I am addicted to the HBO TV series. I am currently watching “the Wire”. Like the crack sold on the streets of Baltimore, I can’t wait till to get my hands on the next episode, and if I can’t get it, I get withdrawal symptoms. Being strung out on a single TV series that runs for ~ 20 hour-long episodes solves the insoluble problem of actually picking a video to watch in a video store, especially after a long day at work when you really want to watch something but your brain is mush. But don’t get the idea that it’s cheap entertainment, because I recently realized that the HBO TV series is a structural descendent of that English-department staple, the Dickensian novel. The HBO TV series is good for you.

Am I drawing a long bow? I think not. First off, the Dickensian novel, was originally, not a flagellation on a generation of English school-boys, but a work of mass-entertainment. There was no TV, or radio at the time, and magazines were the mass entertainment in the sense that many people consumed the same piece of work. A new story appearing in a top magazine was as anticipated as the latest Hollywood blockbuster. The serialized novel held as much sway over culture then as TV has today. And Dickens was the super-star novelist of his day, perhaps the Victorian Alan Sorkin, or Steven Spieldberg.

More specifically, Dickens wrote his novels in episodic form: each chapter appeared in timely sequence in a magazine, just like the weekly appearance of a TV series. The Dickens novel was written to be consumed piece-wise. This is a sound strategy from a commercial sense. You need a long over-arching story that will bring people back. You need a sticky product – the integral plot structure of a novel provides that. Reading a typical novel provides 50-60 hours of entertainment, but broken up into episodic form in magazine form, then it becomes crack cocaine, a commercial product non-pareil. It makes the reader come back again, and again.

All TV series tries to make the reader come back again, and again. So what makes the HBO series special? There are much older TV series form – the sit-com, the mini-series, the soap opera. Yet these forms don’t have the texture of the Dickensian novel. What has marked the HBO series is the pioneering element of the intricately plotted story that has a definite story arc, AND runs for 20+ hours of entertainment. The sit-com has characters doesn’t have a story arc. The mini-series (2-6 episodes) doesn’t have the epic sweep, and the soap opera has no characters and no arc, just a continuous unfolding of recyclable story elements.

The reason that we had to wait for a cable station, like HBO, to dive into the marshy swamp of the season-long novelistic story-arc, is censorship. Being a cable station meant that HBO could break free from the shackles of the FCC. Before HBO, broadcast TV had ossified into a set of conventions that had to tread timidly around social mores. HBO had a unique problem of providing a product that could bring people back (entertain them) and make them feel like they were getting something of greater value. They hit on the idea of the season-long story arc to bring viewers back, and injected sufficient violence and sex to differentiate it from broadcast television. When you add these eternal elements of the human condition, you naturally get a epic novel, in form at least.

But there is one last feature that is unique in the HBO series form, and I didn’t realized until Tim Goodman pointed it out. I had started watching the HBO series, “Carneval”, in which the forces of good and evil played out in t the amoral world of a travelling cricus in the Dustbowl era of Americana. An enticing premise indeed. Yet I was bored shitless after a few episodes. Why? Tim Goodman pointed out that “Carneval” failed in a very basic TV sense – nothing much happens in many of the episodes. Sure, there lot’s of special effects, spooky music and dream sequences. In each episode, little plot details dribbled out. But some of these episodes don’t have a discernible story line. Within the greater arc of the season-long story, each episode has to stand on its own. The double structure of the short story within the long story, is an essential structure of both the novel and the HBO TV series. That is the crack element, the addiction.

In television, one can say that there was the pre-“Sopranos” and post-“Sopranaos” world. One could argue that the “Wire” is better, but the “Sopranos” started the ball running. Here was a family saga, with fully-fleshed characters, sex and violence, seasnon-long story arc, and disciplined writing in the form of self-contained episodes. It is an addictive product and I reckon Charles Dickens would approve.

Petrice Gaskin on 03/26 said:

Chris Miller on 06/13 said: