'I haven't seen a movie that's inspired me as much as The Sopranos has. A lot of our one-hour episodes are as good as any movie out there today.' Lorraine Bracco (Dr Jennifer Melfi, The Sopranos), to Entertainment Weekly, March 2006

The days are long gone when the makers of famous movies about TV, such as A Face In The Crowd, Network, Broadcast News or Up Close And Personal, could sneer at the money-grubbing pinheads of network television. Also gone are the days when formulaic trash such as All In The Family and Sandford And Son, alongside Happy Days, Welcome Back, Kotter (which spawned John Travolta), Dallas and Dynasty, were considered the cream of what the three big US networks - CBS, NBC and ABC - were producing.

Today, US television is where cultural debates are sparked, and where popular culture renews and reinvigorates itself. Over the past 10 years, TV has slowly seized the creative initiative from the movies and run with it, all the way to the Emmys - and to the bank. With entire seasons of TV shows available on DVD and cheap iPod downloads of popular shows online, television is now teeming with beautifully written, well-made programmes, including The Sopranos, Deadwood, Law & Order and its many spin-offs, Lost, 24, Six Feet Under, The Shield and Nip/Tuck. Umbilically connected to the internet, TV is also able to attach itself swiftly to new currents in subterranean culture and bring them to viewers in a matter of days. This inventiveness affects all areas, from news to drama. And it is because of the sudden upsurge in TV drama, along with the immense fortunes to be made in it, that so many names we associate with the cinema are moving to television.

James Woods, the star of the new legal drama Shark, is part of this year's mass migration to the small, well, smaller screen. His main reason: better material. "I've been lamenting the horrible state of the movie industry the past few years," he told the LA Times in March. "When I was young, everyone pooh-poohed television, and now every time I turn [it] on, I see some extraordinarily interesting series." The transition should be easy for Woods: he'll be surrounded by plenty of movie people - Shark is produced by Brian Grazer (Ron Howard's producer) and the pilot directed by Spike Lee.

The shift has been going on for a while. Geena Davis and Donald Sutherland in the White House drama Commander In Chief, and Glenn Close and Forest Whitaker in The Shield offered 2005's most obvious examples; with 24, meanwhile, Kiefer Sutherland beat them to it by four years. Two feature directors, Doug Liman and McG, crafted the look and feel of Fox's hit The OC, and Liman is a guiding force behind ABC's new thriller Heist. Directors Mike Nichols, Peter Bogdanovich, Lee Tamahori and Mike Figgis have all worked for HBO (Home Box Office), the latter trio on episodes of The Sopranos. But, as the spring 2006 pilot season unfolds, casting agents are astounded at the sheer numbers of major movie players now intent on making careers, and fortunes, in TV (for a more comprehensive list, see below).

The traffic between movies and television used to flow all the other way. TV has seen many of its talents become movie stars: Clint Eastwood, James Garner, Billy Crystal, Jim Carrey, Jamie Foxx, Johnny Depp and George Clooney spring to mind. Directors Sydney Lumet (12 Angry Men), John Frankenheimer (The Manchurian Candidate), Arthur Penn (Bonnie And Clyde) and countless others got their start in the late 50s and early 60s production boom that we should call the First Golden Age of American Television. But for a good three decades after that, moving from movies to TV was considered slumming it, a suicidal burning of one's bridges. Not any more. Actors, like many others, have cottoned on to one fact: we're now in the Second Golden Age of American Television.

To understand how everything changed so drastically, one must go back 20 years to the foundation of Fox TV in 1985, an insanely expensive gamble by Rupert Murdoch and Barry Diller, one the upstart new owner of 20th Century Fox, the other the recently retired boss of Paramount Pictures (and, not incidentally, inventor of the made-for-TV movie). Fox put US culture on notice with The Simpsons - which has since established itself as an ongoing masterpiece of public art, a satirical Bayeux tapestry of the past 20 years of US history and culture - and was set to dominate the 90s as the most aggressively innovative and creative (though not always the most successful) network on TV. (It's an uncomfortable fact for many that Murdoch, by taking a hands-off approach with his creative people at Fox, played an almost heroic role in driving up the quality of network drama and comedy. But we should bear in mind that in the past decade he was also largely responsible for the destruction of US broadcast news. So he's still a major villain.)

