The Rise and Fall of the ‘TV Movie’ Category – ryan

Illustration: Britt Spencer

One of the best TV programs of the season just received an Emmy, and nobody who watches this Sunday’s telecast is going to know about it. Rebel Ridge, the crackling action thriller from director Jeremy Saulnier, won the Outstanding TV Movie Emmy at the Creative Arts Emmys, where the award for that category has been presented since 2020. Held one week before the main Emmys broadcast, the two-day Creative Arts ceremony celebrates achievements in more than 95 categories that include sound, cinematography, and casting. This fact should in no way diminish Rebel Ridge’s win — an Emmy is an Emmy — but it does affect the afterglow. The Creative Arts ceremony didn’t even air live. It will instead be presented in condensed form this Saturday evening on FXX and Hulu.

A prerecorded ceremony airing on cable is a far cry from where the TV Movie category stood just 12 years ago, when Claire Danes and Bryan Cranston presented two of the most anticipated awards of the 2013 Emmys season to Steven Soderbergh’s Behind the Candelabra and Michael Douglas for his lead performance in it as Liberace. There was little doubt the award, which was then given for “Outstanding Miniseries or Movie,” would go this way. Soderbergh and Douglas (as well as fellow Lead Actor nominee Matt Damon) were Oscar winners and Hollywood A-listers representing an acclaimed TV movie that HBO had given a substantial push. It was yet another big night in what had been a series of them: For the previous 20 years HBO’s TV movies had dominated at the Emmys, winning 65 major awards over that span. While Behind the Candelabra marked one of its starrier offerings, HBO had long since established the TV movie as one of its most reliable vectors for prestige acclaim and Emmy victories, with films like Don King: Only in America, Recount, and Temple Grandin.

But even at that moment of triumph, change was in the air. The very existence of Behind the Candelabra as a TV movie was a sign of a shifting industry. Soderbergh had been somewhat flabbergasted that Warner Bros. was unwilling to pony up a $5 million budget for him to make a theatrically released Liberace biopic starring talent like Douglas and Damon. (Warners viewed the film as too difficult to market. Soderbergh’s translation: “too gay.”) Meanwhile, the rest of TV was getting into the limited-series game thanks to the success of Downton Abbey and American Horror Story. The following year, an “Outstanding TV Movie” category was created to separate the format from Miniseries (which was rechristened “Outstanding Limited Series or Anthology”), kicking off a decadelong slide to where things currently stand: the TV movie as an afterthought in the Emmys conversation, all but completely absent from the main telecast since 2019. In the relevant acting categories, which combine performances from Limited Series and TV Movies, only one actor from a movie (Daniel Radcliffe in Weird: The Al Yankovic Story) has been nominated in the past four years.

It’s tempting to look at the gradual marginalization of the Outstanding TV Movie category — which has featured such recent winners as Dolly Parton’s Christmas on the Square and Chip ’n Dale: Rescue Rangers — as well as the format itself with an indifferent, if not fatalistic, eye. It’s a holdover from a previous era, when its purpose was better defined. We’ve been given plenty of reasons not to take it seriously. But there’s also a useful ambiguity inherent in our current understanding of what constitutes a TV Movie. In a time when far too much great content goes underseen and underappreciated, the flexibility provided by the category’s fuzzy definition could be a way to reestablish it as something meaningful. Maybe there’s a way to make people care about TV Movies again.

While the name has changed numerous times over the years, the existence of a TV Movie category dates all the way back to the first-ever Emmy Awards in 1949. The category, originally called “Best Film Made for Television” only appeared that year before disappearing until 1966, when the broadcast networks, which often aired movies that had first run theatrically (under the banner of NBC Saturday Night at the Movies or The Wonderful World of Disney), started producing movies of their own. They had lower budgets and lower production values, though there were certainly memorable offerings like the sports weepie Brian’s Song, Cicely Tyson in The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, Sally Field’s breakthrough in the dramatic film Sybil, and the topical Roe vs. Wade.

