At lunch on Friday I was talking about a recent realization I had with regards to television. Right now I’m on my way through Breaking Bad. After that I’m doing Downtown Abbey. After that I think I’m probably going to start with the Eccleston Doctor Who revival and go all the way through today. Then maybe that Sherlock show that the Doctor Who guy is doing. Then who knows—a friend just recommended the hell out of Friday Night Lights, for example. I really could keep doing this sort of thing for at least a year, I would guess, without a pause.

So I realized that we may now be at the point, post-Sopranos, where TV is like literature, in that you can pretty much just keep watching good-to-great television series from start to finish for the rest of your life. That wasn’t true ten years ago. Probably not even five. And we’re at the point where if you wanted, you could probably put off the crown jewel HBO/AMC shows and still never insult your own intelligence with the shows you choose to watch. That’s a pretty amazing turnaround in a very short period of time. Not to mention all the technology that didn’t exist as recently as the ’90s that now makes doing this sort of thing possible: DVDs, Netflix, streaming, DVRs. It’s an amazing time for long-form fiction because of all this. I mean, obviously television is still a young medium with a very high price of admission for artists compared to literature, so the supply isn’t inexhaustible like the supply of great books is. But you can now make good-to-great television a consistent part of your life on your own terms for pretty much as long as you want.

Tags: TV

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