A serial is built to continue and a film has to end

The argument

The second argument against the claim is about endings. Proponents of this position argue that a film is shaped by the obligation to finish: everything in it is placed with respect to a conclusion the audience will reach in one sitting, and the meaning of the whole depends on how it resolves. A serial, by contrast, is commissioned to continue. Its first instalment has to leave the audience wanting another, and its success is measured by whether it is renewed, which means the structure is designed to postpone resolution rather than to deliver it. Proponents argue that this is why so many serials are praised throughout and faulted at the end. The form is built to extend, so when an ending finally has to be supplied it is often supplied late, under pressure, and against material that was never arranged to point anywhere in particular. A film that did this would be considered a failure of construction; in a serial it is a structural consequence of how the work is made and paid for. What follows is a difference in kind rather than in quality. Proponents accept that serial television can be as ambitious, as well made and as widely discussed as any film, and argue that the obligation to resolve is nevertheless central to what a film does, so a form which lacks it is doing something else. On this account the useful question is not whether television has replaced cinema but what each form is for: one is built to conclude and the other to continue, and that is a description rather than a ranking.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Critics answer that the contrast is drawn from commissioning practice rather than from the form. Serials are routinely written to a planned length with an ending in view, and series conceived as closed stories are now ordinary, while films are themselves extended into sequels and series when they succeed, which is the same pressure the argument attributes to television alone. They add that endings are a weak place to locate the essence of a form, since plenty of admired films resolve badly or barely resolve at all, and nobody concludes from this that they are not cinema. On that view the difference described is a tendency in how work is financed rather than a boundary between arts.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] Many admired films resolve weakly or leave their material open, so the obligation to conclude is a convention rather than the thing on which a film's meaning depends. [Rejecting P2] Closed-ended serials written to a planned length are now ordinary, so postponement describes a commissioning practice rather than the serial form. [Rejecting P3] Successful films are extended into sequels and series under exactly the pressure the premise attributes to television alone. [Rejecting C] At most it follows that the forms tend to handle endings differently, not that television has not taken over the role cinema held.