

We live in complicated times. For most of its life, television would frantically chase cinema’s tail. Film was always where the money was. It was where the biggest stars were, and all the strongest storytelling. Television was just a poor relation, a dumb box that sat in the corner of the room squawking at idiots.

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But then things changed. Slowly, television started making bolder decisions. It started aping cinema’s production values. First-class writers came to see the benefit of longer-form narrative. Movie stars began to appear on television shows, and those shows quickly became career-defining highlights.

And, as of last week, cinema has started to chase television’s tail. Because Avengers: Infinity War is almost definitely going to become the biggest movie of all time. And what is Avengers: Infinity War if not a really expensive episode of television?

Stick with me. Viewed in a vacuum, Infinity War is meaningless. As a standalone film, it’s a mess. Characters pop up for one scene and then vanish again completely. Nobody has any meaningful screen time. The antagonist swans about with an entirely unearned sense of motivation. And there’s no emotional weight to the ending. It’s just a lot of stuff happening to people we’ve barely met. We may as well be watching it happen to extras.

Play Video 2:19 Watch the trailer for Avengers: Infinity War

But, with 10 years of context behind it, Infinity War is deeply impressive. We’ve watched these characters grow and change and their relationships evolve in several ways. Infinity War contains a moment – it’s far too brief to be called a scene – between two characters who haven’t seen each other for years. We know their history and their motivations, their thwarted desires and their realisation that they’ll probably never get what they both want. And they communicate all this with a look and maybe two lines of dialogue. The film can’t linger any longer than that, because there’s a superhuman testicle-chinned alien trying to murder them all, but it nevertheless counts as one of the most touching moments in the entire movie.

The reason this moment feels earned at all is because we’ve spent enough time with the characters to grasp the complexity of their shorthand. Until now, this sort of thing has only happened on television. Take something like Breaking Bad. In one of the final episodes, Walter White calls his wife a “stupid bitch”. On its own it’s a moment of simple cruelty, but the knowledge of everything that’s gone before adds layer upon layer of meaning.

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This happens again and again throughout Infinity War, because it’s just an episode of television. Things that happened in previous episodes pay off here, and things that are set up here will pay off in upcoming episodes. There’s a reason why the Russo brothers were chosen to direct Infinity War, and that’s because they have enough television experience to satisfactorily keep all the balls in the air. If these films were self-contained, standalone affairs, you might want someone with more flair for dialogue or inventive visuals. But the Russo brothers are perfect for this job, because this job is simply about moving the story along. It’s a Gold Blend advert with a talking racoon in it.

In fact, come next year, I’m expecting people to cool on Infinity War. By the time the impact of the spectacle has worn off a little, we’ll come to see it as nothing more than a piece-moving episode that only exists to set up the series finale that is Avengers 4. If it was an episode of Lost, Infinity War would be something like What They Died For; fine on its own, but designed to get the characters to where they need to be in order to make the final episode go off with a bang.

Of course, by becoming an episode of television, Infinity War falls prey to many of television’s flaws – we know which actors still have films on their contracts, which removes the permanence from some of the movie’s events – but that doesn’t really matter in the big scheme of things. Because movies might be copying television now, but it’s television that we still pay £10 an episode to watch. Maybe Marvel has just discovered the future.