Murdoch defined his credo thus: "These will be shows with no outer limits. The only rules we will enforce on these programmes [are] that they have taste, they must be engaging, they must be entertaining and they must be original." Setting aside the question of taste (Who Wants To Marry A Midget, anyone?), this is a good prescription for what actually happened in all of network television (in TV drama at least) over the next two decades.

A change was under way already. The slow-building success of Steven Bochco's Hill Street Blues from 1981 onwards on NBC TV suggested something to which network suits had long seemed blind: that television shows could be intelligent, provocative and superbly written, yet still draw audiences and make money. In short, quality was no longer a bad idea. It took a while for that quite revolutionary notion to take hold among the greedheads of the major networks.

Fox set off another tremor through the industry with its attitude to censorship. Whereas, for instance, ABC had spent the late 70s dispatching inspectors from its "standards and practices" department to the set of Soap to ensure Katherine Helmond's cleavage was not too drastically exposed, Fox happily embraced vulgarity, originally with the gutter-dwelling Married... With Children, and then made it an essential part of the subversive Simpsons. To everyone's amazement, once viewers got used to it and the usual crew of fundamentalist boycotters backed off, no one seemed to mind any more.

Censor-baiters on other networks picked up the challenge. Bochco was always keen to put one over on his network, even if it was something as silly as naming a Japanese character on LA Law Fukuto. Later, he would pioneer partial on-screen nudity and push the limits of acceptable TV profanity on NYPD Blue (now returning to British screens four days a week on More4). And while America's religious sensibilities mean it's still true that, as West Wing creator Aaron Sorkin once put it, "We'll hear the word 'cocksucker' on TV before we ever hear the word 'goddamn'," the range of realistic usable language has broadened significantly. Television has finally grown up.

One of the main fields of conflict between television and movies has always been technology, and the quality of the sound and image. When TV first put Hollywood on notice in the 50s, the suddenly beleaguered studios responded with the razzle-dazzle of CinemaScope and TechniColor to retain their audiences. The foot-wide, oval-shaped, black-and-white TV screen of 1952 was no match for a movie screen the size of a warehouse wall in vibrant colour. Although TVs grew larger and were able to project colour from the late 50s, the technological gap between TV and movies still persists, but it's narrowing all the time.

A recent TV commercial - a bit of self-promotion by LA's main local cable provider, Adelphia - shows how things have changed. A kid eats his Froot Loops in front of his TV when, suddenly, the worst thing imaginable happens: his living room turns into a movie auditorium. His remote is gone. There's only one channel. A tall guy in a cowboy hat sits in front of him. A few rows back a baby yowls, people are making out, arguing, eating loudly and talking on their mobile phones. Then we cut to what Adelphia - and other large cable suppliers - can offer you at home: hundreds of channels providing an unprecedented range of programming; video on demand, which lets you watch cable shows and movies free whenever you wish; and a recording facility that will record your favourite shows automatically on to a hard drive and let you watch them at a time of your choosing, while skipping the commercials.

The glory days of cinema, mourned in a recent LA Times article by Peter Bogdanovich (director of The Last Picture Show, who, incidentally appears in The Sopranos as a shrink) - the days of communal enjoyment in great movie palaces, of submerging your identity into that of the congregation-like crowd - are, sad to say, gone for ever, along with newsreels, animated shorts, B-features and ashtrays in the seat-arms. But that's not entirely TV's fault. As Bogdanovich says, "Better movies would help." Today, we are offered a fast-food McMovie experience that is dismayingly TV-like, the screens often clotted with big-screen TV show remakes and product placement.

Meanwhile, television has become infinitely more cinematic, just as audiences have progressively become more cine-literate. Gone are the all-over lighting and static cameras of the old made-for-TV movie, to be replaced, often, by superbly kinetic and inventive film-making, shot on film, often in wide-screen formats and on location, using big budgets (Lost's opener, for example, cost a record-breaking $10m), special effects and hit-parade soundtracks.

