SOME of television's most compelling shows start up again this month — and thank heaven for that. "Downton Abbey," "The Good Wife" and "Girls" will happily draw viewers — like me — back into their characters and their plot-heavy story lines.
There is a reason for our attraction to these shows other than that they simply entertain us. "Downton" and today's other quality television series also promise a welcome escape from a muddled, technology-addled existence.
By pulling us away from Twitter, texts, e-mails, pointless videos and all the other technological distractions demanding attention, "Homeland," "Mad Men" and "Breaking Bad" provide a coherent (albeit sometimes disturbing) refuge from our fragmented lives. I, for one, find a sense of narrative order, however fleeting, from these shows.
They provide relief from nonnarrative mobile messages, from different voices nattering away, all at once, on different subjects and the multiple, inconstant jobs that now fill so much of our lives.
Today's shows are qualitatively different from older, sophisticated shows like "St. Elsewhere" or "Hill Street Blues" or "thirtysomething," all of which, though deftly written, were relatively formulaic. A "Hill Street Blues" episode inevitably ended with a slow cop car chase around the same alley that eventually brought the criminal element to justice.
The conflicts presented in "thirtysomething," one of the best shows of the late 1980s and early '90s, were even less remarkable: in one episode, for example, the pretty boomer mom Hope Steadman struggled to find a good-enough nanny for her infant daughter. Story lines sometimes stretched beyond a single episode but, for the most part, dramas were neatly resolved in the allotted time slot. Madcap antics sometimes arose (an "L.A. Law" episode involved a member of the ensemble cast in a gorilla suit) but these were incidental to the central action.
The high-octane, multilayered story lines that drive today's best television represent one side of an opposition posed by Lev Manovich, a scholar at the City University of New York Graduate Center: narrative versus database. Database logic (that of the computer archive) tends to lack beginnings or endings, and thematic developments are not necessarily sequential. Professor Manovich has written that the database is simply a collection of individual items in which "every item has the same significance as any other." One bit of information stands on equal footing with every other bit of information. Information is gathered, without a fixed order.
IN the first years of the new century, television seemed to be looking to find a competitive niche for itself in a media world increasingly dominated by the database logic of the Web. "Lost," "Heroes" and other shows of this era (and films like "Babel" and "Traffic") offered what I call "hyperlink television" and "hyperlink cinema." Their "sideways" and flashback-laden narratives involved constant cutting back and forth among disparate characters, reflective of an emerging culture of sensory as well as existential multitasking. TV shows, like the rest of the world, started to operate at a frenetic pace.
Those shows made sense to Web-savvy audiences alive to the fun of skipping back and forth from one thread to the next, and to random-seeming series of nonlinear sequences directed mostly by whim, taste and mood.
Smartphones have helped make our lives so multilayered and cacophonous that only super-narrative television shows like "Boardwalk Empire" can offer respite from our everyday "hyperlinked" reality. My preference for these shows over "hyperlink" shows suggests that I, along with a large segment of the American viewing public, again want to be captivated by melodrama.
DVR, Netflix streaming videos, television series on iTunes and television box sets with commentaries mean we can now watch these high-charged, emotive narratives as we once read novels, in long sittings, without regard for a television network's schedule. We may well take in whole seasons or at least several episodes at once.
These marathons, hilariously mocked in the show "Portlandia," when a couple give up their jobs and friends in order to spend a week watching every episode of the latest TV iteration of "Battlestar Galactica" back to back, may actually bespeak a shared hunger for continuing, connected conversation and community. Television shows watched in this fashion provide a kind of through-line that's missing from most of our lives.
Premium cable, with its loosened content restrictions and quality programming, has made possible a period of what the Brandeis University scholar Thomas Doherty called "Arc TV," or "adult-minded serials" whose story lines unfold "over the life span of the series" and whose strongest kinship is to the serialized novel of the 19th century.
For many among today's intelligentsia, television serials like "Homeland," "Breaking Bad" and "Mad Men" with their continuing fables of Alicia Florrick and Walter White, Don Draper and Carrie Mathison, occupy the cultural position of the Dickens tales that were famously doled out in monthly installments. (Except that spoilers are possible now in a way they were not in the age of Pip or Little Nell.) Narrative shows have become the entertainment of choice. And that's because stories, not algorithms, give order to our hectic world.
Alissa Quart is the author of "Branded" and the forthcoming "Republic of Outsiders."
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