A word for streamed TV series.
Not that they need a word from me. Last year more than six million folks watched the final episode of The White Lotus while a million and a half purchased the best-selling American book. A best-seller’s sales are typically boosted by their adoption to the popular screen. Sociable conversation predictably swirls around televised favorites while book talk is infrequent except in reading groups.
TV series are Jane’s and my entertainment of choice. Alone at home we like nothing better than to eat dinner while watching some detective, doc, under-butler, or royal writhe with mystery and stress. I try to make food as satisfying as the fictional fare.
The pleasure will always feel a little guilty. Growing up, TV was viewed as corrosive to young minds, as Internet entanglement is today. Reading a book (of the right sort) was wholesome, while Roy Rogers, Superman or Perry Mason might induce idiocy. Sneaking a pleasure intensifies its delight, while obedience feels like drudgery, if not defeat.
The popularity of TV series turbocharges their improvement. Talent in any age follows the money. Shakespeare and Dickens wrote what they could sell. No American up-and-comer seeks to be a poet.
Literature is my life, yet I watch screened entertainment almost as much as I read. It’s so easy and cozy. Text one must tussle with. Words on a page one must first comprehend, then judge. Reading I’m continually conscious of this expenditure of attention and time. The sort of sinewy writing I favor demands my all or fuggedaboutit. Watching cop-glop, events gallop along without my say-so. If I doze, Jane can tell me what’s happened during my pleasant absence.
The improvement of streamed TV is bad news for literacy. As a knife needs whetting, reading takes practice. Losing the knack, we lose our taste for an activity. I’ve whip-smart younger relatives who never read books. Book-reading is so slow and lonely – fuddy-duddy really – poor old Uncle Carll. Their brains may acquire information faster than mine – they “get” things in an eyeblink – but at arraying and arranging ideas they’re less deft. An argument must be constructed with delicate care, like a house of cards.
Making with a camera is in some ways easier than making with words. The first challenge for a word-worker is to persuade the reader these characters are real. The fancy name for this trick is mimesis. Any character that feels concocted won’t move us: their problems aren’t mine.
The actors on screen are actual (unless you’re watching a cartoon). I do not need to envision them, for there they are. When the scene is contemporary, both context and characters convince, as if we were voyeurs.
I avoid recommending TV shows because everybody does and a discussion devolves into likes and dislikes, away from ideas. I write so we can think together, not swap suggestions. That said, three recent series packed a wallop.
The second season of Wolf Hall implanted Thomas Cromwell and Henry VIII permanently in my imagination. (Mark Rylance, for my money, is our greatest living actor.) It also reminds us pungently of the perils of an imperious, impetuous, pompous autocrat.
The brief series Adolescence rips your heart out of its chest and squeezes it. Modernity has made childhood confoundingly complex. Back in my day who wondered, age thirteen, what it meant to be a man.
Breathlessly thrilling, The Pitt – which dramatizes a day in a city hospital’s E/R – makes me proud to be an American: what competence, caring, technical know-how! Heartening, when we need it.
We’re just catching up with The White Lotus. It’s weird, no?