As you're sitting watching, the living-room TV experience, with giant plasma screens, HDTV and Dolby SurroundSound systems, is looking more and more like a serious improvement on the tatty old fleapit and sterile multiplex. And don't think the studios aren't worried about this threat to their much diminished hegemony. At this year's Oscars, after yet another montage of ancient and venerable movie clips, presenter Jake Gyllenhaal self-consciously delivered a few scripted remarks about the superior quality of the movie image that suggested a curiously defensive mindset among the studio titans: "You can't properly watch these on a television set, and good luck trying to enjoy them on a portable DVD." (Which raises the question, "So, who's manufacturing these DVDs?")

In his LA Times piece, Bogdanovich expanded on Gyllenhaal's theme: "What is there to say about seeing movies of quality on an iPod? Chilling." The two of them sounded like embattled studio executives circa 1952, scorning the upstart TV while hymning the glories of 'Scope and TechniColor.

The studios are mired in a fading paradigm of bloated budgets and creative inertia. Unlike TV, especially the cable outfits, studios seem unable, or unwilling, to make movies for intelligent adults. They also face the enormous costs of converting their auditoriums from celluloid to digital projection. This will make delivering movies a lot cheaper and quicker, but it will cost billions before any money is seen from it. And all this at a time when movie releases are becoming more like trailers for the inevitable DVD release.

In America, all this year's Oscar-winners were available on DVD less than a month after the ceremony (several were available before it). Going to the movies has become like buying hardback books; those with patience may opt to wait for the DVD, the paperback. And the wait is now down from a year or six months to as little as six weeks. Steven Soderbergh upset a lot of Hollywood top-table types by releasing his latest movie, Bubble, simultaneously in cinemas, on subscription cable and on DVD. Within a few years, he may be doing the same with Ocean's 15.

A movie gets one chance to fail (unless it becomes a cult on DVD, which happens to good movies that flummox the studio's marketing honchos). It's a large and inflexible investment, a behemoth that need not concern itself with building customer loyalty as TV must, but has to strut into the marketplace with the almost impossible task of making a huge splash over a single opening weekend.

Studios are also notoriously slow to respond to new trends and cultural phenomena. They have the laborious, 50-mile turning circle of a fleet of oil tankers. By contrast, TV is a speedboat, zipping and weaving in response to ratings, reviews, fan clubs and the zeitgeist. In an age of interactivity, spawned by home computers and video games, and of hybrids, inspired mainly by hip-hop, TV is better able to make adjustments on the hoof, and the frenzied evolution of one genre into another - from, say, a trashy reality show such as Survivor to a stylish drama such as Lost - is dizzyingly fast.

Most shows broadcast their first eight episodes and then take a break. A successful show will at this point often recalibrate itself, responding rapidly to satisfy audience expectations or, these days, to confound them. When The OC returned for its ninth episode after its first hiatus, it had wittily incorporated all the jokes that fans were already making about the show: Benjamin McKenzie's resemblance to a puppy-dog Russell Crowe was duly noted, and jokes about Peter Gallagher's eyebrows were 10 a penny. South Park proved itself even more fleet of foot, killing off Isaac Hayes's character Chef less than a week after Hayes himself quit in protest at the show's treatment of Scientology (they tore him limb from limb and did everything short of boiling his bones). Try doing that with a movie.

On TV, writing by committee is a blessing, the secret of US TV's present greatness, whereas at the movies one groans inwardly when a movie has six or more writing credits. Movie writers work at home with a script originated by someone they've never met. A director may then take a shot at rewriting, and the star will bring on even more scribes to tailor the material to his or her on-screen persona. The result, often, is a dog's dinner of a script, and a dog of a movie, because there is no single governing intelligence to hold everything together.

TV writers, perhaps 10 or more on some shows, work together with a supreme guiding force - usually the show's creator - working up story arcs, character profiles and so on, before handing individual episodes to one or two writers. Their work is then tweaked in committee. Somehow, it works. And the person who benefits is the viewer. As CBS-Paramount TV president David Stapf said recently, "TV is as good as it gets because the form forces the writers to be better. You don't have time to meander. So writers hone their craft on 22 little movies a year."

Then there is the sordid matter of coin. Movie people heading to television expect to get rich sooner or later. The fortunes to be made in television often dwarf the incomes of all but the most Olympian movie stars and producers. Aaron Spelling could buy and sell most of his studio peers, which attracts such savvy entrepreneurs as Jerry Bruckheimer, David Mamet and the Scott brothers into television. Kelsey Grammer's personal profits from the syndication of Frasier - $40m-70m by various estimates - could gag the New York Stock Exchange, a fact that surely motivates ambitious young actors.

