Television film
Precursors of "television movies" include Talk Faster, Mister, which aired on WABD (now WNYW) in New York City on December 18, 1944, and was produced by RKO Pictures,[citation needed] and the 1957 The Pied Piper of Hamelin, based on the poem by Robert Browning, and starring Van Johnson, one of the first filmed "family musicals" made directly for television.
In 1996, 264 made-for-TV movies were made by five of the six largest American television networks at the time (CBS, NBC, Fox, ABC, and UPN), averaging a 7.5 rating.
The BBC's 1984 television film Threads earned a similar reputation in the United Kingdom as it followed two families and workers of Sheffield City Council in the run up and aftermath of a nuclear war.
Another popular and critically acclaimed television movie was 1971's Duel, written by Richard Matheson, directed by Steven Spielberg and starring Dennis Weaver.
In some instances, television movies of the period had more explicit content included in the versions prepared to be exhibited theatrically in Europe.
My Sweet Charlie (1970) with Patty Duke and Al Freeman Jr. dealt with racial prejudice, and That Certain Summer (1972), starring Hal Holbrook and Martin Sheen, although controversial, was considered the first television movie to approach the subject of homosexuality in a non-threatening manner.
Another example is the Showtime movie Sabrina, the Teenage Witch, which launched the sitcom of the same name that originally aired on ABC, and used the same actress (Melissa Joan Hart) for the lead role in both.
[9] The slack has been taken up by cable networks such as Hallmark Channel, Syfy, Lifetime and HBO, with productions such as Temple Grandin and Recount, often utilizing top creative talent.
High-calibre limited programming which would have been formerly scheduled solely as a two-hour film or miniseries also has been re-adapted to the newer "limited series" format over a period of weeks (rather than the consecutive days usually defined by a miniseries) where a conclusion is assured; an example of such would be The People v. O. J. Simpson: American Crime Story, and these are most often seen on cable networks and streaming services such as Netflix.
In a 1991 New York Times article, television critic John J. O'Connor wrote that "few artifacts of popular culture invite more condescension than the made-for-television movie".
The movies tend to rely on smaller casts, one such exception being those produced for premium cable, such as Behind the Candelabra (which featured established film actors Michael Douglas and Matt Damon in the lead roles) and a limited range of scene settings and camera setups.
Even Spielberg's Duel, while having decent production values, features a very small cast (apart from Dennis Weaver, all other actors appearing in the film play smaller roles) and mostly outdoor shooting locations in the desert.
[12] Nonetheless, notable exceptions exist of high production quality and well-known casts and crews that even earned awards, such as The Diamond Fleece, a 1992 Canadian TV film directed by Al Waxman and starring Ben Cross, Kate Nelligan and Brian Dennehy.
Most of these are made and shown during sweeps period in order to attract a large television audience and boost viewership for a show.
Crossover episodes containing a number of episodes of the characters of individual series interacting with characters across different shows (as has been done with the CSI, NCIS and Chicago franchises, along with between Murder, She Wrote and Magnum, P.I., Scandal and How to Get Away with Murder, and Ally McBeal and The Practice) also play as films, encouraging tune-in among all the series crossed over to effectively create a multiple-hour plot that plays as a film when watched as a whole.
