Burn those books — the golden age of TV is here to stay
At the start of the year, when drawing up a list of resolutions, top of the agenda was TV. “2019,” I told myself, “is the year I get back into TV. I’m going to aim to watch 50 box sets, really get back into the swing of things. There are so many programmes out there that I never get to watch, but that everyone else has — well that changes now.”
Fast forward six months, and here I am, having started precisely zero series. I can’t find the time, what with work, the commute, the gym etc. It’s just so easy, when I walk through the door at the end of the day, to collapse onto the sofa and absent-mindedly flick through some Chekov. Killing Eve looks so daunting compared to a history of the fourth crusade. Why bother with Chernobyl when I can read Serhii Plokhy’s 400-page analysis of it? And no matter how classic Game of Thrones is, it just lacks the all-star action of Little Women.
This will no doubt come as worrying news to Netflix, Amazon and Now TV, who have identified reading, alongside socialising with friends and drinking wine, as ‘competitors’.
If reading and socialising were indeed heralding the death of TV, they should indeed be worrying. TV’s demise would devastate society as we know it; studio execs would be forced to subsist on a pittance, egged on by a hardcore of soap opera fanatics unable, or unwilling, to let the outside world in. Advertisers would run screaming into the Atacama, never to be seen or heard from again, and legions of actors will be reduced to little more than vagrants, eking out their days working in bars or the hospitality secto… oh.
But luckily for Netflix et al, TV is far from dying.
It’s obvious why not — TV requires no effort to absorb, where a book requires moving your eyes back and forth, with the occasional page turn. Who has the time, or the energy? Socialising, meanwhile, means leaving the house and engaging with others. Set aside whether anyone would want to do that in the first place (where on earth would you meet? And for that matter, who) it’s not as easy as it seems. Sure, you can’t engage with a TV like you can a human being, but that also means a TV can’t tell you about what a tart their flatmate is or how much they hate their job.
At best, all you talk about when socialising is what you’ve been watching on TV; this is valuable time wasted that you could be using to watch TV. Other people don’t need to listen to what you’ve been watching, they need to go home and watch it themselves.
But above all, books and the people who write them have no one to blame but themselves for this mess. The quality of writing has dipped in recent decades — it’s the only way of rationalising how I could ever have got a gig writing professionally. If the quality isn’t there, there’s not much point extending the effort trying to engage with it — you might as well watch TV.
Almost all fiction today can be separated into one of three distinct categories: The classics, crime, and everything else. The ones that are worth reading have already been turned into TV series which, whilst not as good as the books, take less time to plough through and give you the gist of the plot, complete with your favourite fruity actors in the lead roles. And the ones not worth reading, too, have also been made into television — and are often infinitely better than they were before.
History and non-fiction sales are up, which is nice, but this is largely driven by middle aged men who still haven’t got over their fascination with the second world war, and sleb autobiographies. Which says a lot more about the state of the nation than the quality of books on offer.
Ultimately, TV companies have very little to worry about. Books and socialising aren’t real competitors, and wine is an accompaniment there to improve the umpteenth effort to penetrate The Handmaid’s Tale (which, again, was better as a TV show). The golden age of TV has only just begun; neither paperbacks nor people are going to get in the way of that.
