TV show… The Night Of.
The lighter dark tones probably punch out more in OLED, which is hardly an excuse.
‘rim-light’
Well there were a lot of “dark” scenes is sitcoms and dramas made in the 1970s and early 1980s simply because video cameras of the period had a very poor tonal range and so there were many scenes when all you saw was a face and the rest of the screen was black (“Remington Steele” for example).
A lot of US programs in the past used a preponderance of dark colours, such as purple and dark blue, because the NTSC-1 system used on US television sets had a tendency to “bleed” bright colours like yellow and cyan, leaving a pulsing brown mess.
Perhaps then the current fashion for running around in the dark is to make it look more “retro” ?