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A television movie (also known as a TV film, TV movie, TV-movie, feature-length drama, made-for-TV movie, original movie, movie of the week (MOTW or MOW), single drama, telemovie, or telefilm) is a film that is produced for and originally distributed by a television network.

Origins and history

Though not explicitly labelled as such, there were early precedents for "tv movies," such as the 1957 version of The Pied Piper of Hamelin, starring Van Johnson, one of the first "family musicals" made directly for television. The 1956 production of Requiem for a Heavyweight, usually considered a made-for-television film, was actually a live production later rebroadcast on kinescope.

The term "made-for-TV movie" was coined in the United States in the early 1960s as an advertising gimmick to encourage even larger numbers of the cinema-going audience to stay home and watch television, on the premise that they were going to see the equivalent of a major, first-run theatrical motion picture in the comfort of their own homes. The first of these made-for-TV movies is generally acknowledged to be See How They Run, which debuted on NBC on 7 October 1964. The Killers, starring Lee Marvin, was filmed as a made for TV movie, although it was decided to be too violent and switched to cinema release instead.

These events originally filled a 90-minute time slot (including commercials), later expanded to two hours, and were usually broadcast as a weekly anthology series (for example, the ABC Movie of the Week). Most TV movies featured major stars, and some were accorded even higher budgets than standard series television programs of the same length, including the major dramatic anthology programs which they came to replace. However, most made-for-TV films were (and still are) considered inferior in artistic quality to those shown in theatres, although it could be argued that HBO's many made-for-TV films are not. It is also possible that the current epidemic of special effects films may render many theatrical films inferior (in the eyes of critics) to those made for TV.

Today the advent of cable television has served to increase the number of venues for the broadcast of TV movies as well as their form. Budgets may be higher and the constraints of writing to fill fixed-time slots while accounting for commercials have been eliminated on the subscription-based cable stations. Conversely, the dispersal of the audience for TV-movies among numerous cable channels with a penchant for "original programming" has resulted in lower budgets, lesser-known performers, and even cheaper effects and settings, along with formulaic writing, on commercial-driven channels.

Read more at Wikipedia.org