As the summer blockbuster season stalks moviegoers and the TV season wanes, I’m reminded that the small screen is sorely lacking in big-budget megaprojects. 

It used to be that the big miniseries was the mainstay of sweeps periods. These were big productions, shot in several countries, featuring dozens of stars, costing more than most feature films. This was Television with a capital T, and it gave us long, involved stories that simply couldn’t be told on the big screen in less than three hours.

The trend actually started, as much good TV does, in Britain, with the first BBC version of The Forsyte Saga in 1967 and QB VII in 1974. Americans lapped them up, and the networks thought, “This isn’t a bad idea!”

So then there was Roots.

Roots, which aired over seven nights in 1977, changed the TV landscape. The final episode remains the third highest-rated program of all time. Roots: The Next Generations, in 1979, was even better. And behind this TV tsunami came a storm surge of fabulous miniseries in the 1980s.

Maybe I have such fond memories of many of these productions simply because I was at the perfect age to be dazzled by them. I wasn’t old enough to see Scarface in the theatre, but I could watch V. I was a dork for being obsessed with Gone With the Wind, but it wasn’t so uncool to watch North and South. And there was a big difference between watching documentaries in social studies classes and watching all 30 hours of War and Remembrance in 1988. 

War and Remembrance, which was the sequel to 1983’s The Winds of War, was an astonishing achievement by producer Dan Curtis, and not just because it seemed to last longer than World War II. The screenplay, based on the Hermann Wouk book, took two years to write. It was budgeted at $100 million, nearly four times the budget of Die Hard that same year. It had 358 speaking parts, and was shot in 10 countries. Curtis even convinced the Polish government to let him shoot in Auschwitz. The result was heralded as some of the most gripping, honest, tortured scenes ever seen on television.

Don’t get me wrong—the American networks didn’t have a monopoly on great miniseries. Some of the best were from across the pond: I, Claudius (1976), Brideshead Revisited (1981), and The Jewel in the Crown (1984).

Am I stirring any memories? How about Shogun (1981)? The Thorn Birds (1983)? Amerika (1987)? Rich Man, Poor Man (1976)? Lace (1985)? Queenie (1987)? Lonesome Dove (1989)? Hmmm. Maybe I need to fast forward for the younger SEE-ers.

The problem is that by the 1990s, miniseries were fewer and farther between. Pride and Prejudice in 1995. The Boys of St. Vincent in 1993. Merlin in 1998. The Stand in 1994. Joan of Arc in 1999. Dune in 2000. Anything jiggling loose in your brain now?

Maybe this is why they died out. These miniseries were water-cooler material for a few weeks at a time, but shoveling hundreds of millions of dollars into programming that died a quick death in the cultural consciousness just wasn’t good business.

Thank heaven for HBO. It’s the only network that still shells out the bucks for these risky ventures, and in return we get Band of Brothers, Angels in America, Empire Falls, and John Adams.

Thus endeth the history lesson. 

Now the closest thing we have to a miniseries on regular networks is freaking election coverage. But thanks to new technology, we can revisit most of the miniseries I’ve mentioned on DVD. It’s not the same, though.

It’s too bad that the format has died out, because there are projects out there that are much better suited for miniseries than movies. Prime example: Watchmen. 

However, we have further proof that everything old is new again. Kenneth Johnson, the creator of V, recently announced that a new big-screen feature is planned to revive the story.