Stealing the Show: The Oners That Ruled the Small Screen
My 5-part look at TV's big trends of the year continues with a breakdown of the year's best shots. Plus: Lesley Goldberg on Emmy underdog 'Overcompensating'
Today marks the midway point of my five-part series on Emmy trends (read the earlier parts here and here), and in case yesterday’s excellent news about honorary Oscars has you distracted, a reminder: It’s still Emmy voting time! If you’ve got a ballot in your inbox, it is your duty to catch up on the shows worthy of consideration — and you could do a whole lot worse than starting with the ones I’m featuring today.
But first, I want to hand the laptop over to my colleague Lesley Goldberg, who hosted the final live Prestige Junkie event of this round of Emmy season on Monday night. (Watch the whole conversation here.) Having just reported on the frightening state of LGBTQ+ stories on television, she was the perfect person to help us shine a spotlight on the Prime Video series bucking that distressing trend.
Lesley Goldberg on Overcompensating
Benito Skinner’s Overcompensating began as a stand-up stage show in 2018 at the New York Comedy Festival, where the comedian saw his “cringe” and “cathartic” stories resonating emotionally with the audience. Skinner knew he had something more to say and, with the success of his “heroes” Phoebe Waller-Bridge (Fleabag) and Issa Rae (Insecure) as a road map, turned his semi-autobiographical comedy about a closeted Idaho college jock into a series for Amazon’s Prime Video.
“It feels specific to my coming out story, but also that the girl across from me is overcompensating too. And so are all the people around us; we all don't know who we are,” Skinner told me during a Monday evening Prestige Junkie Live conversation, presented by Prime Video, at the Linwood Dunn Theater in Hollywood to support his Emmy contender.
Released on May 15, Overcompensating isn’t just about Benny (played by Skinner), but his friends and family, including his sister, played by Skinner’s longtime friend Mary Beth Barone, who joined us on the panel this week.
“Initially, the pilot does focus on Benny’s story, and that was the show that was greenlit,” showrunner Scott King told me. King, a veteran whose credits include MadTV and The Big Gay Sketch Show, connected with Skinner’s “original voice” after reading his pilot script when producers A24 and Amazon were looking to pair the young star with an experienced showrunner. But “then as we got into the writers room and we started talking about how [to] expand this world, [we] got so obsessed with everyone overcompensating,” King added.
Reviews for Overcompensating have been generally strong, but the show has yet to be renewed for a second season. Still, Skinner has scores of stories he hopes to be able to tell. “There’s so much more to say in that experience and the experience of someone who is in the closet versus out and the friction and finding friendship in that,” Skinner told me. “There’s so much to say here. … We’ve pitched it. We’re ready.”
Behind the Camera
If you don’t have a character rushing frantically through a carefully art-directed series of hallways, do you even have a prestige TV show?
That is certainly how it felt for a stretch of this spring, when three new shows — HBO Max’s The Pitt, Netflix’s Adolescence and Apple’s The Studio — as well as Apple’s returning Severance had audiences glued to their couches, asking themselves, “Wow, how did they get that shot??”
Dazzling cinematography is not a new phenomenon on television, of course. The road to Rian Johnson’s career directing blockbusters like Star Wars: The Last Jedi and Knives Out was partly paved by the canny trick shots in his Breaking Bad episode “Fly,” and the moody cinematography of The Sopranos was a crucial element in kicking off the Golden Age of television. An age of austerity may have replaced those halcyon days, but the bar for what television can look like has been permanently raised.
This Emmy season, from emotional limited series to laugh-out-loud comedies, cinematographers and directors have been as essential to the storytelling as the actors onscreen. Today I’m talking to several people about their most spectacular shots — what it took to pull them off, why it was worth trying in the first place and what kind of stories you can tell with a camera that can do almost anything.
