Fifty years from now, people will likely consider Steven Soderbergh the best American filmmaker of his era. While he hasn’t also written, shot, edited, and produced all of the over thirty films he has directed (slacker), his contributions to both mainstream and independent cinema so far outpace most of his contemporaries that the Academy should probably just give him the Lifetime Achievement Award now. The fact that he is retiring from feature filmmaking is a cultural bummer. However, he is leaving us with one final feature that may hint at a new direction in his career. Behind the Candelabra is a biopic about Liberace starring Michael Douglas and Matt Damon that is going to be airing on HBO because it was deemed, according to Soderbergh, “too gay” for any studio in Hollywood to give it distribution. That sounds like the punchline of a particularly blue Borscht Belt joke, but it’s apparently true. My hope is that that this move by HBO means they will give Soderbergh a TV show on the network, as his talents seem well-suited for what TV has become in the last few years. It would be a shame to simply lose such an artist to posterity.