Unlike Liel Leibovitz, who wrote this fine diatribe against the trend of comparing longform television to novels, I do watch some serialized television. I recently discovered Longmire and just finished Jane Campion’s Top Of The Lake, which was compelling but probably also as troubled as this New York Times review says.
It’s time to stop this madness. Let the unfashionable truth ring clear: No matter how good it is, it will never be more than just TV—an unparalleled distraction, crisply shallow, full of wondrous sounds and gorgeous furies that ultimately, in the ways that are truly vital and important to human life, signify nothing. It does not now, nor will it ever, meet the same sublime depths explored by the great novels. It is, quite simply, essentially inferior.
His comparison of watching and reading comes down to this:
Whatever else serious art accomplishes, it is committed to giving us a report of our condition, as idiosyncratic and insufferable and immensely complex as it is. It tells us something worth knowing about what it’s like to be human, to think and to feel and to be. [A]ll the great novels . . . perform that operation with a small and sharp scalpel, with insights and emotions cascading from every minute observation and every word. Breaking Bad approaches the same procedure with a sledgehammer; it titillates more than it truly moves, because its basic building blocks are not elastic words but cumbersome actions. It’s all it could ever do: It’s only a TV show.
Once on Netflix, I will put down my book and let Breaking Bad Season 5 sledghammer me.