If episodic storytelling is characterized by perpetual endings and re-beginnings, it is perhaps curious that endings are a dominant source of anxiety around serial storytelling, a narrative defined by continually delayed resolution. Does it end, or is canceled with little warning? Does it end on its own terms, or is it forced to finish when still in full swing? Does it end “well,” or does the final conclusion fail to answer all of the remaining questions? For some shows, these questions are given the power to validate or invalidate entire viewing experiences. I’m thinking here in particular about shows like Lost, of course, where so much pressure was placed on the show’s finale to justify what was often a frustrating viewing experience. It’s true for other shows similarly centered on plot, including mysteries or soap operas, where the resolution has the burden of presenting a solved puzzle or a love triangle made square. But it’s also true for shows more driven by character development, like Friday Night Lights or Gilmore Girls, where the final episodes are needed to bring a character to a stable conclusion or gesture toward a character’s continuing future.

It makes sense that a serialized story pushes viewers away from a standard week-to-week viewing pattern, as continuing plotlines create desire for the next installment and make it pleasurable to view several episodes at once. Maybe a viewer will opt out of a show for a few weeks and then catch up all at once on DVR or hulu, or maybe he or she will wait until a season is completed and watch it all on DVD. More than just establishing a desire for multiple episodes at a time, though, the ability to view television outside of weekly installment structure allows viewers to hold off altogether until they can be sure that a show has ended. When season six of Lost appears on DVD, there will be nothing between you and a legal, uninterrupted, start-to-finish viewing experience. Aside from the promise of continuous narrative, alternate viewing technologies allow audiences to watch completed shows with a determinate length, as well as know in advance the circumstances of their endings. A viewer sitting down with Deadwood right now can choose to learn that its abrupt cancellation will likely lead to a frustrating resolution, or that despite its beginning appearance as a show centered on high school, Buffy the Vampire Slayer will continue long enough for its characters to grow out of their awkward teenage years. The presence or absence of these two simple pieces of knowledge – how long a story will be, and how it will end – make serialized television stressful and potentially frustrating in the moment, and profoundly satisfying in retrospect. This, in large part, is why television serialization continues to be a topic of interest for television creators and viewers. It is the form of narrative that best strains the gap between traditional television viewing and alternate methods (how long will it be?), and it reflects viewers’ anxieties away from the fiction and onto the creation process (how will it end?).

As a way of coping with the inevitable worry and potential dissatisfaction that comes from unknown endings, serialized television shows have also retained a much stronger episode structure than earlier forms of long-term storytelling, like the serialized novel. Without the benefit of a known end point, serial television shows often provide a strong impression of the episode as a whole unit, either by coupling the long-arc stories with episodic plotlines in shows like The X-Files or House, or by establishing the episode as a unit that is whole outside of, or in spite of, incomplete plot. Shows like Mad Men or The Wire work with thematic or aesthetic motifs to displace any anxiety about large-scale endings onto episodes that are meant to be complete and satisfying as individual pieces as well as seamless parts of a longer story. This, too, is a reason for our continued consideration of serialized television as a form – its strong episode structure, even in shows that play with the limits of how porous an episode’s boundaries can be, make it a different and more complicated type of serialization than simple long-form storytelling. Even in the most serialized shows, the divisions are still more powerful than the continuous line.

It’s always nice when a new work of fiction includes a whole outline of its premise right in the first episode, and even better when that little précis makes you want to keep watching rather than making you feel bored. Take it away, Laura Linney’s character from The Big C:

I could do chemo, but I’d just be buying more time, and it’d mean a lot of people taking care of me. It’s just not my thing. You know what makes me feel better though, if I’m being honest? It makes me feel better to think that we’re all dying. All of us. And when you have a kid, you expect that you’ll die before they do. Even though you try not to think about it, at least, you hope to god you do. So if I think about it that way, hey! I’m living the dream! I’m here all year! Performing at Stage 4! Oh, come on. Come on, you’ve gotta give it up for me a little bit. It’s kinda funny – death comedy. I’m warning you that this laughter might turn into tears in a second. Yep, there it goes.

On the page as well as on screen, this reads as much like a theatrical monologue as anything I’ve seen on television, and the impression is enhanced by the empty-stage-like darkened background, the metafictional content that gives it the sense of a soliloquy, and the fact that Linney is addressing all of this to a neighbor’s dog. Really, what better representative could there be for a stage audience than a dog – he’s a participant in tone, emotion, and a supplier of large watching eyes, but also a necessarily mute body.