One in a Million
You cannot discuss cinematography on television in 2025 without mentioning the “oner,” a single continuous shot or unbroken take. It’s the title of the second episode of The Studio, which fittingly is about filmmaker Sarah Polley trying to execute a oner of her own. It’s the entire style of the limited series Adolescence, four episodes filmed in four outrageously ambitious, unbroken takes. It’s the frantic opening shot for the second season of Severance, a sequence that may be even more captivating when you see what went into it behind the scenes.
The oner is “the ultimate filmmaking experience,” says Adam Newport-Berra, the director of photography for every episode of The Studio. Having worked on several music videos and short-form projects (including the video for Haim’s “I Want You Back”) that relied on unbroken shots, Newport-Berra was brought in by co-creators and co-directors Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg to pull off their ambitious goal of having every scene play out in real-time, extended sequences. With this kind of filmmaking, Newport-Berra says, “Every single person on set has to be firing on all cylinders. Everyone has to be showing up a hundred percent and giving their all, and everyone relies on everyone else to pull it off.”
That was undoubtedly also the attitude on the set of Adolescence, which took the approach of a theater troupe to pull off each of its four episodes in a single take: a week of rehearsals with the actors, a week of rehearsals with the cameras, and then a week of filming. That rehearsal process wasn’t just essential for the more technically challenging episodes, like the one set in a school with hundreds of children as extras, but for the actors, particularly Adolescence’s young star, Owen Cooper, who was just 14 during production.
“One of the most remarkable things I've ever witnessed in my life is the journey between Owen on Monday and Owen on Friday of that first week,” says series co-creator Jack Thorne, who wrote each episode alongside his co-creator and the show’s star, Stephen Graham. The first episode to be filmed was the third, a two-hander between Cooper and Erin Doherty as the psychologist meeting with his character, Jamie, ahead of his murder trial. It was the two weeks of rehearsal before cameras rolled, Thorne argues, that allowed Cooper to inhabit his first-ever onscreen role so fully.
“He came in and he was good, and he did a really good job in the role,” says Thorne, who was on set each day to make sure the script could work alongside the show’s extremely technical camera work. “But by Friday, he was Jamie. Stephen calls him the next De Niro, and I really think he is that.”
The unbroken takes of Adolescence allow the horror of Jamie’s crime to sink into the audience, with nowhere to escape. There’s a similar process at work in another Netflix limited series, American Primeval, set during the 1857 frontier wars over what would eventually become Utah. At the end of the show’s first episode, our heroes, played by Taylor Kitsch and Betty Gilpin, are caught up in a real-world event, the Mountain Meadows Massacre, in which a Mormon-led militia attacked a group of settlers.
Peter Berg, who directed all six episodes, was inspired to do the series when he learned of the massacre. The filmmaker, no stranger to harrowing material following projects like Lone Survivor (with Kitsch), Patriots Day and Deepwater Horizon, knew the show’s recreation could be both a showstopper sequence and an emotional, visceral experience for the audience. Plus, being shot outside and full of horses and flying arrows and fake blood, it was a technical challenge on a whole other level. “Everyone’s talking about Adolescence, and they’re incredible oners,” he said with a wink when we spoke back in April. “But we were doing oners before they were doing oners. And they didn’t have horses.”
The Human Factor
There are a ton of technical considerations that go into pulling off these oners, of course, and a lot of behind-the-scenes videos out there to show you how it’s done. Adolescence had a lot of people on walkie-talkies; The Studio had a camera on an enormous extending arm; American Primeval had a lot of very cold people working in the New Mexico mountains. The camera nerds, as you might imagine, are having the time of their lives.
But a whole lot of these spectacular shots are pulled off by what Newport-Berra describes as “just a dude with a camera on his shoulder.” The Studio uses gimbals and cranes and cameras mounted to cars. Still, for Newport-Berra, the best moments on the show are when “we’ve perfectly timed the camera to whip to somebody for a reaction and then whip back for a joke and then push into another space to reveal something. At its core, it’s very simple filmmaking, and the technology was really just there when there was no way to do it with a human.”
