A shot across the bow for TV

Two of the greatest novels of all time were originally serialized. A Tale of Two Cities appeared in All The Year Round in 31 weekly installments in 1859. Crime and Punishment ran in The Russian Messenger in twelve monthly installments in 1866. The serial structure of the stories gave the reader at the time a sense of suspense and kept them coming back. It gave them something to discuss in the parlor or the pub (there were no water coolers at the time). What would happen to Charles Darnay or Raskolnikov? Tune in next time.

When we look back on these serial novels we see them backwards. We see them as great works of literature that were divided into a series of installments. In fact, they were a series of installments which together formed a great work of literature. Only after achieving success as a serial were the installments published together in one volume.

Might one not make the same case for the better TV series of our time? The Wire, Mad Men, even Battlestar Galactica? They appear first as weekly episodes and only later are published in a more permanent form, as one DVD box-set per season. The numbers are comparable. The twelve installments of Crime and Punishment is considered more or less the golden mean for a season of pay cable shows like The Wire. Dickens’ 31 installments for A Tale of Two Cities is not that far off from the 22 or so episodes that has become the standard for a season on a network or basic cable channel such as Syfy, on which Battlestar Galactica originally appeared. Shows such as these maintain the serial pleasure of suspense—they string you along from one episode to the next—but as a season, they cohere into a single, larger story with broader implications than any of their individual episodes can hold. Just like the novels of Dickens and Dostoevsky, these series are more than the sum of their parts.

The TV series taken as a whole and the novel also share a similarity of scope and scale. They can include multiple well-developed and nuanced characters. They can tell stories that span all social milieus and strata. The Wire, for example, includes as two of its major characters a homeless drug addict and the mayor of Baltimore. They can transport us from one place—a planet called Caprica—to another—a planet called Earth (a little farther apart than London and Paris but equally foreign to one another). They can range over large periods of time without seeming choppy or schematic. They can, in other words, give complicated social and political phenomena their due. Dostoevsky has poverty and crime in his contemporary Russia, and Dickens has the French Revolution. The Wire shows us the dysfunction of civic institutions in the American city. Mad Men uses the ad agency as a lens to examine the culture of consumption that got humming in the ‘50s. Battlestar Galactica gives us a futuristic analogue of the political and military apparatuses of a democratic society at war with extremists.

The most successful adaptations of novels are usually mini-series, which turn them into something akin to a shortened TV season. Examples of this are the BBC’s I, Claudius, or Pride and Prejudice, which is still considered the definitive screen adaptation after numerous movie versions. The complaint that is usually launched against film adaptations of novels is that they cut out too much of the book and reduce its complexity. The exception to this rule are four-hour mega-films, like The Godfather, which strive to retain much, but not all of the original’s sub-plots and twists. Rarely does one hear that a movie is better than the novel, except in those cases where the novel is considered mostly chaff and the adaptation presents us with the wheat. The Godfather, in fact, might be an example of that, or American Psycho. What movies do significantly better is adaptation of novellas, like Breakfast at Tiffany’s or Of Mice and Men. Short stories have to be puffed up to become films. Novels have to be cut down. The novella, which tends to focus on one plot line and a very small number of characters, is just right for a movie.

Novellas are certainly worthwhile endeavors. The Turn of the Screw and Heart of Darkness, for example, both remain gripping, powerful, and poignant to this day. They make the reputations of their authors as much as any of their novels. If, however, we want our narrative media to do what novels do best, to explore social and political issues that demand more than a handful of characters and a couple of settings, we will have to do away with the silly assumption that underlies our cultural reception of the screen arts, that film is the high art and television the low.