TV movies have always been a mixed blessing. But now, with so few of them being made, have we, audience and writers, been damned to hell?
by Matt Brennan?
Midway through Bessie — director Dee Rees’ made-for-television biopic of blueswoman Bessie Smith (Queen Latifah), which premiered on HBO earlier this year — the singer meets writer Carl Van Vechten (Oliver Platt) at a swanky New York party. A promoter of the Harlem Renaissance, the pasty, rotund novelist nonetheless “praises” black culture in the patronizing terms of the era’s white, Northern liberals. Van Vechten misjudges his audience; the title of his new book, Nigger Heaven, doesn’t sit well with Smith. She throws her champagne in his face, smashes the flute on the floor, and pillories the particular brand of racism that flourishes above the Mason-Dixon Line.
This is what’s great about made-for-TV movies. They have long offered a (relatively) prominent platform to women, people of color, and LGBT people. They make way for voices, subjects, and styles too often excluded from the airwaves. They tell stories that don’t often get told. And now, sadly, made-for-TV movies are dying.
