10 21st-­Century TV Dramas Literary TV Twenty-­first-­century tele­vi­sion dramas have been compared to literary novels, creating debate about “TV-­as-­Lit­er­a­ture.”31 In an article on the topic, subtitled “How tele­ vi ­ sion is struggling—­and often succeeding—at becoming a mature literary form,” Michael Agresta describes the parallels: It’s become commonplace lately to talk about the serial tele­vi­sion show as the novelistic medium of the 21st ­century—­The Wire as a modern-­day Dickens novel, Mad Men our Cheever, Friday Night Lights our Steinbeck. One could continue down the line, with Lost as our Michael Crichton and Desperate House­wives our Jacqueline Susann, but the lowbrow serial has been entrenched for de­cades now it’s the higher-­quality stuff that’s new. Whereas feature films ­were always limited in comparison to literary novels by their brief and rig- orous story arcs, TV is ­ free, theoretically at least, to use a broad canvas and unfold over tens or even hundreds of hours of screen time.32 Agresta goes on to claim that, since The Sopranos (1999–2007) debuted, tele­vi­sion has met the benchmarks “essential to any narrative medium’s claim to broad cultural relevance—­holding up a mirror to society, con- veying characters’ internal lives with depth and integrity, achieving new expressive styles that reflect the consciousness and felt real­ity of the time.”33 Claiming, “Cable [TV] is the New Novel,” Thomas Doherty elaborates, saying that although 21st-­century dramas are historically part of a history of tele­ vi ­ sion programming, their “real kinship is literary, not televisual. Like the bulky tomes of Dickens and Dreiser, Trollope and Wharton, the series are thick on character and dense in plot line, span- ning generations and tribal networks and crisscrossing the currents of personal life and professional duty.”34 The lines between lit­er­a­ture and TV have been blurred in other ways as well. For example, in 2011, novelist Salman Rushdie announced he was switching from writing novels to writing TV series, a creative form he claimed allows the writer to be “the primary creative artist.”35 Con- versely, TV has crossed into territory once reserved for ­great works of fiction. Just as literary novels have been traditionally studied in college courses, such TV dramas as The Wire, The Sopranos, and Breaking Bad are now routinely included on academic syllabi and written about in pub- lished scholarship. Tele­ vi ­ sion showrunners have been held up as creative forces worthy of media interviews and recognition, whereas TV series
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