Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg recently won an Emmy for their directing in the show The Studio, which took home an impressive 13 awards. The episode they won for, “The Oner,” was an obvious pick for production enthusiasts and its meta elements were a delight to watch. The episode follows a film crew trying to pull off a complicated single-shot sequence at sunset. Shots like this are aptly called oners. The creators of this episode demonstrate their prowess by shooting the episode in a single take. (Though Rogen and Goldberg admit that it is technically several oners stitched together, their efforts and creativity are still praiseworthy.)
Since its airing, I have rewatched the episode a few times. Perhaps one of the reasons I am attracted to this episode is because shooting a continuous take is technically demanding. It requires thoughtful planning, rehearsing, and execution by a team of people working in perfect sync. While film and TV are inherently collaborative, pulling off a oner increases the stakes. Its technical achievement is, in itself, impressive, and so I rewatch it to enjoy the spectacle of it all. But, I think its significance goes beyond its technical achievement.
In today’s media environment, we are bombarded with short-form content. The pervasiveness of Instagram reels, TikTok, and Youtube shorts, and quick posts on X or Facebook trains us to consume information in small, decontextualized bursts. And the way we are presented with content matters. In Amusing Ourselves to Death, Neil Postman warns us that television has eroded our public discourse because it does not require the discipline and concentration required by print. Reading requires patience. One must move sentence by sentence, holding ideas in mind until they resolve themselves at the end of a section, chapter, or book. Television, by contrast, is able to show us images that are easier to consume but harder to organize meaningfully.
While I do not fully agree with Postman about all of his comparisons between reading and television, I think he makes a compelling argument about attending to the form of our media. The dominant form of media in one’s culture will shape the kind of information one consumes and the way one understands the information it tries to convey. Postman notes that the idea of “daily news” does not make sense before the telegraph machine arrives because prior to the telegraph news could only travel between 20-30mph (that was the speed of a train).
What fascinates me about the oner, however, is that it resists standard television logic. Unlike much of the form, it demands sustained attention. Most shows are cut-heavy, forcing us to switch perspectives. We shift from over-the-shoulder to wide shots, and between a variety of third-person vantage points, all of which are used to serve important storytelling purposes. However, these cuts also fragment our viewing experience.
Contrast this with a continuous, uncut shot. With a oner, we are allowed to occupy a singular perspective that flows with the action of the scene in real time. This allows us to be a part of the reality we are witnessing in real time, mimicking the way we actually experience the world. Watching Seth Rogen’s character, Matt Remick, infiltrate the set and disrupt the production, I felt as if I was also there on set, perhaps as a silent PA in the background. The format draws us into the scene and allows us to feel the events that unfold more naturally.
What is striking about the long, unbroken shot in “The Oner,” is that it asks us to practice something that resembles the skills of reading. Consider one of the jokes made in the beginning of the episode. Remick suggests to the director that the actress should be smoking in the scene because it will create a nice bookend, and who doesn’t love a nice bookend? Of course, this suggestion is just one of the many things that Remick does that ultimately thwarts the success of the shot in the episode. The joke for us as viewers is that this episode itself contains a bookend. Remick parks his car in the driveway in the very beginning of the episode, only to be told at the very end of the episode that his car is blocking the shot. The gag only really works if you exercise attention, much like the attention that Postman tells us is required for reading.
The oner can do more than just engage our attention. When executed properly, it has the power to bring us closer to the truth. This is also apt when we consider what Heidegger says in The Question Concerning Technology. In this piece, Heidegger attempts to uncover the nature of technology. He argues that technology is a kind of revealing or uncovering, which he traces to the ancient Greek notion of revealing or alētheia.
The video camera is undoubtedly an expression of technology. But its ability to bring us closer to truth is dependent on the way it is used. When we consider the nature of film and TV, we cannot do so without considering the edit and the final cut. Every cut and juxtaposition of one shot next to another will convey some kind of reality or another. Cuts can be used to bring us closer to something true or further away.
When presented with a single-shot scene, the viewer’s ability to accept what is happening as true increases because the alternative, viz., a cut up, edited scene, implies a certain kind of concealment. In the heavily edited scene, we must infer what happens in-between cuts. Even if the cuts appear to happen instantly, we lose something in the movement between shots.
The oner, however, does not blink. It attempts to show us an unbroken version of reality. This is why a long shot can feel more believable when it’s a part of a fictional story and why videos of real-world events often feel more trustworthy when there are fewer cuts. The longer the camera runs, the more we are forced to accept what it shows. The oner is powerful because it refuses to hide reality.
This is not to say that every single, continuous shot is inherently more truthful than an edited sequence, nor is it to suggest that one cannot fake the truth of an unbroken shot. Indeed, many one-shot takes in film and television are cheated (both Birdman and 1917 are edited to look as though they were shot in one continuous take, when in fact they were not). Even if the shot is genuinely done in one take, it is still limited by its own perspective in time and space. But the oner stands out to me because, in today’s media landscape, where we prioritize short attention spans and fast payoffs, the single-shot sequence asks us to sit down, wait for the scene to unfold, and hold our judgment until the very end.