Occasionally a made-for-TV movie was so impressive it would subsequently go to theaters, as in the case in 1971 with Steven Spielberg’s debut film, Duel. It’s since been claimed by the cinephile community, mostly because people think it’s too good to be a TV movie (speaking to a stigma about the quality of TV movies that persists to this day). But it wasn’t until the early ‘90s and the advent of HBO that the made-for-TV movie really began to artistically flourish. Suddenly, filmmakers were freed from the strictures of network-TV mandates: no two-hour time slots to fit into, no commercials to plan narrative beats around, more relaxed standards for content and language, and bigger budgets to attract the most prestigious talent.

“What we were trying to do then was make things that wouldn’t be made anywhere else,” says Colin Callender, who was president of HBO Films from 1996 to 2008 and had been producing films for HBO since 1986. “The other thing HBO did was promote the hell out of the movies. We marketed them. It was part of the DNA of the project from the get-go. HBO’s great strength back in those days was the way we marketed everything, but we certainly marketed our movies.”

The Emmy Awards increasingly took notice. In 1993, HBO’s Barbarians at the Gate, a corporate satire starring James Garner as a corrupt tobacco executive, earned nine nominations, more than double that of the Outstanding Drama Series winner that year, Northern Exposure. In 1994, And the Band Played On, a sprawling work about the early days of the AIDS crisis, earned 14 nominations, second that year only to NYPD Blue’s record-setting haul of 27.

As HBO cornered the Emmys market, winning 16 out of 18 Made for TV Movie trophies between 1993 and 2010, production standards across the board leveled up, particularly at cable outlets like Showtime, TNT, and Lifetime. “The films had to live up to multiple viewings,” Callender says, differentiating the cable films from their network predecessors, which tended to air once and perhaps never again. “The quality of the movies we made had to improve — and I mean even simple things, like the sound mixing.”

The added emphasis on production value translated into increased attention. “They were cultural and even monocultural moments on Saturday night, where you’d see Temple Grandin or Game Change or Grey Gardens,” says Fred Berger, an award-winning producer who got his start on the HBO TV movie Taking Chance. “These movies were bona fide events.”

Contrast that with the 2025 TV Movie Emmy lineup. In addition to Rebel Ridge, the other four nominees were

Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy, a franchise extension (the fourth Bridget film) that was a $140 million hit overseas but got sent directly to Peacock here in the States.

The Gorge, an Apple TV+ co-production with Skydance, starring Anya Taylor-Joy and Miles Teller, rumored to have cost up to $100 million and reportedly Apple’s biggest film launch ever despite having almost no cultural footprint.

Nonnas, a Netflix movie starring Vince Vaughn and a quartet of older actresses who should get more work. It was originally intended to premiere at the 2024 Toronto Film Festival before Netflix shelled out $20 million for its worldwide-distribution rights.

Mountainhead, the one TV movie in the classic mold, produced in-house at HBO on a fast track with familiar talent (Succession’s Jesse Armstrong wrote and directed). It got mixed reviews.

That lineup is a far cry from the prestige-packed nominations of decades past. The Outstanding Made for TV Movie category once honored heavyweight producers like Oliver Stone and Barbra Streisand and directors like Mike Nichols and John Frankenheimer. Performances like Raul Julia’s in The Burning Season, Alfre Woodard’s in Miss Evers’ Boys, and Angelina Jolie’s in Gia were hailed as career landmarks. These films were the definition of prestige TV long before shows like The Sopranos and Breaking Bad claimed that term for dramatic ongoing series.

The blame for the death of the TV movie could be laid at the feet of a half-dozen of the usual TV bogeymen: It’s Peak TV’s fault for raising the standard of quality TV and attracting major movie stars to appear in series instead of movies. It’s Ryan Murphy’s fault for repopularizing the limited series. It’s Ricky Gervais’s fault for campaigning the Extras series finale as a movie. It’s Harvey Weinstein’s fault for setting the precedent that failed film-festival products such as the Nicole Kidman–starring Grace of Monaco could get dumped on TV and still get an Emmy nomination. The notion of television as a soft yet unsatisfying landing spot for movies that don’t get purchased for theatrical distribution at film festivals is one reason it’s almost impossible to differentiate a TV movie from a movie-movie anymore.

