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While the French film critics created and championed the auteur theory celebrating cinema as a medium dominated by directors, television has been perceived more primarily as the domain of writers and producers and even stars, going back to Gertrude Berg and Lucy & Desi, from Rod Serling and Norman Lear to David Chase and Matthew Weiner (both of whom directed their respective shows) and Aaron Sorkin (who did not).
Just as the auteur theory was a reductive way to approach the collaborative process of filmmaking, those conversations negating directors and cinematographers and other technical craftspeople as key players in the shaping of television have left countless influential figures marginalized in a medium that has developed and reshaped and evolved its aesthetic over 80+ years.
There’s no television without Karl Freund, the legendary film cinematographer (Metropolis, Dracula) recruited by Desi Arnaz to shoot I Love Lucy, bringing with him the polished black and white photography that characterized television’s first Golden Age and advancing and perfecting the look and process behind what would become the multi-cam comedy.
There’s no television without the legendary directors who turned around the weekly installments of Playhouse 90 and other anthology shows of the 1950s and early 1960s, creating a look and feel that was prestigious back when the phrase “prestige TV” would have been treated as an oxymoron.
