Why is an actor ‘in’ a movie but ‘on’ a show?
In: 39
Prepositions are weird. While we like to think they go by their literal meaning, it doesn’t always work that way. Thus we have variations such as “different to” (more common in British English) versus “different from” (more common in American English, but may be changing). Or consider the German “zu Hause” as opposed to the English “at home”, even though the German word “zu” can usually be translated as “to”.
In this case, it’s not clear if the choice was documented. More likely, news reporters and magazine writers, when exposed to these new media, used what felt right to them and one of the terms in each case won.
[This article](https://slate.com/human-interest/2015/10/why-are-you-on-a-tv-show-but-in-a-movie-several-hypotheses.html) proposes that “in a movie” comes from being “in a theater”, but you can’t say in TV because no one is physically in a TV set. On the other hand, one might say “I’m in TV” to mean “I’m in the television business”.
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