Aside from its overt staginess, the kernel here is obviously the concept of a “death comedy,” and that already omnipresent and unstable tragedy/comedy mask. You couldn’t do a show like this without a truly impressive lead actress, and Laura Linney is certainly up to the task. This soliloquy is the strongest part of The Big C’s pilot, and it’s because she sells that stupid pun about performing at “Stage 4” as convincingly as a pun about end-stage cancer should be played. I love a good, punny, achingly awful death, and vastly prefer it to the beatification process inherent in rosier portrayals like Tuesdays with Morrie or Stepmom (*sniff* oh Susan Sarandon!). My favorite death scene in Romeo and Juliet was always Mercutio, with that classic line, “Ask for me tomorrow, and you shall find me a grave man.” There’s just something about a pun that’s so appropriate for death scenes; it’s a humor with all of the effort and none of the joy, a joke that seems to admit its insufficiency even in the moment of execution.

This scene also functions as a comprehensive warning for the show’s intentions, which are clearly laid out as being potentially offensive to those who find death startlingly unfunny, and probably depressing for those who prefer their comedy unsullied by reminders of mortality. If this soliloquy is where The Big C will be for its tenure, then I am certainly on board, but I worry about everything outside of this darkened stage space. The main character’s host of incompetent, childish companions – her clueless husband, her antisocial brother, her rude son, her rude student, her rude neighbor – threaten to pull this sad, funny, delicate act out of tune, and drag the conceit toward an out and out tearjerker, or worse, rosiness. For now, while there’s still space for wry puns and simple anger at the world, it’s lovely.

This was the funniest episode of Mad Men I can remember, and a lot of it has to do with Peggy Olson. Of course, because it’s Mad Men and because things are not going well for Don Draper, it was also quite sad, and especially painful for poor Allison, who was absolutely right to chuck that knickknack at his head.

Don’s status as a character is balancing between two statements. “I don’t say this easily,” says Allison as she storms out of his office, “but you are not a good person.” So much of the series is based on the questions surrounding that judgment, testing what pushes these characters toward being good or bad people, and at feeling around for what point they become irrevocably one or the other. Don’s many sins have been thoroughly documented on the show, as have his many causes for sadness and anger. At what point do we have to throw up our hands and pronounce this to be an irredeemably awful person? Or, as Don so fervently hopes in his spirited denunciation of Faye Miller’s report for Pond’s Cold Cream, “you can’t tell how people are going to behave based on how they have behaved.” I can turn this around, he says, and indeed, his whole life is based on the experience of waking up one morning as a completely different person. Let’s hope he manages to do it soon, because right now, he’s so lost that he can’t even finish his pitiful letter of excuse to Allison. “Right now my life is very…”

On the flip side of the coin, we have Peggy, who responds to the news of Pete’s impending fatherhood (err…re-impending?) by diving into some welcome counter culture, the first extended portrait we’ve gotten since Don’s days with Midge in the first season. Nudged along by the lesbian photo editor from Life, Peggy gets to stand next to a guy walking by wearing a bear head, get high and watch anti-Catholic art cinema, and be the snappy wit she has long wanted to be. (“He doesn’t own your vagina!” “No, but he’s renting it!” is one of the funniest lines of dialogue we’ve ever gotten from Peggy.) It’s a relief to get these occasional glimpses of other worlds. We remember how insular and controlled it feels at Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce, even in this newer and scrappier incarnation of Sterling Cooper. We can also better contextualize the choice that Peggy is trying to make, highlighted by the opposition created at the end of the episode. On one side of the glass, Peggy and her new bohemian friends, on the other, Pete and the good ol’ boys. The other side of the glass may not seem appealing – a guy who left her pregnant, a boss who sleeps with secretaries. But it also represents professional success, mentorship, and the telltale engagement ring she surreptitiously slips on during the focus group. If Don is balancing between his past and his future, so too is Peggy. The difference is that our metaphor for Don’s choice is an unfinished sentence that makes us wonder whether he even knows enough about his life to pick one option over another. Peggy’s metaphor is a glass door, which lets her see both options clearly and which only requires that she pick a side.

The last thing I’d like to say about this episode is just a praise of its undeniably infectious swagger, which began with that disastrous, hilarious conference call (“Oh my god, there’s some kind of fire”) and ended with a moment between an elderly husband and wife that swerved from saccharine to comic at the last possible moment (“We’ll discuss it inside”). Its peak, and the moment that made me laugh out loud and then rewind, was this hysterical bit of physical comedy from Peggy.

