'Disclaimer' Is a "Seven Hour Movie," Which Is a Bad Thing for a TV Show to Be

More like Cate Bland-chett, you feel me?

Apple TV+; Hannah Roman

When Alfonso Cuarón’s Apple TV+ limited series Disclaimer premiered at the Venice Film Festival in August, the director said “I don’t know how to direct TV. Probably at this stage of my life it’s too late to learn how to direct TV. We approached this whole thing as a film. There was never a conversation where we were doing something different.”

After watching four episodes of the show, I can tell Cuarón wasn’t being flippant. He really doesn’t know how to direct TV (even though he has directed TV before; he co-created and directed the pilot of 2014 NBC series called Awake, which I would like to watch but probably never will). Although he’s one of the best film directors in the game — I remember where I was when I found out Baby Diego died in Children of Men — Cuarón commits the cardinal sin of filmmakers slumming it in television: Stretching a movie-length story beyond its breaking point while trying to fit a TV runtime. The most annoying cliche that people making TV use to describe their shows is “It’s a ten-hour movie” (or however long their show happens to be). Most of the time they’re trying to say that their show tells a continuing story over the course of its season and has some cinematic qualities. That’s not what Cuarón is doing, though. Disclaimer shows the perils of what happens when someone actually tries to make a seven-hour movie. 

Cuarón thinks that having all this extra time means he can elongate moments in a way film does not allow. And the master of long takes takes it too far, letting things take vastly longer than they need to while hitting every possible micro-beat in a scene. A scene where Kevin Kline shops for a vacuum cleaner that could take two minutes takes five. Episodes 3 and 4 have about 40 minutes of sex scenes spread across them, at which point it’s like, okay, yes, Leila George is very beautiful, but it’s time to put some clothes on and go out and move the plot along. 

Cuarón misunderstands what TV actually offers. He doesn’t really have seven hours to tell a story, he has about 45 minutes, the length of an episode. The story has to be broken up in a different way, into individual chapters with their own beginning, middle, and end, not like acts in a movie that can get away with being less clearly defined (though Disclaimer does usually end on a moment that makes me want to click play on the next episode, which I appreciate). What TV truly offers is the opportunity for greater depth of character, and that is achieved by putting characters in more scenarios, not extending the ones they’re in. Disclaimer ends up stretching events that would take 20 minutes in a movie across a 45-minute episode, which makes each episode feel interminable. Instead of getting a seven-hour Tár where each episode shows us another facet of Lydia Tár’s complex psyche by giving her a different piece of a problem to solve, we get Tár in slow motion where we spend an hour with the grieving parents of the woman haunting her. It’s a drab, dreary, London gray-blue slog.  

Dadsclaimer

You know that scene in Step Brothers where they’re wearing tuxedos for a job interview at a sporting goods store and John C. Reilly farts and Seth Rogen says “Okay, now the tuxedos seem kinda fucked up?” That’s how I feel about Cuarón’s stylistic flourishes in Disclaimer. Because the story is so mismanaged, the showy camera swoops and Looney Tunes iris wipe transitions look cheesy instead of cool. His style heightens great material, but the material here wasn’t developed enough to rise to the occasion. The story, which is about a journalist played by Cate Blanchett who receives a copy of a “novel” that actually exposes a secret from her past that could ruin her life, is inherently engaging, and as I watch Disclaimer I find myself wanting to know what happens next, but out of natural curiosity, not because I’m enjoying the show.

I haven’t listened yet, but I saw The Watch podcast did an episode about Disclaimer called “Disclaimer Feels Like the Prestige TV of Five Years Ago,” and that’s accurate. There used to be more baggy, slow-moving dramas without strong genre hooks like this one. Remember I Know This Much Is True? Prestige TV now is The Penguin, for better or worse. Worse because when things like Disclaimer are good, they’re better than things like The Penguin. But better because prestige TV shows are remembering that they don’t have to be movies, which is good. Five years ago, I may have given Disclaimer a more positive review than this. But my tastes have changed a bit, and I find myself drawn to more traditional forms of television. If I want to watch an Apple TV+ show, I would rather watch Bad Monkey, a fun crime comedy made by veteran broadcast TV producer Bill Lawrence, than Disclaimer, a gloomy limited series made by one of cinema’s greatest living filmmakers. I admit that some of this change may be me reacting to external forces — it’s convenient that my own tastes are changing in concert with an industry trend toward the type of show I think I want, isn’t it? — but I also think a lot of people got tired of this type of self-serious but underbaked show. We got burnt out on vibes and want plot again. We want to watch Dad Shows.

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Elsewhere, it’s been a CBS week for me. I published interviews with the stars of Young Sheldon spinoff Georgie & Mandy’s First Marriage and the showrunner of Fire Country over at Parade.