The new Fear Street series on Netflix -- all three of which I have now seen -- certainly profiles as a series of movies in most respects. On a purely objective level, the shortest of the three is 107 minutes, well past the longest single episodes of what gets categorized as television.
But ...
The three movies -- Part One: 1994, Part Two: 1978 and Part Three: 1666 -- were released at one-week intervals since the start of July, every Friday, much like a streaming service waiting to spring the next episode of one of it most popular TV shows. Such as Loki, a very cinematic TV show, which we also just finished.
And more convincingly ...
Each of the final two movies begins with a recap of what has happened so far, with the damning words:
"Previously on Fear Street ..."
There are two things about this that are troubling from a categorization perspective:
1) The preposition. Things happen in a movie. They happen on a TV show.
2) Movies generally don't recap what happened in the movie before them, even if they are part of long-running series. They assume either you saw that movie or you did your homework to prepare yourself for this viewing.
This doesn't make me reconsider whether Fear Street is a trilogy of movies or a limited television series. For one, Netflix itself refers to it as a trilogy. (A "film trilogy event," as you can see on this poster.) "Trilogy" is movie terminology, not TV terminology. Then there's the convincing piece of circumstantial evidence, which is that the three movies all have the typical end-credit slow crawl that you only see on movies, not on TV shows.
What the slight ambiguity does do, though, is make me think about others that have ended up on the other side of the categorization debate after I completed my analysis.
And that gives me a chance to tell you that I still cannot watch Steve McQueen's Small Axe [movies/TV shows] to be sure my analysis holds water.
If you recall this post from December, you'll remember that I decided that the five "movies" in the series that ran on the BBC and then were carried on Amazon did not qualify as such and I would not be watching them in order to rank them with my 2020 films.
There were a number of reasons I cited, one of which was their length (some of them barely cracked the hour mark) and one of which was the place they originally ran (the BBC, a television station).
But the reason that seemed to convince me the most was that I didn't think it was possible for a director to direct five movies in one year.
After Fear Street, I'm starting to reconsider that.
Fear Street director Leigh Janiak has, demonstrably, directed three movies in one year. Sure, they could have been shot at different times and all released consecutively as a kind of gimmick, but I doubt it -- since some of the cast appeared in all three movies, it would make no sense to scatter them to the winds only to bring them back together again.
Plus, the combined running time of the three Fear Street movies (330 minutes) actually would exceed the combined running time of the five Small Axe "movies" (406 minutes) if not for the extraordinary length of Mangrove, which is 127 minutes. If someone can direct 330 minutes of movies in one year, why not 406? (Increasing the difficulty factor is that McQueen had five different casts and five different settings, but maybe that doesn't increase the difficulty as much as I'm suggesting.)
But I still can't watch Small Axe to see if they "feel" like movies. Know why?
They are not available on Amazon internationally.
This would have been the biggest reason I couldn't watch them for my 2020 year-end, if I'd bothered to check.
I determined one night earlier this year, when I needed something short, to watch Lovers Rock, by the far the most acclaimed of McQueen's pieces. Neither that title nor Small Axe came up when I searched on Amazon.
Thinking it might have been an aberration limited to that particular night, I checked again recently, at which point I discovered that they just aren't on Amazon in Australia. If I want to watch them here, I have to do a deal with the devil with Rupert Murdoch's Foxtel, and I just ain't going to do it.
So they are stuck in the TV ghetto until some future point where Murdoch get his grubby mitts off of them. (I can't even rent them on iTunes.) Then, and only then, can I possibly renege on my initial conclusion about them.
As for Fear Street, it was a project that got significantly better for me as it progressed. I actually disliked the first one. Got much better after that. Full review here.
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