But at the risk of pointing the finger at a predictable villain, if we’re going to assign blame, we have to look closely at Netflix.

“The biggest culprit in all of this is really streaming,” says a longtime HBO insider, “specifically Netflix having movies that don’t go through theaters.” Netflix made its inauspicious debut in the TV Movie category in 2016 with a nomination for A Very Murray Christmas. Despite its (loose) narrative conceit and Oscar winner Sofia Coppola directing, this was mostly a glorified Christmas special taking advantage of an increasingly anemic field of TV movies. The winner that year, Sherlock: The Abominable Bride,  was even more of a non-movie, the third of four episodes of the TV series Sherlock that the TV Academy allowed to compete as a film. Perhaps encouraged by this, Netflix began submitting episodes of its Black Mirror anthology series as individual films, and ended up winning the TV Movie category three years in a row, from 2017 to 2019, after which the Academy finally ruled that anthology series must compete against other limited series.

Far bigger an issue than Netflix’s habitual gaming of the system has been the degree to which streaming movies have for all practical purposes obliterated the distinction between television and film. Currently, the letter-of-the-law differentiator is that Netflix feature films are defined by being Oscars eligible, said eligibility being attained by playing for a minimum of two weeks in a movie theater in New York or Los Angeles. In practice, what this means is, with very few exceptions, Netflix movies will play for two weeks in theaters that have been “four walled” — i.e., Netflix rents the theater (or owns it outright, as in the case of New York’s Paris Theater) and takes in all the box-office revenue. Four-walled ticket sales and earnings don’t count toward box-office data, so if a Netflix original flops (or succeeds!) in limited release, no one’s the wiser and, crucially, no one’s Oscar campaign gets the stink of failure.

Conversely, Netflix TV movies skip that two-week charade and debut directly on Netflix, as was the case with Rebel Ridge. Yet the cinematic scale of Saulnier’s film had critics openly lamenting its absence from theaters. “That a movie as accomplished and enjoyable as Rebel Ridge is bypassing theaters for a streaming platform is at once a legitimate shame and business as usual,” bemoaned The Ringer’s Adam Nayman. “A Zen riddle: What if a filmmaker makes a crowd-pleaser without a crowd?”

So if Oscars eligibility and perfunctory trial runs are unsatisfactory differentiators, how do we separate a TV movie from a feature? Aesthetics are a far squishier “I know it when I see it” determiner, but it’s true that any TV movie that seems sufficiently “cinematic” feels out of place in the TV Movie category. That goes for films like Rebel Ridge but also the 2023 nominee Prey, a Dan Trachtenberg–directed Predator spinoff that went direct to Hulu. It was so praised for its visual grandeur that 20th Century Studios is releasing the sequel, Predator: Badlands, theatrically.

But it’s not as though TV series haven’t been bringing it on an aesthetic level for some time. Take a scan of this year’s Emmys ballot from Severance to The Penguin to The Bear and you’ll find no shortage of aesthetic accomplishment. “After True Detective season one, it is really hard to argue that visual art tilts any more toward film than certain types of cable programming, especially when the latter has adopted a lot of aesthetic film grammar in its storytelling,” says film producer Braxton Pope (The Card Counter).

Depressingly, if inevitably, money emerges as a key factor as well. Streamers like Netflix and Apple TV+ barged into the marketplace with incredibly deep pockets and threw the price structure for making and acquiring TV movies all out of whack. “Essentially, an HBO film that we produce in-house you used to be able to do for a (certain) price,” says the HBO insider. “And as streamers started snapping up anything, everything got more expensive. So the films just got so much more expensive to make and then you’d look at, well, what are we getting for it? And should we spend that money on a series?”

The combination of streamers emerging and HBO retreating has brought us to the point where the Television Academy president doesn’t even know what makes a TV movie anymore. “It’s a question of where the studios are placing those movies,” says Maury McIntyre, president of the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences. “Is it a theatrical movie, or is it a television movie? They don’t necessarily get the same kind of love or the same kind of buzz. And Television Academy members then don’t quite know, Are we supposed to be looking at this or not?”

