Is Franzen right? Is television also a novel?

kek

There's TV created by people who want to create art.
The influence of people who primarily seek profit is greater in TV than in literature, but that doesn't mean artistic ambitions are absent.

It does make TV worse ofc

This. You can completely disregard anything that hack has to say. It's guaranteed to be uninformed horseshit like his "Mr. Difficult" essay.

TV is a second-rate artistic medium desu.

Ah, that's some nice vintage memery, son.

Completely agree, people do this type of thing too often. One example that comes to mind immediately for me is when Charlie Brooker said Facebook is a video game, because umm... You get likes on Facebook so umm... It's like points in a game.

it's probably fair to say that television satisfies our desires for serialized storytelling, as 19th century novels did in that era.

also there have been plenty of worthwhile tv shows. finished Six Feet Under recently, that was an excellent portrayal of the early 21st century american family unit. soon i'd like to rewatch Twin Peaks, then get started on Mad Men, but first i have some anime to watch.

mad men is amongst the most literary tv programs. twin peaks is more akin to visual or conceptual art, in my mind. they are my two favorite television programs.

McLuhan also wrote that each new medium consists of the content of previous mediums. serial television has the same content as serial novels. that's all Franzen is saying, really.

>it's probably fair to say that television satisfies our desires for serialized storytelling, as 19th century novels did in that era.

Yes, but in no way does it follow that this makes TV shows novels.

look they're obviously not literally novels. franzen's just drawing attention to the fact that they do similar things. it's hyperbole. what's the big deal?

I don't think anyone would say this. Franzen included. He's just saying they have similar sociocultural effects. Same as you lulululululul

No. Television shows are written by a constantly revolving team of writers, have their stories manipulated and milked for financial gain by networks, are processed through an interchangeable series of directors, DPs, editors, actors and technicians, get sliced up into eleven minute blocks to facilitate commercial interruptions (with occasional product placement), and are marketed to millions around the globe, which makes sense since programs rarely get picked up unless they have plausible popular appeal. Whatever vision a showrunner has, it is severely diluted by the time the final product makes it to the audience, and if the vision strikes a chord with the audience then studio involvement can easily overpower it.

After the extreme difficulty in sharing and preserving a experimental, creative or independent idea, the biggest difference between reading and watching television is the audience's mental investment. Television is passive, making it is much easier to consume a television show than it is to interact with a text, and this is sometimes an advantage for television. Serial commercial television is good at establishing familiarity with massive and complex fictional worlds wherein viewers are quickly introduced to a wide array of characters, and that lends well to wide themes about society and politics. But the episodic format of television and desire for familiarity by the viewer is severely limiting from both a narrative and visual perspective. A program's film grammar is a cliche by the second episode; we are repeatedly delivered the same exchange of shots, the same dialogue cues and character traits, and often the same set-up and plot.

Even the giants of television like The Sopranos, The West Wing, Mad Men and The Wire cannot graze the heights of arthouse film, let alone the novel. Tarkovsky described early commercial Hollywood films as glorified theater and I think that remark applies here. Some of television is very good and entertaining theater, but it's entirely different genre with entirely different goals. The best television programs are usually short self-contained miniseries directed by an experienced figure in the film world, programs like the first season of Twin Peaks, Dekalog, and Fanny and Alexander. These avoid the typical pitfalls of the medium e.g. bloated stories, filler, repetition, cliche, and collapse into caricature. Longer programs are extremely prone to artistic failure. Narratives get stretched if the studio wants to push more DVDs, characters are suddenly dropped if an actor wants to move on to bigger things, plot threads often lack closure and consistency since the writers changed, disliked where the story was headed, or had conflicting goals, Maintaining an individual style and vision like an auteur is next to impossible when there is this much involvement from this many people and this much demand for popular appeal.

>Fanny and Alexander
That's literally a film, they just ran it as a series because it's so long. Also the real pinnacle of television is The Goodies.

It was written for television, and originally released through television in four distinct episodes, as was intended.

>Whatever vision a showrunner has, it is severely diluted by the time the final product makes it to the audience, and if the vision strikes a chord with the audience then studio involvement can easily overpower it.

This is a part of it that I don't think is stressed enough whenever Video games, TV, or even film are compared to a medium like literature.

The sheer number of people it takes to make these things automatically dilutes any sort of "vision" or artistic drive because it's filtered and mediated a hundred times over even in the best case scenario by the time it takes the form the audience is shown.

I think he means that he likes reading closed captioning. I do too, it's hard to understand people on tv in my opinion.

>It was written for television
Doesn't make it not a film.
>originally released through television
Not according to wiki.

People sometimes overlook the work of editors in lit though.

Yes but editors by and large have far less of a passive and active influence than all the various people involved in those other productions. It's more of an exception than the norm when the editors really have the run of things or do much more than make suggestions or proofread things for consistency/accuracy/spelling grammar, etc.

thread brought to a satisfying and thorough conclusion.

Thanks, lad.

The Sopranos is more literary than Charlie 'Trash' Dickens ever was.

They are called telenovelas for a reason.