There are all sorts of things you can say here – more about Don’s roll as Peggy’s mentor, a little bit on Peggy perpetually looking through glass, maybe something about the drinking. When it comes right down to it, this scene was ultimately a moment of levity in a show that can really use a little fun now and again. It won’t last, because it never does. But every once in a while there’s a guy with a bear on his head, or Peggy peaking over your office wall, and thank goodness.

As I’ve kept painting (almost done so much trim gahh) and continued to watch Northern Exposure, I’ve reached a place where the show begins to change. Many shows – probably all shows – cope with production challenges that limit or change something about the show’s fiction, particularly related to cast members. Without enough money or an ideal location, you could probably still tell the same story, but it would be less impressive or have a different overall effect. But when you’re lacking a cast member who plays a previously introduced character, there’s not much you can do to overwrite that absence.

In its beginning premise, Northern Exposure is about a Jewish doctor who owes the debt for his medical education to the state of Alaska, and instead of letting him pay it off with a check, the state forces him to spend several years working out in the Alaskan wilderness. He arrives angry and frustrated by his unwilling servitude, and much of the first season is spent watching Dr. Fleischman learn to appreciate Alaska in spite of himself. It’s a charming, familiar, predictable story, and after it completes most of Joel’s Alaskan education, Northern Exposure is free to explore other characters and ideas.

Unfortunately, the actor who plays Dr. Fleischman began to have contract disputes as Northern Exposure’s popularity grew, and by season four, Rob Morrow was occasionally threatening to leave the show unless he received a better contract. It’s certainly not a new or surprising story, but what I love so much about the Northern Exposure version is the way the show responds to this changing pressure from Morrow. Other characters are introduced to take the focus away from Dr. Fleischman, his role in the town becomes much less pronounced, and there are all sorts of subtle moves away from Joel as the show’s protagonist. Even better, though, Northern Exposure then goes out of its way to make Joel Fleischman a tortured, unpleasant, uncomfortable pill. In one episode, he discovers that the state of Alaska is forcing him to extend his promised four years of service to five years, and he spends the entire episode railing against the town full of now-beloved characters for being hicks and uneducated slobs. The show continues to capitalize on Joel’s Yankee snobbishness throughout the first three seasons, but it always does so with generosity and an opportunity for character development. When Joel’s contract with Alaska is extended and he goes off the deep end, I kept expecting a cheesy “awww” moment when he looks around at all the people he’s been friends with for three years and admits that it won’t be so bad to hang around for awhile longer. The moment never comes, and we’re left with a protagonist who despises his own fiction.

Not every episode is quite so explicit, but Joel’s priggishness never returns to its mellow, odd-man-out quality of the previous seasons. He complains bitterly about mosquitoes. He’s whiny to the point of childishness when a lack of patients leads to boredom. I haven’t seen past season four yet, but I know that eventually he gets entirely replaced by other doctors, and I’m just fascinated by the vicious fictional revenge Northern Exposure inflicts on Dr. Fleischman for the crimes of his actor.

It’s been painfully obvious over the past several weeks on the blog, but just in case you hadn’t noticed my shameful, repeated absences – I’ve been doing some stuff. Namely, stuff that has involved lots of cross-country travel, late-night trips to Home Depot, a surprising amount of ribbon tying, several frenzied IKEA trips, brochure gathering, a UHaul rental, a fabulous meal at Momofuku Ko, frantically skimming that Dickens classic Sketches by Boz, dodging through crowds of people dressed as sci fi characters trying to get a photo of William Shatner, illicitly disposing of massive amounts of cardboard in campus recycling bins, etc. etc. etc. It’s been a strange, awesome six weeks.

You may note that TV viewing did not make it into the list of prominent activities, and although that is accurate in comparison to my normally TV-saturated schedule, I did manage to strategize one aspect of the craziness to coordinate with some television watching. We have been painting our new apartment, which means that while my husband is at work, I am at home doing all of the edges and trim so he can do all of the rolling. And while I sit, painstakingly working my way around doorframes and windows (I accidentally wrote “paintstakingly” har har), I’ve been watching Northern Exposure.

