I only realized in the past week or so that yes, on the whole, I prefer TV shows to movies.
This is a strange about-face for me to make. I was the roommate who, in freshman year of college, fought hard to prevent having the TV in the living room. I came from a household where we watched TV pretty much every night, usually for 3-4 hours, and I was sick of it. I became sick of it before I went away to college, and I’d hide out in the back room practicing music by the hour, reading lots of books, and whiling away my remaining time playing backgammon and Hearts with a computer AI.
But now, I find when I get to choose between a TV show and a movie, I am more likely to select a TV show.
I prefer TV shows for the same reason I prefer novels. I am what I call a character reader; I get pulled through a story because I am invested in the characters’ lives and development. World building I only care about if it is so off as to be distracting. Plot I care about more. But it is the characters who breathe life into the experience for me. And TV shows allow a lot more space for character development than most movies
But perhaps more importantly, I was listing my favorite shows and found that all of them feature either a female lead character or ensemble casts with plenty of female characters. Which is something that can be hard to find in the movies, which too often have the token female character or the two female characters who never even talk to each other. (Thank you, Bechdel test, for helping me systematically notice this.)
In fact, these days I tend to choose not to watch TV shows that have a male lead character as opposed to an ensemble cast. (The exception to this is Sherlock. My love for Sherlock Holmes is greater than my irritation at the low numbers of female characters in the show.) I was never interested in Dexter or Breaking Bad. A serial killer who the audience is supposed to be okay with because he chooses his victims carefully? A teacher who is a drug dealer and brings his student and family with him on his downhill plummet? Ugh. Both of these shows have their merits, from what I hear, but they are unappealing to me. Plus in the current culture, neither of those characters, anti-heroes at their finest, could have been female, simply because they aren’t likeable enough in their conception. Ugh again.
No, instead I have an endearing love for Buffy the Vampire Slayer. (Not so much love for Angel.) I enjoy the ensemble casts of Battlestar Galactica and Game of Thrones. (Yes, GoT women tend to conform to types, but at least they exist as main characters, and their stories, horror and all, are illustrative of what it’s like to lack power and agency due to gender and the different ways they are forced to strive for power in spite of their genders simply in order to survive.) I rewatch Veronica Mars and Gilmore Girls. I watched every episode of Gossip Girl, and I’m catching up on Vampire Diaries.
Murray Close/Lionsgate Publicity Jennifer Lawrence as Katniss Everdeen.
Are these shows perfect? Not by a long shot. But at least I get to watch women doing stuff and being a real part of the story. Perhaps with the box office successes of Catching Fire and Gravity, I’ll get to watch more women doing stuff in the movies too. Maybe they can even do stuff together. Maybe Frozen did well enough that next time, I’ll get to watch a female snowperson sidekick/comic relief, without any sexist jokes being involved.
And in the meantime, I’ll be sitting on my couch watching Buffy.
The Practical Free Spirit 
It’s sad that it’s such a seemingly noteworthy thing when there is a piece of entertainment with a female lead or strong female characters. Women obviously make up half the population and yet male-centered stories make up the vast majority of movie/TV/video game entertainment. Even the most well-known female-centered genre, so-called “chick-flick” rom-coms, hardly portray women in the most interesting or empowering light and they’re still often stories centered around men. This suggests that there are a whole range of stories that are not being told in popular media. I think this situation is slowly changing as women become more accepted as writers, directors, producers, etc.
As for TV vs movies, while I think TV is experiencing a golden age of storytelling, there are many stories that only work in the context of a film. When I think back to many of my favorite movies, they simply could not or would not be made as TV shows without radically compromising the artist’s vision. Part of it is that TV shows necessarily rely on maintaining a mass audience (or at the very least a super-dedicated contingent of die-hard fans, which often is unfortunately not enough to ensure the show lasts more than a season or two). There is much more latitude for independent films that take risks to tell the story that the artist wants to tell, and not necessarily the story that a mass audience is interested in.
The format itself also dictates what sorts of stories can be told. A subtle, small-scale character drama with a clearly defined beginning, middle, and end works better as a movie (say “Lost in Translation”, for example), while a larger-scale family drama with long-term character arcs and clearly delineated episodes works better as a TV show (“Six Feet Under”, for example). In short, I’d say that TV and film are complementary storytelling mediums.
Speaking of “Six Feet Under”, while it had its lulls, it was also a really good show with strong female characters. The current “Parks and Recreation” is also pretty good as far as comedies go with strong female characters.