It used to be that TV producers made 22 shows a year while grinding towards the magic number, Episode 100, when syndication of a successful show on local stations commences. At that point, with residuals kicking in and points finally being counted, the major players all stood to make a fortune. Today, the money starts to pour in the moment the first season has its DVD release, usually in the run-up to season two. And iPod downloads for a couple of dollars mean that a hit show can start minting money the morning after it is broadcast. This year's flood of pilot directors suggests that more of them are becoming aware of how lucrative TV can be, compared with notoriously undependable movie projects. They're tempted by executive producer titles that, if the pilot goes to a series and becomes a hit, can earn them enormous fees and back-end deals. And because box-office takings over recent years have been dwindling, there is now a shortage of projects in development or in production, and they may find many good reasons not to return.

Perhaps the most influential player in recent television history has been HBO. Being a subscriber-only network allows it to transcend the limitations under which the big four networks must labour. Originally, HBO showed uncut, commercial-free studio movies, closed-circuit sporting events and a lot of sex-based programming, but when it began to get the hang of producing original material, it found that the lack of such limits was its greatest asset, leading to superb, adult-oriented shows such as The Larry Sanders Show, Mr Show With Bob And David, Sex And The City and Curb Your Enthusiasm.

And then there is The Sopranos, which many, myself included, consider the greatest television drama ever made (it remains so in its new season). The knock-on effect of the show - its violence, its peerless writing and acting, its effortless channelling of the zeitgeist - were felt not only at HBO, which has had a further string of critical successes with Six Feet Under, Deadwood, The Wire and Big Love, but also at former most-innovative network Fox.

In 1999, Fox debuted a short-lived half-hour comedy for adults called Action, starring Jay Mohr as an utterly amoral movie agent (an early example of a TV show paying back some of the scorn of those movies about TV). It was foul-mouthed, scatological and sexually sophisticated - a lot like the conventional HBO product of that period - and Fox liked it enough to film it uncut, then "bleep" it for transmission. Action was well reviewed but lasted only a single season. All the same, like Homer Simpson when he excitedly discovered "a new meal between breakfast and brunch", Fox had revealed a hitherto undetected interzone between a constrained, mainstream network, such as itself, and a no-holds-barred cable pioneer such as HBO. At that time, no one had any idea how to make best use of it, and when a similarly conceived adult drama about the New Jersey mafia was pitched to Fox, the network turned it down. In handing The Sopranos over to HBO, it also passed on the baton for revolutionising TV.

After pondering the riddle of this middle-ground between Fox and HBO for several years, Murdoch's people finally developed the FX cable network and started investing heavily in smart, innovative programming, pushing the envelope in terms of language, violence and nudity. FX is like HBO with commercials and without the F-word. (P-word? A-word? D-word? No problem.) The Shield was so well written and compellingly made that it started attracting actors of the calibre of Glenn Close and Forest Whitaker, while the agreeably demented Nip/Tuck snagged no less august a thesp than Vanessa Redgrave (perhaps because her daughter Joely Richardson stars in it). And Steven Bochco's arrival at FX to make the Iraq war drama Over There - although his show didn't survive - did suggest the fledgling network was being taken seriously by network-seasoned pros. FX, or HBO-lite, with its emphasis on intelligent, exciting drama for adults, has had a knock-on effect on the major networks, too, including Fox itself, which continues to produce exciting work such as Prison Break and the hugely successful House.

One of the people who superintended the success of HBO, Brad Grey, recently became the head of Paramount Pictures, reversing the movies-to-TV career-trajectory of Barry Diller, the Paramount honcho who built Fox TV. This makes a lot of sense, because HBO has taken on many of the outward qualities of an old-line movie studio. Its productions - dramas, comedies or one-off movies - all draw on a large reservoir, a mini star system, if you will, of mainly New York-based character actors. It shoots in a small number of East Coast studios, and HBO now has a creative identity as striking and clear-cut as MGM or Warner Brothers did in the 30s and 40s. Perhaps Grey can return the favour and bring a little of HBO's magic and inventiveness to the once-great, now fading studio pioneer of the 70s, as innovative then as his old employer is today.

