{"id":174915,"date":"2025-09-28T10:22:09","date_gmt":"2025-09-28T10:22:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/174915\/"},"modified":"2025-09-28T10:22:09","modified_gmt":"2025-09-28T10:22:09","slug":"let-there-be-light-why-modern-tv-shows-are-so-often-too-dark-to-see","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/174915\/","title":{"rendered":"Let there be light: Why modern TV shows are so often too dark to see"},"content":{"rendered":"

A pint of Guinness<\/a> is a beautiful thing. That stripe of off-white head at the top of the glass giving way to the brooding black abyss of stout below. That contrast is part of what has made the drink iconic. And it\u2019s a colour palette that has \u2013 quite naturally \u2013 inflected Steven Knight\u2019s new drama, House of Guinness<\/a>, about family wranglings within the Guinness clan. But where those tarry shades have become part of the drink\u2019s mystique, has the television programme simply fallen foul of the modern trend for lighting shows with an unwatchably funereal gloominess?<\/p>\n

From House of the Dragon to The Luminaries, The Handmaid\u2019s Tale to Wolf Hall and Great Expectations (another Knight vehicle), accusations of excessive dreariness have dogged recent telly. Back in 2019, viewers tuned into a climactic episode of Game of Thrones\u2019s final season \u2013 \u201cThe Long Night\u201d \u2013 only to discover that the last battle for the living residents of Westeros would occur during the uncannily realistic nighttime. \u201cThis battle is fun but also totally visually incomprehensible,\u201d one tweeter observed. \u201cHow do u switch this show from night mode?\u201d another asked. As the show\u2019s critical reputation degenerated in its twilight weeks, these issues felt symbolic.<\/p>\n

Darkness hides many things. The most commonly deployed defence is that it adds to the verisimilitude. After all, that fight for the soul of the Seven Kingdoms happened under moonlit skies in a fantasy universe without electrical lighting. So why wouldn\u2019t it be dark? \u201cWe want you to be subjected to the feeling of claustrophobia, anxiety, and frustration that these characters are experiencing,\u201d the episode\u2019s director, Miguel Sapochnik, told an interviewer. And it\u2019s true: \u201cThe Long Night\u201d is disorientating in many ways. Some good, many bad.<\/p>\n

Another helpful function of turning the dimmer down is cost saving. While Sapochnik was out defending the creative decisions behind the episode, his director of photography (who is ultimately responsible for lighting decisions on a film set), Fabian Wagner, was being more practical. \u201cVFX didn\u2019t have the money to show an army of Whites in every shot,\u201d he said in an interview, \u201cso we embraced the darkness even more.\u201d Even on a VFX-heavy show like Game of Thrones \u2013 which is also one of the most expensive small-screen projects in history \u2013 the budget is not limitless. A show like the BBC<\/a>\u2019s recent Battle of Hastings epic, King & Conqueror, is far more constrained. For them, the dingy tent corners don\u2019t just reduce the necessity for photorealistic CGI rendering, but also sand down the imprecision of the whole production.<\/p>\n

If you are composing a historical epic \u2013 like King & Conqueror or House of Guinness, which is set in late 1860s Dublin \u2013 you are faced with daunting requirements from almost every department. Costumes and props must be period-appropriate, without looking too box-fresh. Houses and cars, castles and horses; all need to blend with the period setting. Here, darkness is convenient. The illusion of candle or oil lamp-lit scenes allows the shadows to consume the detail. The colour grade, too, is often used to alter the visual profile of the scene, particularly when making the blacks truer. But decrease the \u201cblack point\u201d too far, and you run the risk of \u201ccrushing the blacks\u201d, creating a palette that looks like it\u2019s been confected by a moody teenager on a MacBook Photo Booth.<\/p>\n

\"ShotShot in the dark: A still from \u2018Game of Thrones\u2019 episode \u2018The Long Night\u2019 (HBO)<\/p>\n

Does any of this matter, though? Isn\u2019t art subjective? The BBC\u2019s 2014 adaptation of Daphne du Maurier\u2019s Jamaica Inn was roundly condemned by viewers for its inaudible dialogue (resulting in a quarter drop in audience for its second episode) at a time when the \u201cmumblecore\u201d genre \u2013 ultra-realistic films using improvised dialogue and little or no artificial lighting \u2013 was going gangbusters. Who am I to slag off King & Conqueror (calling it \u201calmost unwatchably dark\u201d in my review<\/a>) if low-lumen lighting is good enough for Stanley Kubrick<\/a> or Martin Scorsese or Paul Thomas Anderson? <\/p>\n

It comes down, ultimately, to how television is consumed. Most movies are still designed with theatrical release in mind, hence why Kubrick attached a letter for projectionists alongside reels of his natural light masterpiece Barry Lyndon, instructing them on the precise number of foot lamberts of light required on screen. With television, there is nobody to exercise such control. There are thousands of different manufacturers of TV sets with different configurations. Some people watch with the \u201cbig light\u201d on, some people with the curtains drawn. Some watch on their iPhone on their commute, others while they\u2019re cooking, on a laptop splashed with tomato sauce. You can tell people to turn off motion smoothing. You can inform them of the best brightness, the perfect contrast level. But there are too many variables to constrain.<\/p>\n

And so, adequately lighting shows is important. TV is a democratic medium, at its best when it is being enjoyed by diverse audiences. Realism should not be placed above the needs of viewers. After all, there\u2019s a long, storied history of willing suspensions of disbelief about lighting. When Sean Astin \u2013 who played Samwise Gamgee \u2013 asked Andrew Lesnie, The Lord of the Rings cinematographer, where the light in a scene was coming from, Lesnie famously replied: \u201cThe same place as the music.\u201d Rather than surrendering to its limitations, more television makers should embrace the messy, uncontrollable nature of home viewing, and let there be light.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A pint of Guinness is a beautiful thing. That stripe of off-white head at the top of the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":174916,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[64,63,134,427],"class_list":{"0":"post-174915","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-tv","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-entertainment","11":"tag-tv"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/174915","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=174915"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/174915\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/174916"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=174915"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=174915"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=174915"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}