The Six-Hour Binge

If you write it they will come.

Get It Try It

The Night Manager: not the book. The BBC television series. From 2016. It's a six-hour narrative. Carriers find different strategies to parcel it up. But it's built as six episodes with opening and ending titles on each.

Our plan here was to watch Licence to Kill tonight on ITV. Of this movie our friends often say 'it's not just a good Bond movie, it's a good movie, period'.

Which can be true.

It's said of le Carré's 1993 novel that there were twenty (20) attempts to turn it into a two-hour feature film script. All failed - there's just no way to stuff all that content into such a small format.

But here's the kicker. Both The Night Manager from 2016 and The Little Drummer Girl two years later were able to surpass all expectations. The critics loved both of them, the general public did as well.



But an audience can't sit still for much more than two hours. Epics come with an intermission and can then stretch to three hours or a little more. But six hours, twice that? It's not going to work. If for no other reason, think of the logistics.

And yet the six-hour format is in every way superior. At least if you're working from quality material like a le Carré opus. The wide-sweeping panoramas of a 007 Broccoli extravaganza pale in comparison.

This is the era of film-binging. Divide it up however you want. Start after an early dinner, get to sleep just after midnight. Or just play it by ear. Turn the show on and see how much you can do in a single binging. But be warned: start early. Don't disrupt your day too much for cinema entertainment.

The cinema matinée era that inspired Spielberg and Lucas? Thirty-minute segments with cliffhangers and no ending before the twentieth episode? They're not back. This is new.

Licence to Kill is rolling in the background. No one's interested. The whole thing's a hack. Cheap. It feels rushed. Nothing compares to the new six-hour 'Carré' format. Not that anyone can compete with le Carré. They can't. Le Carré is exceptional.

But David Cornwell aka John le Carré has written a lot of books.

Speaking of which: in these Corona times, why haven't the BBC run these in repeat?