It’s a show I remember seeing occasionally on daytime reruns when I was about ten, and have since rediscovered as an appealing, funny, comforting, gently surreal portrait of a tiny town in Alaska that reminds me as much of Twin Peaks as it does The Gilmore Girls. Cicely, Alaska was founded by two lesbian patronesses as a highbrow artist’s retreat and salon, and in the mid-nineties of the show, is now home to a parade of wacky personalities. There’s a retired astronaut, a recently imported Jewish doctor, a radio DJ who reads Whitman and Dostoyevsky, a laconic Inuit office manager, a cheerleader and her seventy-year-old lover, and a host of other bizarre characters.

John Corbett as Cicely's radio host

What I discovered in my paint-fume laced Northern Exposure marathon sessions is that I had inadvertently chosen the ideal show for a divided attention, because it somehow manages to be funny and engrossing while also having almost no plot. There are no long arc mysteries, there’s a tiny hint of sexual tension between two characters that hardly counts as a developing story much less a soap opera, and the single-episode plotlines are so relaxed and mundane that they’re more like single-episode premises. A Russian classical musician, who has been to Cicely before and whom everyone likes, returns for an episode. Ed, the town’s resident filmmaker, has an idea about filming a guy who makes wooden whistles. In one episode, everyone gets the flu. It’s like watching a show where every script is copped from a small town newspaper, and the biggest stories of the day are not necessarily the fact that there’s an annual blood drive, but who’s running the blood drive, and whether they need more volunteers to bake cookies, and how much money they need to put up a new stop sign, and the fact that it’s been above 70 degrees twice this week even though it’s only May!

Darren Burrows as Ed Chigliak

The series is often meta-fictionalized through Ed Chigliak’s amateur filmmaking efforts, and it’s telling that his preferred form is the portrait – his films are almost always brief portrayals of inspiring people around town, he rarely works with a script or even a fictional concept, and his favorite subject matter is everyday life.

I love plot. So much of my pleasure in narrative comes out of anticipating what’s going to happen next, and watching all of the pieces fall together. But Northern Exposure is a lesson in the possibilities of a long story where the story is the least important aspect of narrative, and all of that energy and forward-drive gets displaced onto singular characters and a setting that is both unusual and familiar.

I love the BBC’s new Sherlock, a modern adaptation of the late-Victorian Conan Doyle classic by Doctor Who wizard Stephen Moffat. I should mention as a starting point that I’m a Sherlock fan in general, and am a sucker for pretty much anything with a Dr. Watson and a deerstalker hat somewhere in its production.

Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson: totally not on a date

As a modernized version, Sherlock does suffer from a severe dearth of deerstalker hats, but what it lacks in natty headgear, it amply makes up in canny production decisions, a fully realized and persuasive Holmes, and some winking gestures toward the history of Sherlock Holmes adaptations that manage to be fun without seeming burdensome. The Watson/Holmes relationship in particular is the subject of frequent jokes and raised eyebrows as they are repeatedly taken for a gay couple, a nice way to incorporate both the many queer readings of Holmes and the more conservative insistence on an asexual, unsullied detecting machine.

“Detecting machine” is a useful phrase for Sherlock Holmes, and Moffat’s biggest achievement with the miniseries is his completely convincing answer to a question that necessarily underlies any modern procedural, and especially an updated Sherlock – what is the point of a guy like Sherlock Holmes in the age of the internet? Bodies can be scanned to discover all of those telling inconsistencies, train timetables and moon phrase calendars no longer need to be memorized for convenient access, and why would someone need a photographic memory of every shoe brand in the world when a search engine will remember it for you?

Moffat’s Sherlock answers this question in the traditional way – whatever human technology may be, Sherlock Holmes is just a weird, mesmerizing guy, and his powers of deduction are a part of his appeal as a mysterious character. As is pretty obvious watching Sherlock, Moffat’s Holmes bears a striking similarity to another lean, socially awkward, oddly intelligent, timeless character, and the decision to portray Holmes at an early, unformed stage in his career bears out further comparisons with Moffat’s youthful Dr. Who. Their long, narrow faces and dark mops of hair make them nearly twins, but where Dr. Who’s hilarious goofiness occasionally reveals dark, scary glimpses of his real self, Sherlock Holmes’ serious work ethic gives off a glint of humor every once in a great while. Similarities aside, these two characters make the same points about their impressively long-running fictional franchises: the world around them may change, but an appealing character will stay relevant.

