I love long books by good writers. I love being invested in something long and complicated and ultimately rewarding. In fact, when I’m reading something I enjoy and it ends at less than four hundred pages, I feel a little cheated. This, however, is only true of novels. I hate long movies. I’m one of those people who say that if a director can’t tell a story in an hour and a half, then he’s doing something wrong (although I make exceptions for filmmakers I enjoy. Example: There Will be Blood is only two and a half hours? Can’t wait for the director’s cut.)
I’m even worse with television shows. To begin with, I only like comedies. I never watched the Sopranos, or Lost, or any other dramatic show from the past decade. When people tell me I have to watch The Wire, or people ask me how I can possibly not like Mad Men, my answer is that they’re just not interesting to me. (Two addendums: (1) I don’t watch the above shows, but it’s not like I have something else on instead. I spend, at most, four or five hours a week watching T.V. (2) My perspective is admittedly biased in that I don’t believe television is a viable form of art, but that is a subject for a later post.)
As I’ve written in this space before, my favorite show is It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. I know, I know: it’s counterintuitive for me to rebuff award winning series in the previous paragraph and then claim such a course, vulgar, and offensive (to some) program as Sunny in Philadelphia is my favorite. But that’s exactly the point. I get all the high art from novels and trips to the Met (unless I walk past the Hirst piece), and when I watch television, I want something that is explicitly not trying to be more than what is: T.V. Each episode of Sunny is staked on a simple premise, is self-contained, and is concerned only with being ridiculous and funny (and often ridiculously funny).
For the past few months I’ve been reading War and Peace. I essentially began it when the television season began last fall, and I will probably finish it just before summer begins and when those same series are wrapping up for the year. This is why I have no time for so-called-great television dramas. War and Peace is rich, and textured, and despite being over thirteen-hundred pages, tightly paced and free of filler or redundancies. The narrative is compelling, the characters are intricately and deeply portrayed in way that cannot be accomplished outside of a novel. It’s easily one of the two or three best books ever written. Now, based on that, do I think you’re going to read it? No, I don’t. War and Peace, though an amazing piece of art, is simply too long for casual readers. But consider this: the way you feel reading what I have to say about War and Peace is the exact same way I feel when someone tries to convince me to watch their favorite show. No matter how much they praise it, no matter how vehement they are in their opinions, I will never watch, say, The Wire, just as I know that no matter what I say about War and Peace most people will never read it. So this is what I say now to anyone when they start to tell me how much they love Mad Men: I’ll definitely check that out, just as soon as you finish reading this book, which happens to be the size of a toaster.
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