In the meantime, stay home and grab that remote because, like the lady said, it's "as good as any movie out there..."

Breaking the shackles

Wentworth Miller, actor, Prison Break

The most famous nipples in America are, for now at least, covered up. As Prison Break's Michael Scofield, Wentworth Miller exposes his torso at least once an episode - in the name of vital plot development, of course. For the unfamiliar, his physique is tattooed with the plans of the prison in which he and his brother, framed for murder, languish. Racing against time, and a cabal of baddies, to save this brother from execution requires Miller frequently to refer to the plans. It helps that Miller, 33, is not an unattractive man, as anyone who has seen him smouldering on billboards and bus shelter posters will testify. Which is pretty much how Miller looks in the flesh, except he's shyer.

'I have a healthy disconnect between who I am and who that is,' he says of the promotional posters. 'Half the time, my eyes aren't the colour I know them to be, and my moles have been airbrushed out. It's me and it's not me, and it's an odd feeling, especially when fans approach me in the street and ask to see the tattoo. I have to break it to them gently that I don't actually have one.' (In fact, the tattoo takes two people between four and five hours to apply.)

Before Prison Break, Miller's career was unremarkable. He appeared in the odd episode of ER, Joan Of Arcadia and Buffy, and played the lead in the miniseries Dinotopia, opposite a trample of CGI dinosaurs. The role that might have been his breakthrough to movies was that of the young Coleman Silk in The Human Stain, the film based on the Philip Roth novel. Might have... 'That was supposed to do A, B and C for me, but instead did D, E and F,' Miller says. 'The reality of the feature film world today is that casting decisions are not made by directors, unless you're Steven Spielberg. Casting decisions are made by accountants, studio execs and foreign distributors. Your name has to mean something in foreign territories, and if it means something, it's on a list. So it's one thing to be among the best who audition for a project, but the fact is, there is a list of people who don't have to audition. They'll work their way down that list first and, nine times out of 10, one of those people will say yes.'

Miller's disillusionment with the film industry made a move into television all the more appealing. 'I didn't think of it as a stepping stone or something that would open doors. I just wanted to work on something that would inspire and challenge me.'

Prison Break is certainly inspired, even if a prison setting has already been employed by HBO's Oz (1997), while the show's use of a season-long arc is familiar from Lost, 24 and 1995's Murder One. What makes it unique, in Miller's view, is its tone. 'It's a drama, and we take it seriously, but I don't think it's meant to be taken seriously. It's set in this fantastic universe where almost anything is possible: there's a really Saturday morning serial exuberance to it. We have those built-in cliffhangers, there's action, adventure and romance. What more do you want?'

Moreover, says Miller, television affords something else that film cannot - time. 'You could not do justice to Michael Scofield in a two-hour movie. Really, it's not until the last nine episodes that you see what's been underneath that character all along. He's not been the most likeable hero - you weren't quite sure you should sympathise with him for quite a while - but we've told the story well and people have invested time in him and that pays dividends you don't get from movies.'

And, of course, there is the story itself, the story about family, of how far one man is willing to go to save a loved one. 'That's something anyone anywhere can relate to,' says Miller. Tattoo notwithstanding, obviously.

· Prison Break, 10pm, Mondays, on Five.

Keeping House in order

David Shore, writer-creator, House

'Movies are getting worse,' says Shore, partly to explain the move into TV. 'So much money is getting thrown at them, they become about the spectacle, not the story. TV is story-driven, so it's attracting more talent.'

Shore should know. Bryan Singer, director of The Usual Suspects and the upcoming Superman Returns, was sufficiently impressed with the script for the pilot of House to sign on even before Hugh Laurie did. And then along came Laurie. 'Without Hugh, it could have got pretty boring pretty quickly - a straightforward medical procedural show,' says Shore. Laurie has since been nominated for an Emmy and won a Golden Globe for his performance as the growling, unshaven, misanthropic medical genius. It's little wonder that Shore, who started his TV career on Due South before working on The Outer Limits and Law & Order, is behind the notion that there's a new golden age in US television: 'There were years when it was the same five shows up for Emmys; now there are at least 10 shows you wouldn't be surprised to see win an award. The standard is higher, there is more variety. Though, as a writer with a show on at the moment, I'm biased, obviously.'

