The Idiot Box No More

Waiting for a screening to start this afternoon, a very well-read person told me (I suspect exaggerating somewhat) that he’s “given up books.” I can’t quite say the same—and even if it were true, I’d never admit it—but too often these days, it’s tempting. Even as someone who’s been blessed with the opportunity to spend a large portion of my day reading, there’s simply too much material being published every minute of every day to keep up. It’s not unusual for me to read eight or ten hours in a day; yet it’s also normal for me to know that I could’ve spent twice as much time just reading periodicals. By the time I get home and go through the day’s final waves of articles and blog posts, I’m often simply not interested in picking up a book.

This didn’t used to be the case. In high school, before the net became the all-purpose stop for periodicals, I read a novel or two a week and subscribed to several short story magazines. I was obsessive about fiction, regularly burning through long novels in two days, even, at times, in a day. In college, I read multiple books at a time, both for class and for pleasure. There was always a book on my nightstand and a stack of them on my desk. Now, though, I try to read a book every two weeks and end up reading a little more than a book a month. Time is an issue, but it’s also a matter of simple word-fatigue. Reading so much the rest of the time means that the novels I once devoured so ravenously no longer hold their appeal.

Increasingly, then, I find that the thing that satisfies my urge for complicated, plot-and-character-driven narrative that is both insightful and entertaining is something that a decade ago I never would have expected: television programming. As I recently wrote, this is due both to the increasingly smart nature of classy television and new technologies. Thanks to DVD and DVR, I can watch shows at my own pace and on my own schedule. The feeling of slipping away into another world with its own story and cast of characters is the same as the one I got from all those novels before. And, like those novels, I can either take the whole story in at once or dip in and out, show-by-show rather than chapter-by-chapter.

Terry Teachout, whose essay “The Myth of Classic TV” was part of what I was responding to when I wrote my original post on the novelistic aspects of television, responds today by pointing out that the shows I’m talking about—The Sopranos, The Wire, Brotherhood, to name a few—might be good, but they’re not really “classic” in the sense of Shakespeare or Citizen Kane. I should know better than to attempt to tangle with the likes of Terry Teachout, because, as usual, he’s almost certainly right (though on an especially bold day I still might suggest that it’s possible that The Sopranos will be looked at as the show that built the template for what “great” television could be). But if these shows aren’t timeless classics, they are, at the very least, deeply satisfying exercises in long-form narrative, and for my easily tired, text-weary eyes, that’s often enough.