Great television

This is an interesting article considering the question of whether any of the wonderful TV series of recent years will endure. Here are a couple of thoughts from it:

"Take, for instance, The Wire. A relatively compact series at 60 episodes over five seasons, the show would take about two-and-a-half days to watch from start to finish, assuming one forgoes sleep. ... But what else could you have done with those 60 hours? ... I could finish War and Peace (21 hours and 15 minutes), Don Quixote (16 hours and 16 minutes), Moby-Dick (12 hours and 36 minutes), and still have plenty of time to squeeze in Crime and Punishment (7 hours and 3 minutes). Alternatively, I could read much of Kingsley Amis’s and Graham Greene’s fiction—the stuff worth reading, anyway—in roughly the same span of time.

What about movies? With 60 hours, you could watch the entirety of Stanley Kubrick’s oeuvre—and then watch it again to pick up on all the nuances you missed the first time around. You could watch the first 27 entries on the American Film Institute’s 100 greatest American films of all time (more, if you skipped some of the lengthier, plodding works like Gone with the Wind). You could watch the last quarter-century or so of films to win Best Picture at the Oscars. You could take a tour through world cinema, watching the best of Akira Kurosawa and François Truffaut and Lindsay Anderson and Michelangelo Antonioni.

You could undertake any of those horizon-expanding artistic adventures—or you could watch one program that ran for a few years on HBO."

"'A movie, no matter how perfect, is a compact, finite experience that begins and ends over the course of the same evening. Watch it again and again, and you may notice something new each time, but the story itself will not change, nor will the character arcs. Even the greatest of films is a one-night stand, where a TV series is a relationship—between the creators and the characters, and then between the characters and the audience—that can last years, with changes both subtle and inescapable along the way.'

This is true enough. But it’s only true in the moment. It’s only true while the show in question is a going concern, while we are watching in real time, while we are experiencing a program as a community, while we use it as a way to kill time with the coworkers in lieu of discussing the weather, while we hop online to hash out each and every moment from the preceding hour of programming to mine details from the text and speculate on what will happen next. As soon as a television series ends, it becomes a movie that’s dozens of hours long, almost always a piece of content too lengthy to think about consuming again, since there are so many other dozens of hours of new experiences out there."

I would add this. The comparison is often made between high-quality TV series and those Victorian novels that were originally published in serial form. But novels are a lot more dense than film or television: the best comparison I can imagine is between the book and the 1981 TV series of Brideshead Revisited, as faithful a transposition of book to film as could ever reasonably be hoped for: the book is about 320 pages in the Penguin paperback, while the series is 11 hours long.

The ground is clearly being laid for the future of vast leisure predicted by Keynes. All we need are the robots.