Running Away With the Story

This shouldn't surprise you one bit, but Christopher Orr, as usual, is absolutely right in his column about the rise of DVD and novelistic television.

Back in 1989, Tom Wolfe ... bemoaned the decline in America of the "big, realistic novel, with its broad social sweep," and wondered who would write novels of New York, "in the sense that Balzac and Zola had written novels of Paris and Dickens and Thackeray had written novels of London." The answer Tom Wolfe came up with was, unsurprisingly, Tom Wolfe. But, almost 20 years later, television is offering another possible answer. What is "The Wire," after all, if not a sprawling social novel of Baltimore? "The Sopranos," too, despite its more intimate focus on one profession and one family, is very much the kind of novelistic enterprise whose (exaggerated) absence Wolfe was mourning. The DVD format enables--even encourages--viewers to interact with these series as they would with novels, picking them up and putting them down when they wish.

I've said it before, and I'll keep saying it: Television may not yet be the new classic literature, but it is the new popular novel.

And to take it even further, if The Wire is a novel of Baltimore, then maybe Lonelygirl15 is sketching out the next generation medium of long-form narrative, the first truly postmodern narrative feature--a novel of sheltered teen existence, of the tell-all communications age, of the virtual place that is the internet.