At the same time, Sherlock uses some smart visual devices to cue its viewers into the way Sherlock’s brain works, and to impress a current audience with his enduring acumen. As Holmes scans a crime scene, observes a clue, or even does research on his mobile phone, a visual annotation accompanies his train of thought. The cloud of textual notes – “wet,” “clean,” “unhappily married,” overlay Sherlock’s field of vision like an embedded augmented reality app. Rather than needing our smart phones to take in an image of the world and parse it for useful data, we can just look through Sherlock’s (and Sherlock’s) frame of reference. It’s also incredibly similar to Heavy Rain’s solution to in-game detection. Sherlock Holmes is still interesting as a character, but he’s also still extra-human, even in a new technological paradigm.

What’s different now is that where 1900’s Sherlock Holmes seemed to have skills outside the power of any other human being, 2000’s Holmes has observational powers only inaccessible to other humans with no laptop, cell phone, or microscope. This is part of what makes Sherlock so effective and arresting. There’s no question that Sherlock Holmes still has an intellectual edge on everyone else, but the gap is no longer as large as it used to be. Sherlock Holmes’ quirks – his single-mindedness, his dogged obsession with puzzles, his reliance on nicotine and other stimulants, his general lack of manners – these are no longer just wacky side characteristics. Sherlock weaves Holmes’ deductive skills more firmly into his weird personality, and makes it obvious that any yahoo with an iPhone is not immediately the next great detective. To be Sherlock Holmes, you’re also going to have to be kind of a (compulsive, obnoxious, insensitive, fascinating, brilliant, possibly gay) jerk.

If Joan Holloway Harris could have seen what’s happened to Don Draper after building a life based on what he thought was expected of him, completely ignoring the many incompatibilities and red flags along the way, perhaps she’d be less anxious to get pregnant (for what we now know would be the third time). “The Good News” illustrated three different positions along the same trajectory: Don goes to California to try to recover from his disintegrating life, only to learn that it’s possible for life to break down even further, Lane Pryce is just starting to cope with a broken marriage, and Joan is doing her best to create a life based on the same model that these two men have so aptly demonstrated.

I didn't realize until making this image, but that chandelier is trying its best to stab Joan's husband

Lane’s failed marriage is useful as a foil for Don’s single man debauchery, but Joan is a more productive comparison for what happened between Betty and Don. Her husband is gone at all hours, he’s joined the army (like both Dick and Don), he treats his wife like a child (when he’s not raping her), and Joan clings to an image of marriage that relies on Hawaiian themed dinners and heating up your husband’s leftovers. Out in California, young people are having sit-ins at Berkeley, smoking grass and discussing politics, but Joan’s image of success is circa 1958, and so it’s almost eerily out-of-place to watch her trying to become a successful working woman while she’s still caught on an outdated image of herself at home. This is where Don has been for the past several seasons – he dates Midge and goes to performance art shows in the Village, and then goes home to his Coca-Cola ad wife. If Joan really understood where Don’s decisions have landed him, I wonder if she’d be able to make another choice?

As for Don, Anna Draper’s impending death seems to leave two paths open to him. Alan Sepinwall commented in his post that Anna is the last person tying Don to Dick Whitman, who can look at him and say, “I know everything about you, and I still love you.” Because of this, he says, Anna’s death will forever bury Dick Whitman, and that whole early part of Don’s life will be gone forever. I suppose that’s possible, but it seems so unlikely based on Don’s track record. Every attempt to squash his former life has led to its inevitable and ever-more-potent reoccurrence. Further, Don’s relationship with Anna may be the last remaining tie to Dick Whitman, but that means she’s also the last remaining witness of Don Draper as a persona instead of a person. When she dies, the last barrier between Don Draper as an act and Don Draper as a man will fall away, and Don will be the person he has made himself into. Even though Betty and Bert Cooper may know about his former life, it’s a very different thing to see it, and unless Betty is somehow able to use Don’s lie in a custody battle, every Dick Whitman-related conflict in Don’s life will totally dissolve.

So these seem to be the two options – Dick Whitman dies, and we discover that he was the only thing holding Don Draper together, or Dick Whitman dies, and Don is finally free to make himself something new. Maybe I’m too hopeful, but if I am, it’s because the episode invites us to be optimistic. This is the first time Mad Man has indulged in a signal of renewal as blatant as the New Year, or telegraphed its shifting times as obviously as “Gentlemen, shall we begin 1965?” and it’s hard not to take that as invitation to look forward. Things may still be bad in New York, but somewhere out there in California, Stephanie’s dancing to the Beatles and seeing the future.

