Time & Perspective Quote by Sarah Michelle Gellar

Gellar’s line lands like a polite industry verdict that’s actually a warning label. “Better time” sounds upbeat, but the comparison does the work: TV is where actresses can age, evolve, and stay employable; film is where they’re more likely to be flattened into a type or timed out by the market’s obsession with novelty. Coming from someone who helped define the modern TV heroine on Buffy, it reads less like sour grapes and more like earned pattern recognition.

The subtext is about power and volume. Television (and now streaming) simply needs more hours of story, which forces networks and showrunners to invest in character continuity. That creates space for women to be messy, funny, ambitious, unlikable, and still narratively central. Movies, by contrast, often operate on event economics: fewer slots, bigger budgets, global marketing, and risk-aversion. When a film is engineered to open everywhere at once, executives default to the safest archetypes, and actresses get squeezed between “girlfriend,” “mom,” and “tough sidekick” unless they’re a rare marquee name or in the hands of an auteur.

There’s also a generational context baked in. Gellar’s career spans broadcast-era stardom to today’s prestige ecosystem, where limited series can offer film-level craft without film’s narrower casting logic. Her phrasing is careful, but the implication is blunt: the medium that once carried less status now offers more artistic oxygen, while Hollywood’s big screen still struggles to imagine women as the main event rather than supporting evidence.