You’d think the TV Academy might have an interest in offering some guidance in that regard, but instead it has stayed hands-off, often to the frustration of people in the industry. “I think the TV Academy didn’t really want to deal with it,” the HBO insider says. “By not enforcing the rules like with Black Mirror or really grappling with, like, What does it mean? Yes, Netflix is putting out movies, but what’s the intention behind it? I’m not saying it’s easy; the lines are blurry. But I think they were probably cowed a little by streamers and didn’t know how to deal with it. And there’s not a strict answer. This is not right or wrong.”

With the Academy showing little interest in intervention, the question becomes, What’s to be done with the TV Movie category? Its current condition projects both lawlessness and a regrettable streak of bad taste, perfect conditions for the kind of industrial ennui I’ve noticed when I speak to people in the industry. The Academy doesn’t care, the audiences don’t care, the critics care only about what’s good (a vexing habit, that) and not whether the films in question are actual TV movies or just theatrical features that wandered from the path.

The solution may well start not with the Emmys but the Oscars. There have long been off-the-record mutterings about the Motion Picture Academy making theatrical requirements more stringent when it comes to Oscars eligibility. That may be what it takes to push folks like Netflix’s Ted Sarandos — who is already loath to put his movies into theaters — to promote only his top contenders for Oscars eligibility and reserve some of Netflix’s worthy films that have no shot against the Nolans and Scorseses of the world for what would be a much-improved Emmys competition. And while indie filmmakers may not be thrilled at the idea of competing for Emmys and not Oscars, remember what awards shows exist for: Sure, they’re about recognizing individual achievements and Hollywood patting itself on the back, but at their most useful, awards shows bring much-needed attention to quality work so that more people get to experience it. In a moment when we’re awash in movies, a redefined and reinvigorated notion of the TV movie could serve an important role in helping people find good films and filmmakers.

Last year, Netflix released 137 narrative features; if you want to reduce that number to only English-language features, that’s still 54 films. Of those 54, only three got Oscar nominations. Netflix certainly pushed films like Maria (one Oscar nod) and The Piano Lesson (none) for Oscar nominations. But smaller films like Richard Linklater’s Hit Man and Azazel Jacobs’s His Three Daughters were either never going to be Oscar contenders or Netflix didn’t have the bandwidth to campaign them as such. If the bar to clear for Oscars eligibility were more stringent than simply two weeks in a four-walled theater, maybe Netflix would be incentivized to campaign movies like Hit Man and His Three Daughters as Emmy contenders.

“I’ve made some streaming movies that I think would have had great runs within the Emmys,” says Berger, noting the Riz Ahmed film Encounter that he produced with director Michael Pearce. That film made the festival rounds in 2021 before getting a cursory theatrical run followed by a streaming premiere on Amazon Prime. “Encounter could have gotten way more of a cultural reverberation had we leveraged the Emmy conversation.”

“If there were a return to a robust ecosystem within the Emmys to promote those movies, I think you’d find a much higher volume of premium ‘TV movies’, which would make the category more competitive,” Berger adds. “That includes many great streaming films that decide to pursue Academy Awards, when realistically only a few have a shot.”

For indie filmmakers, the debate around theatrical versus streaming movies always comes down to audience experience versus reach. Do you prioritize the optimal viewing conditions of watching a movie in a theater, or do you focus on getting your film in front of the most eyeballs possible? Most smaller-scale movies coming out of festivals like Sundance or Toronto play limited theatrical runs and then live on streaming, where they could in theory reach a sizable audience — if they get any amount of promotion, and don’t get swallowed by the unending carousel of content. One thing that tends to help good small movies get attention, however, is an awards campaign. And a resurgent, competitive Emmys race for Outstanding TV Movie could be the spotlight these films need.

“I think there is a value in making serious dramas that would otherwise potentially have a difficult time if they were released only in a theatrical venue,“ says Callender, making as straightforward an argument as possible for continuing the TV format he helped take to such great heights. Movies, even smaller ones, can still feel like events. The magic trick that HBO performed back in the ’90s was making TV movies feel like events. There is no shortage of quality films and filmmakers. It’s up to the networks, the streamers, and — if they’re bold enough — the Emmys to make them matter again.