Spike Lee, Nicolas Winding Refn and the Coens are set to join the ongoing exodus to TV, yet there are lessons to be learned from those who have gone before

In his 2015 film Youth, Italian film-maker Paolo Sorrentino used Harvey Keitel’s character Mick as a mouthpiece, delivering a diatribe about the war between film and TV through the ageing director’s dialogue. “This is cinema, and that’s just television!” he tells his muse. “Television is shit!” Her ominous response? “Television is the future, Mick.”

Smash cut to the beginning of 2017 and Sorrentino’s unveiling The Young Pope, perhaps his most opulent vision to date – in 10 parts on HBO. He’s just one of the many artists making a mass exodus from the cinema to TV, lured by the promises of handsome budgets, greater creative control, and the wider canvas of extended run times. Danish enfant terrible Nicolas Winding Refn announced just last week that he would write and direct the 10-episode crime saga Too Old to Die Young for Amazon Prime. Guillermo del Toro premiered his animated series Trollhunters exclusively on Netflix shortly before Christmas. The Lobster director Yorgos Lanthimos plans to follow up his next feature with a typically bizarre series starring Kirsten Dunst on FX, bearing the magnificent title On Becoming a God in Central Florida. Even such elder statesmen as Woody Allen have, reluctantly, taken this migration.

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Film-makers squeezing their work on to the small screen is hardly a recent innovation; Rainer Werner Fassbinder wowed Germany from their couches with his 14-part epic Berlin Alexanderplatz in 1980, and Krzysztof Kieslowski’s 1989 Polish miniseries The Dekalog may be the crowning achievement of the medium. But the numbers have grown drastically over the past few years, and what’s more, the attitude toward the medium has shifted as well.

Moving to TV used to be an admission of failure for film-makers, a last resort when work got scarce and paychecks stopped flowing. Steven Soderbergh, for instance, brought his Liberace biopic Behind the Candelabra to HBO only after spending years searching in vain for a studio buyer. Scarcely a year later, however, Soderbergh returned to TV as the in-house director of Cinemax’s The Knick. He had come onboard to serve the vision of creators Jack Amiel and Michael Begler, but even so, the narrative of his involvement was one of triumph, not defeat. If the suits in Hollywood couldn’t appreciate his distinctive visual style, then he figured he’d take his talents elsewhere.

TV has given auteurs an accommodating home at a time when movie budgets are either ballooning or shrinking. Netflix’s business strategy often equates to selecting a worthy, proven talent and giving them enough money to follow their creative impulses wherever they may lead. The Wachowski sisters could afford to shoot their mind-bending Sense8 on location in eight countries spread across five continents, and more importantly, they didn’t have executives stopping them from staging a surreal singalong to What’s Up by 4 Non-Blondes. Having the latitude to pursue every indulgence has resulted in some highly distinguished work – in all its shameless opulence, The Young Pope plays like it’s on an entirely different plane than the rest of television.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Woody Allen directing Miley Cyrus in Amazon comedy Crisis in Six Scenes. Photograph: Jessica Miglio/AP

But granting bold directors carte blanche freedom still constitutes a major risk, and while that method can yield True Detective-season-one-sized rewards, it also precipitates some True Detective-season-two-sized failures. Allen’s Amazon series Crisis in Six Scenes reflected all of its creator’s kids-these-days crankiness and precious little of his humor, ranking among the worst in his filmography. Martin Scorsese didn’t personally oversee the full production of Vinyl, stepping in as executive producer and the pilot’s director, and the series came out like an over-the-top parody of his most crowd-pleasing films. Baz Luhrmann took the distinction of Netflix’s most expensive program when he debuted The Get Down last summer (he’s since been dethroned by The Crown), and though his flashy chronicle of hip-hop’s early days had some ardent fans, the Netflix brass regarded it as a costly misfire. To hire a big name is to go all-in, inviting a masterwork or, just as easily, a disaster.

This phenomenon will only grow more common in the years to come – Netflix landed Spike Lee for a She’s Gotta Have It series, Amazon purchased two eight-episode seasons’ worth of David O Russell’s time, and the Coen brothers will join him on the streaming platform with the Old West-set series The Ballad of Buster Scruggs. Whether this trend is cause for celebration or concern is something of a glass-half-full, glass-half-empty situation. A viewer can choose to be grateful that film-makers are still being provided with the parameters they need to make the work they want, or lament the slow death of big-screen grandeur and spectacle in moving to the humbler platform of TV. What’s certain is that the influx of new blood has made the TV landscape a far more unpredictable place to be, where the hits reach higher highs and the misses usually have the confidence to stumble with style. From the shores of Cannes and the peaks of Sundance, right to your living room.