Molly Parker has had a busy week, navigating a press tour for the home release of Lost in Space‘s first season (on which she plays Maureen Robinson) while the long-awaited Deadwood movie, in which she plays Alma Ellsworth, debuted over the weekend. The juxtaposition is kind of perfect, though, since the independent film actress likely would not have been tempted by the lure of Lost in Space — a(nother) reboot of the campy sci-fi property — had it not been for the changes to the TV landscape precipitated by HBO and Netflix. Those are, of course, changes in which acclaimed shows like Deadwood played a big role.
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During a recent interview, ComicBook.com asked Parker to reflect on how TV is different now than it was when she took the Deadwood job — one she says that she almost passed up simply because it was TV. Parker’s answer was, basically, that things have changed so completely it is hard to make a full accounting of it all. Not only is TV better — a truism, with fans and critics often calling this a new golden age for the medium or talking about “peak TV” — but it is almost entirely different from what she would have expected when she began her career in the early ’90s.
“I think of it, not so much in terms of quality, although I absolutely agree that there is [a difference],” Parker told ComicBook.com. “I think it’s a new form. I don’t even think we can particularly compare television to what, at least in North America to what was happening before HBO, before Netflix. It’s a different form that is afforded by not having to have commercials and not having to have, not having to dumb it down for an audience that might be distracted or might wander away or might not remember what happened last week. Deadwood was made at the beginning of that reformation, that sort of new form of television. I think the Brits have been doing it for a long time, but really right around then that, that North America started to make that kind of television.”
Parker said that she sometimes feels that the medium of television has shifted so radically that it is hardly even the same thing anymore. That is funny, since one of the most recognizable slogans for the network that made her a star was, “It’s not TV. It’s HBO.”
“I jokingly say to people, I’m an internet actress actually,” Parker said. “When I first started, if you were serious actor, you did film and you didn’t do TV. When my agent first approached me about Deadwood — I was just having a conversation with one of them the other day and he reminded me — I was, ‘I don’t want to do TV.’ He said, ‘no, no, no, this is different. It’s not really like that. This is like something else.’ I was like, ‘yeah, I don’t know,’ and I didn’t know because it didn’t really exist before then. I still love doing film, I love doing independent film. It’s kind of my origin story and really where my heart is. But I do really enjoy making this kind of television that has this sort of long form of storytelling and a characterization.”
Lost in Space‘s first season is available now on Blu-ray and DVD. Look for the second season soon on Netflix.
