Entertainment

When it comes to media and culture in 2007, every conversation can be boiled down to two words: change and upheaval. And when you think about it, those two words share a single source: technology. We are living in the midst of digital-wireless-virtual revolution – perhaps you've heard or read something about it.

Danielle Levkovits / DMN

Technology, in the form of high-speed connections, giant plasma televisions, TiVo, YouTube and other revolutionary innovations, is shaking up, snuffing out or springing forth old and new industries and wiping out or creating old and new modes of behavior.The effect of all this change and upheaval is that a lot of ideas we've held to be fundamental and matter-of-fact are suddenly being transformed into quaint relics of a spontaneously distant past. The latest trend: Television is the new film.

Not literally, of course, but symbolically, as the popular medium that most successfully melds commercial demands with artistic achievements. For as long as the two have been around, film has been a highbrow medium and TV has been lowbrow. We've all heard someone say – maybe you've said it yourself – that they never watch television; it's a boorish and base waste of time, while film is, or at least can be, intellectually stimulating and creatively innovative.

But these days, you might want to reverse those assumptions. We are in a golden age of television, while shifting viewing habits and fragmenting audiences have wreaked havoc on the Hollywood model of filmmaking. The result is that if you are looking for smart, stylish entertainment that will fill your eyes and ears, heart and mind with both surface fun and substantial content, then don't head to the theater; sit down in front of your TV. And the rise in DVD sales and the drop in movie-ticket sales show that viewers are staying home.

Though television history is littered with brilliant and groundbreaking shows, think of this new order as the World According to The Sopranos . The award-winning HBO series opened viewers' eyes to the storytelling possibilities created by this digitally revolutionized media marketplace – call it the era of cinematic television. TV has always had built-in advantages over film: It's a more intimate medium, you watch it in your home, and with its serialized nature, stories and characters can be built over time, allowing for a depth of characterization and detail that is impossible in movies. But TV was always hamstrung by network conventions and commercial restrictions – everything had to be safe and simple, broadly appealing and family-friendly. Movies were where you had to go if you wanted adult entertainment, whether what you meant by "adult" had to do with sexuality or sophistication.

Along came The Sopranos (created by TV vet David Chase, who made his bones working on network shows like The Rockford Files) to show that in a commercial-free, premium cable setting, television could become a full-motion novel, as artistically rich, as meticulously crafted, as brilliantly acted as any big-screen evocation of mob life, only it could just keep digging and layering, expanding and exploring. Like a first tremor, The Sopranos-quake has set off reverberations in wider and wider circles, cracking open and breaking down barriers, so that what was first a premium-cable revolution ( Deadwood, Entourage, Weeds, Dexter) became a basic-cable revolution (Rescue Me) and is now rumbling through broadcast prime-time TV.

Start with Lost and 24, two shows that threw storytelling conventions out the window and created radically unfamiliar experiences for viewers (not bad for a lowbrow mass medium). And then consider newer hybrids, such as Friday Night Lights and Heroes. The first is a TV show based on a movie, and in case you haven't caught it yet (and judging by the ratings thus far, you haven't), the TV show leaves the movie in the dust. Released from its big-screen restraints, this little-screen jewel has opened up a deep, thoughtful, heartfelt exploration of small-town life. Heroes is a genre-bending amalgam – part comic book, part soap opera, part science fiction, part political thriller, part teen romance, part family drama. It's high, low and everything in between. Mostly, it's just flat-out fun to watch. And think about. And talk about.

Movies, meanwhile, seem to have been undone by the same forces that have fed television's renaissance. The proliferation of media outlets and in-home technology has left Hollywood scrambling to maintain its pre-eminent place in American culture. There is this institutional desperation: Hey, don't forget, movies are special. Except that these days, they aren't so much. There are plenty of quality smaller films out there, but when it comes to putting the big in big-screen experiences, Hollywood is stuck – churning out franchise films full of franchise celebrities and franchise effects

Writer-director Paul Haggis has come off his Oscar-winning turns on Crash and Million Dollar Baby to help create NBC's latest venture in cinematic television, The Black Donnellys. Following the lives of four brothers in a working-class New York City neighborhood, the series has the tone and style of a small-screen Goodfellas. Refusing to shy away from the tough talk and tougher actions of the crime-and-desperation milieu, The Black Donnellys plays like an R-rated movie on prime-time network television, but what you see and hear is strictly PG. But then there's what the show makes you think and feel, where no ratings will ever rule.

Thinking and feeling, that's what today's cinematic television is all about.