Within the sterile world of Severance, where characters work for a shadowy corporation and have their brains “severed” from their real selves while at work, the camera often has to mimic the smooth, frictionless vibe of its production design. Not so in the second season’s standout seventh episode “Chikhai Bardo,” which featured flashbacks to the marriage of Mark (Adam Scott) and Gemma (Dichen Lachman) before Lumon interfered and pulled them apart. Jessica Lee Gagné, the cinematographer for the series, made her directorial debut with the episode, and told me she relished the opportunity to break all of the rules she had set for the look of the series.
“In season one, I was very protective of the look of the show. I didn’t want to work with other cinematographers. I just wanted to make sure that it had a very strong cinematic language,” Gagné told me in a recent phone call. Reading the script for “Chikhai Bardo,” though, Gagné saw the potential for opening up “this whole new world. And I was like, I want to be the one to help bring that to life.”
Captured on 35mm film, as opposed to the digital cameras used in the rest of the series, the flashbacks in “Chikhai Bardo” are full of natural light, greenery and the loving energy of Mark and Gemma’s life together. They filmed in the actual house that Gagné had rented during the shoot, and in down moments she would use a small Bolex camera to capture small details of life — flowers, the moon, animals passing through the garden — that became part of a montage of their relationship.
“We approached it with a different energy and a different mindset,” Gagné says of the “Chikhai Bardo” shoot, which allowed the entire crew to escape the sometimes-isolating sets inside Lumon. “People were just relaxing on set. It was spring, it wasn’t cold. People could actually hang out in the gorgeous yard. It had a different feeling.”
Time will tell if a second season will bring a similar escape for the characters of The Pitt, which is filmed at the Warner Bros. lot in Burbank but is set in Pittsburgh, with the doctors and nurses of the show only occasionally escaping outside for some fresh air and a break from their high-pressure jobs. Though the emergency room set of The Pitt is claustrophobic at times, unlike Severance, it teems with very human drama in every possible direction — and it’s the job of the directors and cinematographers to capture it.
When creators John Wells and R. Scott Gemmill were meeting with potential directors of photography for the series, “everyone they met with came on and talked technically about what they were going to do.” That’s according to Amanda Marsalis, who directed four episodes of the season and is a co-executive producer. When cinematographer Johanna Coelho — “everyone calls her Jojo” — came in, she talked about the emotions of the show and how it should feel. Only after she was hired, Marsalis said, did they discuss the technical aspects of how it would be shot.
The emotions of The Pitt can be sneaky — you think you’re just watching a tense surgery scene. Then the camera lingers on a character’s face just long enough for the relationships between these doctors and nurses to take center stage. Sometimes, though, the feelings are impossible to miss. Damian Marcano was the director in charge of The Pitt’s instantly embraced 13th episode, a.k.a. “The One With Dr. Robby’s Breakdown.” As Noah Wyle’s doctor allows his professional facade to crack during the aftermath of a mass-shooting event at a local music festival, Marcano was the one directing the performance — and making sure the camera operators, usually in constant motion to capture all the action on the ER floor, were there to let it all sink in.
“Everything happened in the course of making 13,” Marcano told me. He wasn’t kidding: not only did The Pitt take its holiday break in the middle of filming, but the Los Angeles fires broke out shortly thereafter. Then there was also a personal moment for Marcano, when his 9-year-old son lied to him for the first time. The director brought that experience with him to set and in his conversations with Wyle and The Pitt co-star Taj Speights, who plays Jake, the son of Dr. Robby’s former girlfriend. It’s when Dr. Robby can’t save Jake’s girlfriend that his thick skin finally cracks. “There was something heartfelt in the moment from me learning this with my son,” Marcano said of putting the emotional scene together with his actors. “It’s tearing me up a little bit right now.”
The scene didn’t require any camera wizardry or elaborate technology to make possible, but it’s the immersive experience of The Pitt that makes it land with such a wallop. For all the attention paid to these ambitious oners and stylish TV episodes, they’re all built on the same building blocks as every great TV show in history: an actor, a camera, a script, and a character you can’t bear to cut away from.