Actually, I’m pretty sure Dickens was a fan of jam.

I am still here, fully ensconced in a strange world where everyone chuckles appreciatively at a reference to eating one’s own head and the biggest daily obstacle is that someone’s using a Norton edition when everyone else is using a Penguin. (The Norton, of course, was taken from the later completed novel editions, while the Penguin comes from the earlier serial edition first published in Bentley’s Miscellany. What, you didn’t realize how different they were? Oh ho, you’re in for a treat.)

It’s hard to think about anything other than Dickens, frankly – a trap this person clearly fell victim to while registering his or her car. Occasionally I get flashes of TV or new media -related ideas, among them, “Were Dickens’ sketches the YouTube videos of his day?”, “What is it we like about really long stories if it’s not plot?”, and, “If his insistence on repeated public readings of the most violent scene in his corpus, the scene in Oliver Twist when Sikes murders Nancy, did indeed contribute to Dickens’ premature death (as was argued by a lecturer this morning), do we need to worry about the health of such TV violence aficionados as the Davids Chase, Milch, or Simon?” (Answers: Yes, hmm, and I hope not.)

At the moment, though, television looks like a far-off vision of the future when seen from a world emphasizing daily Victorian teas and frequent discussion of the New Poor Law. Better luck tomorrow.

I’ve written in the past about a peculiarly strong affiliation TV writers have claimed with nineteenth-century novels, and especially with Charles Dickens, and the many qualities of his work that are useful for people who think about television today – Dickens’ serial publishing, his focus on urban spaces, his melodrama, his intricately woven plots. It’s something I have continued to muse about over the past several months, and it’s a topic I feel especially drawn to expound on this week. Because I am at Dickens Universe.

Yes, Dickens Universe, a week-long Dickens-themed conference/workshop/summer camp/party held at UC Santa Cruz every year, and featuring lectures from Dickens scholars, seminars for graduate students and members of the general public, workshops on writing, pedagogy, and presentation skills, and nightly parties with themed cocktails that coordinate with the current year’s primary text. (This year: Oliver Twist and Sketches by Boz. Last night’s drink: Nancy’s Heart of Goldschlager cocktails.) It’s an unusual space for academics, something that combines graduate student development opportunities with a forum for peer feedback, and then adds in the nearly unheard of element of presenting one’s ideas to an audience outside of the academy. It’s pretty great, really, and not just because each day’s schedule includes two coffee breaks, a Victorian tea, post-prandial potations (yes, really), and the aforementioned nightly party.

I came to Dickens Universe well aware that ol’ Charlie has been actively re-appropriated in the world of television as a father of intellectually respectable mass entertainment of a form not unlike Lost or Deadwood or Damages or [insert multi-plot serialized show here]. I was also aware that from what I’ve found, most references to television’s nineteenth-century analogues have been whittled down to just one authorial figure, a jovial Dickens perched in the background of today’s television landscape. Wilkie Collins, Anthony Trollope, Elizabeth Gaskell, or Thomas Hardy are nowhere to be seen, much less Balzac or Flaubert. What I have been surprised to discover is that at least colloquially, many Dickens scholars have performed the same kind of singular appropriation, only in reverse.

Where interviews and critical pieces about television reference Dickens over and over, Dickens scholars reference one show – The Wire – with similar fervor. I’ll admit, some of this is at least prompted by me. “I work on television,” I say, and the near-unanimous response is “The Wire!” But I hasten to add that it would certainly be here whether or not I were here, frequently bringing up TV. On the Universe’s first full day, graduate students and faculty got into small groups to brainstorm teaching ideas about Oliver Twist, and when we reported back to the big group, we ended with a giant list of possible avenues for further discussion. We had the novel as a form, affect theory, Dickens as a social reformer, caricatures and characterization, thingness in Oliver Twist, Oliver as the novel’s vacant center, negative depictions of marriage, etc. etc. etc., and as a suggestion from one of the groups, The Wire. In connection with Oliver Twist, they mentioned that season four might be particularly relevant.

It is particularly relevant, of course, but so would a discussion of melodrama, serialization, violence, audience, and any number of other things about television more generally. Right now, though, I find the selection of that singular touchstone show to be sort of satisfying. Television seems to have picked Dickens, and in turn, Dickens scholars have picked The Wire. Even if it’s somewhat unfair on both sides, the symmetry is too pleasing to pass up.