Do the Bright Thing
I thought I had seen “Stranger Things”, a Netflix show about a quartet of kids battling mutant creatures in small- town America. Then I watched it again on a brand-new TV. A 65-inch monster made by Sony, it dominated my old Samsung the way Orson Welles once dominated conversation, putting the company in the shade with its size and vividness.
Its quality was especially noticeable at one particular moment. Eleven, a girl with supernatural powers, is wandering through the Upside Down, a copy of the real world that differs from it in one crucial respect: everything’s dead. As she stalks the dark corridors of the local school, details that I hadn’t noticed before popped out of the murk. I’d barely registered the periodic table on the classroom wall, but now I could read every character. I didn’t remember the clock above the blackboard, but this time I noticed that it was just past ten. On my old screen, the portal to the real world that glows at the end of a corridor seemed bright. Now its incandescence threatened to melt the television, and the corona around its edge had a far richer palette of primrose, scarlet, mauve and magenta. As Eleven looked through it, the dust around her face fluorescing like embers, I could pick out every strand of pale down on her cheek.
It is often said that we’re living in the golden age of television. But whatever you think of the dramatic quality of the shows on Netflix or HBO, one thing’s for sure: they look better than ever. The descriptive power of TV – its ability to render texture, colour and contrast – is growing fast. Directors have advances in screen technology to thank.
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