Television’s Best Shows Are Taking Their Cues From Literature

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From Vulture:

Over the past decade, there’s been a continual debate about whether TV is, in one sense or another, “the new movies.” This lively argument has drowned out another, more fascinating development: scripted television’s raiding of literature for devices that it places in service of its own storytelling, then transforms into something that’s part literature, part cinema, but ultimately and distinctively television.

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But the recent iterations of voice-overs have been more ambitious and varied — and while some of these started out as the by-products of an attempt to be faithful to a literary source, there have been as many or more original examples, and their execution has become confident and sophisticated. Jane the Virgin’s narration is third-person and slyly aware of itself as a device. Ditto Netflix’s House of Cards (adapted from a British original with the same device), in which Kevin Spacey’s anti-hero tantalizes the audience like a monologuing Shakespearean hero. Hulu’s The Handmaid’s Tale (adapted from Margaret Atwood’s novel) and USA Network’s Mr. Robot (an original series) have narration in the manner of a Martin Scorsese or Stanley Kubrick film, granting us access to thoughts that the main characters can’t speak out loud because doing so would trigger their arrests. The most provocative narration makes the audience question the narrator’s relationship to the story they’re watching and ask if they can trust their eyes and ears. An ongoing argument about the reliability of Jane the Virgin’s narrator appeared to be settled this season when the oft-foreshadowed death of a main character finally came to pass.

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Television’s literary touches aren’t confined to voice-over. We’re seeing more series that break their stories up into chapters that are pointedly identified as chapters, complete with onscreen titles identifying them as such: Netflix’s Stranger Things, Master of None, and Dear White People all do this. The Coen brothers–derived FX anthology Fargo — whose producer, Noah Hawley, started out as a novelist — made similar literary affectations official in season two, when it kicked off a new episode with a framing device narrated by actor Martin Freeman (who appeared onscreen in season one) establishing that everything you’d seen in both seasons of the show was drawn from a book about violent crime in the Midwest.

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The most fascinating development of all, though, is the way that scripted TV shows uniformly seem to be striving to develop an instantly identifiable voice, one that’s as strong as anything we’d hope to encounter in a thoughtful work of fiction. This is increasingly true, whether the series runs a half-hour or an hour, is ongoing or an anthology, and whether or not it has voice-over narration, and whether it is drawn from a book or play. Look back at television from as recently as the mid-’90s and you’ll notice a tedious sameness in the storytelling, an almost factorylike capitulation to norms. Discounting such striking outliers as The Twilight Zone, Twin Peaks, Miami Vice, and other pantheon-ready classics, it was rare to encounter a TV show that could be described as having a voice in the way that you could say that a play or novel had a voice. There often wasn’t much difference between the way a typical sitcom, a mystery, an action series, and a nighttime soap told their stories. Things usually unfolded in a reliably linear way, with characters pausing occasionally to verbally sum up what we’d just seen.

Link to the rest at Vulture

4 thoughts on “Television’s Best Shows Are Taking Their Cues From Literature”

  1. Now if they’d just pick a book that was worth reading in the first place (and not ruin it in the retelling …)

  2. What about TV’s Worst Shows? IMWTK!

    Genre fiction, perhaps? (Or so say the litfic fanboys and fangirls!)

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