Smallville and Battlestar Galactica live at opposite ends of the colour spectrum, but both look gorgeous. These and other shows prove that the quality gap between TV and movies has finally narrowed.

One show is bright. The other is dark. One is primary colour overload and a cute young cast. The other is grey and dusk and metal and washed out and dark circles under the eyes. The Vancouver rain aids one and impedes the other. One show often veers into family values candy land, while the other sometimes lingers too long in dystopia. One leans visually on inspiration from decades of art and comic books; the creators of the other wanted to do something entirely new.

Smallville and Battlestar Galactica, both seen on Space, reside far apart in the fantasy/sci-fi universe, but they have one important thing in common: Both shows look striking and should set straight anyone who doubts television can be a serious visual arts medium.

They are, of course, not the only examples of ambitious design, merely the cream of the crop.

You no longer need to go to the movie theatre to see colour and design used to striking effect. At any given time you can turn on your television and catch an episode of one of the three CSI corpse shows, which each have their own easily recognizable palette. You know whether the stiff keeled over in Vegas, Miami or New York even before you hear The Who tune playing over the opening credits.

Huge TV screens, every fleck of dust clearly rendered in high definition, an abundance of programming and the expectations of a special effects-reared audience all contribute to the necessity of painting a pretty picture as well as telling a good story. And you don’t arrive at eye-catching by accident.

"We set out to establish a unique palette for our show," says Smallville co-creator Miles Millar from Los Angeles. "Not just unique to the show itself, but unique to television. There’s so many choices on TV today and if you’re channel surfing, you need something that would make you stop when you see something arresting. For us it was about making the show beautiful, authentically beautiful, through the lighting and the sets and the colours."

Millar, whose show just reached the 100th episode milestone and merrily celebrated by killing off a character, says the classic Superman colours - red, blue, yellow - appear in every frame of the show. As well, "Clark Kent always wears those colours in some form. Although he doesn’t wear the actual costume, he always wears the blue or red or yellow in some combination. So you always get that classical element, but in a contemporary way."

Having a comic book helps create a visual universe, but in building Smallville’s unique look, a little extra something was needed.

"(Edward) Hopper was a clear influence in terms of the look of the show; we had images of his painting on the walls when working on the production design. We wanted it to look very classic Americana. Norman Rockwell was also an influence."

Richard Hudolin, on the phone from Vancouver, is Battlestar Galactica’s production designer. While sharing name and villains with the short-lived ’70s series, the new show does not share the wonky sets and the costumes that looked like they were sewn from particularly ugly curtains. In order to distance itself from the campy original, the show’s creators needed to set the bar high.

"There was a Battlestar in the ’70s, but we stayed as far away from that as we could," Hudolin says. "The only thing we kept was the basis of the fighter, but we even changed that....

``We made big efforts not to have bright, popping colours. We’re always bleaching and pushing back the intensity of our colour."

Someone who’s paid a lot of attention to television genre shows and the way they look is Rhonda Wilcox, a Georgia English professor and the author of the recently published Why Buffy Matters: The Art of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. She cites Smallville as a show she’ll watch because it’s "visually vivid," while "not quite as strong as some of the others in some ways."

She agrees that series creators are getting better at stretching the small-screen canvas.

"Instead of the simple back-and-forth middle shot, you get angles, vistas, pans - and they seem to be emotionally cued," she says via email. "Last night I was watching Bones (which has gotten drastically better since its beginning); there was a shot of a small group on the beach on the left of screen, the human figures dwarfed by nature - the composition seemed almost Japanese in effect. And of course the earlier show starring David Boreanaz - Angel - was visually very dark and used fast shots flashing by in a fashion recalling experimental cinema... Currently, of course, Lost is really strong visually."

Wilcox points out that Lost’s director of photography is John Bartley, whose work with The X-Files set the standard for production values.

`If you’re channel surfing, you need something that would make you stop when you see something arresting.’

Miles Millar, Smallville co-creator

Millar also acknowledges The X-Files as a favourite for its stunning visuals: "The moment you turned it on you knew you were watching the X-Files. Very unique, very specific."

X-Files was, of course, also shot in damp Vancouver. Millar says his crew often battles the downpour to stay within the bright Smallville palette.

"Technically it’s difficult because of the environment in Vancouver. It’s often grey and rainy, while you very rarely see the rain in Smallville. If it rains in Smallville, it rains really, really hard and that’s a deliberate look as well, where we’ll put in massive rain showers and soak our actors for hours in pouring, fake rain," Millar says.

"But a lot of the scenes are shot in rain, and you’d never know it. We put big screens up and projectors for the cast, but that’s always a challenge. We have special filters for the lenses, it is more of a lighting challenge, week in and week out, than most shows have to deal with."

For the darker Battlestar, the rain is a blessing. "Vancouver is a great place to shoot because it has a unique kind of light and the rain actually helps us a lot, especially in the winter. A lot of it is done in camera when we’re doing exteriors and we try to go places that fall within what our colour needs are," Hudolin says.

A dependable look, or what Wilcox refers to as "the visual equivalent of genre," is important for shows to succeed. Franchises like the CSIs and the Law & Orders are reliable, not only because of their writing and acting, but for the comfort zone they offer the eye. You know exactly what you’re going to get.

"Every show that succeeds has a look. It’s something we’ve learned from (producer) Stephen Bochco. Every show he starts, he figures out what’s the unique look of the show, like with NYPD Blue that had that gritty, handheld look. The look is essential," Millar says.

His own show, the tale of young Clark before he dons the cape, has smaller, compartmentalized visual comfort zones within the larger scope of the series.

"We wanted it to be a fantasy location with the ideal farmhouse, the fantasy farmhouse, the fantasy mansion, everything just slightly bigger than reality. So the farm feels very lived-in and worn and inviting, with golden colours, and the barn that is Clark’s oasis is also very weathered and worn but it feels like every kid in America would love to have this barn to go and hang out in....

"Meanwhile, the Luthor mansion is much colder and rather than the golden colours, Lex’s colours are charcoal and black and silver; you always see Lex in black or grey or purple and it’s contrasting the different environments. The moment we go to Metropolis, it’s much more about metals and blacks and greys, where Smallville is about colour."

Having shot a successful miniseries on film, the makers of Battlestar were faced with the technical difficulties inherent in recreating the look when the series was picked up and they started shooting it in high definition. HD has the tendency to make colours pop out "like on a jukebox," says Hudolin.

"We had to go back and basically had to repaint all the sets to take them way, way, way back in terms of their intensity, so they would appear as they did in the miniseries," he says. "It was a huge job to get everything back to where it was supposed to be. Just because the technology needs just a little light and it makes everything look like an MTV ad. Once we figured that out, we then knew what intensity of paint we should be using and colours we should stay with. It was a big experiment and it worked well."

And what if someone gets a bright idea and wants to change a show’s palette?

"People watch it because there is something in it that they like. Story, acting, design, lighting. You can change them slowly, but to change them radically episode-to-episode is a mistake. Then they’re turning on the TV and they’re not seeing what it was that they expected to see. So you have to give them kind of a comfort zone, and you can go off that a little bit, but subtly. Then they’ll be used to that and that’s how you do it."