· House, 9pm, Thursdays, on Five.

Soaps for men

Rob Thomas, writer-creator, Veronica Mars

Hailed by Buffy creator Joss Whedon as his new favourite show when it debuted, Veronica Mars is classic teen drama. Its protagonists may have peachy skin and pearly teeth, but darkness lurks below the surface: murder and date rape are all in a day's work for Veronica, high-school student and private eye. In some ways, it's more grown up than many of its contemporaries.

Thomas, a former teacher, says many new dramas are not born out of invigorated creativity. 'Lost and Desperate Housewives could have been done only by ABC because it was the only network desperate enough to do something different, something that wasn't a cop show. Their success is going to lead to more outside-the-box, non-franchise shows. We're already seeing shows influenced by 24, like Heist, Thief and Kidnapped.'

Thomas is all for the character-based dramas emblematic of this creative revival. 'I never felt qualified or interested in writing procedural cop or lawyer shows, and for a while that was all that was being made. I'm more interested in the characters than the case, shows like The Sopranos, The Shield, Deadwood: soaps for men, really.'

· Veronica Mars returns to LivingTV at 8pm on June 8.

Fluff and nonsense

Neil Baer, writer-producer, Law & Order: Special Victims Unit

Baer previously toiled on another of US TV's greats, ER, as well as on one of its less renowned, China Beach. He's wary of the notion of a new golden age. 'Edgier shows are doing well: Rescue Me, Six Feet Under, The Shield. Audiences will track them down on cable because they are so rewarding.'

To what does he attribute the popularity of big network shows such as Desperate Housewives and Lost? 'They're very character-based and soap operatic, and their success is partly a reaction to more procedural shows [like L&O, where there's little character development]. They're also successful, I think, because they're fluffy. Things are so bad in terms of fear - fear of terrorism, worries about healthcare and the economy - that people are turning to fluffier material to escape.'

In this fluffy landscape, Baer says SVU is 'probably the most political show on TV... teen abortion rights, end-of-life issues and gun control have all been dealt with. The West Wing did things like that, and ER, but that's about it. I think we're more in an era of fluff than a golden age, shiny though it is.'

· Law & Order: Special Victims Unit returns to Five on July 1.

Leading the exodus...

Jeff Goldblum is in talks to star in crime drama Seeing Red, as a detective who can speak to the dead.

Paul Haggis, writer-director of this year's Oscar winner, Crash, directs his own script for the pilot of the New York Irish gangster thriller The Black Donnellys.

Bruce Beresford is directing the pilot for CBS-TV's Orpheus, to be co-produced by Tony and Ridley Scott, about a man drawn into a sinister religious cult.

Barry Sonnenfeld, director of Men In Black, has an untitled buddy-cop pilot in the works, and F Gary Gray (of The Italian Job) helms ABC's FBI drama Enemies. Even an old hand like William Friedkin, who got his start as a director in TV's first 'golden age' before directing The French Connection and The Exorcist (and cannily marrying the CEO of Paramount), will return to TV to direct Anything But Murder, based on the life of a fugitive Boston crime boss.

Steven Spielberg, master of the studio picture, teams up again with the cable-based Sci-Fi Channel for the 12-part miniseries Nine Lives.

Jerry Bruckheimer, a byword for success (and excess) in big-budget movies of the Top Gun variety, will continue his invasion of the small screen (CSI, Without A Trace, Cold Case) with American Crime about an LA law firm.

Shark, another crime drama, directed by Spike Lee, has a cast that includes Ray Liotta, Virginia Madsen and Jonny Lee Miller, as well as James Woods as a celebrity attorney turned prosecutor.

George Clooney , bona fide movie star deluxe and about as thoroughgoing a child of television as you could find (most notably in ER), will return to TV to direct a live-in-the-studio version of the greatest movie ever made about broadcasting, Network.

Aaron Sorkin wrote A Few Good Men before moving to TV and creating the highly influential if little-seen comedy Sports Night. He went on to build The West Wing, that parallel universe for people who wish Bill Clinton was still in the Oval Office.

JJ Abrams, a movie writer and director of Mission: Impossible III, created Felicity, Alias and, most recently, the huge hit Lost.