Smart Series
“It is no longer a smart social move to brag about not owning a television,” writes Richard Beck. He says the small screen has gone from popular entertainment to popular art.
TV critics and viewers alike no longer consider artistically ambitious dramas as miraculous aberrations. Richard Beck says it’s thanks to serialization that the small screen has gone from a mere medium of popular entertainment to one of popular art. “It is no longer a smart social move to brag about not owning a television,” he writes. “Many of the nineteenth century’s now-canonical European novels were originally serial works, published chapter by chapter…and consumed with the same sustained enthusiasm that now characterizes television viewing.”
