Wire, Breaking Bad, Mad Men, Justified etc.
The current popularity of long-form television is at odds with modern society’s notoriously short attention span. Is there a limit to viewers’ patience, asks Adam Gopnik.
The business of choosing a long-form television series to become addicted to is eerily like the act of marriage itself. One or two episodes are, so to speak, dated. They please. They intrigue. But then, as with marriage, a commitment must be made. If you decide to watch Homeland or Downton Abbey, you do not really have the option of watching an episode here or there anymore than you can be married for an afternoon.
You are committed to a programme, to “seasons”, sometimes six or seven seasons. This means hours – hours and hours and hours – of committed viewing.
(…) For there is that additional oddity about this moment and that is, the appeal of sheer length. We live after all, in a culture which is famously short of attention span, supposedly quickly amnesiac – a culture so impatient that teenagers no longer have time to talk to each other on the telephone for three minutes, but must text each other in cryptic shorthand, while simultaneously texting some three other teenagers, a practice that, by now, has passed to their parents. Political speeches have been reduced to talking points, journalism to money quotes, long-form reporting to mere takeaways.
And yet this same culture now has an appetite for slowly wrung-out storytelling that would have shamed the Greeks as they listened to a bard recite in monotone the ancient epics of their race – or for that matter, would have shamed the Elizabethans, watching the original Hamlet wend its way through a mere five or so hours. By comparison with Breaking Bad, Hamlet at full length is positively epigrammatic. Even the Victorians, with their multi-volume novels, are usually portrayed reading them bit-by-bit in bed, over six months or so. I don’t recall binge reading of Middlemarch or Our Mutual Friend consuming many hours of the Victorian evening. They snatched at their stories, as we once did at ours.