Steven Johnson gracefully responds to a bunch of reviews of his book, Everything Bad Is Good for You, including mine.

In his response he says something that I don’t recall his book saying flat out:

…the long-format, multithreaded TV drama — when viewed as a single narrative spanning several seasons, and not as isolated episodes — is an incredibly rich platform for precisely the literary values Dave celebrates. We don’t have a lot of opportunities in culture to tell a story that lasts a hundred hours, but that’s exactly what we’re taking in on The Sopranos or Lost or Six Feet Under. I feel totally confident that those shows will stack up very nicely against Madame Bovary a hundred years from now, if not sooner.

My head is swimming with responses. Steve’s writing tends to have that effect on me.

First, I want to drop Lost and Six Feet Under from the discussion because I personally don’t much like either. The one episode of Lost I saw was (IMO, of course) melodramatic crap — sentimental flashbacks, trumped up Big Events — and Six Feet Under is undisciplined and random; it’ll do anything to be interesting. For purposes of Steve’s point, we should be able to substitute whatever we think is the best of long-form TV. To my mind, that’s The Sopranos. Likewise, if Madame Bovary doesn’t do it for you, then pick some other work of literature that you consider to be incontestably first rate.

Second, Steve’s point about having 100 hours to tell a story is excellent. That’s especially true on networks with the British TV sensibility of ending a series when the story is done. (Are you listening, Will? Are you paying attention, Grace?) A literal retelling of a complex, multi-character novel by, say, Dickens, might equate to, what, one season of The Sopranos? (On the other hand, how do you compare the complexity of a 100-hour series with The Iliad’s brief but poignant indications of the “back story” of its mortal characters that open out into the unspoken enormity of death?)

Third, my point initially wasn’t about the relative quality of TV and books. It was that books develop a sympathetic understanding that TV (and theater and movies) — and especially video games — don’t, no matter how good they are. Those media show us characters behaving in a world. At those media’s best, we understand how that world looks to the characters, how they’re interpreting their choices, how they understand one another. But books do something different. They don’t just show us characters in a world, they show us that world. By “world” I don’t mean the things of the world — a show like Deadwood is wonderful at showing us that sense of a world — but the world of interrelated meanings. This does not mean that books are better than everything else. It does mean that they’re better at this way of showing than anything else…and this way of showing has moral implications. (Unfortunately, I’m not sure I’m right about what I’m claiming to be a unique feature of books. You should be throwing Shakespeare in my face right about now.)

Fourth, Steve is right that The Sims is a highly ambiguous environment, and thus is a counter-example to my statement that video games present relatively simple, rule-based environments. But The Sims remains a simplification of real life, whereas Madame Bovary reveals the bottomless complexity of real life.

Fifth, there’s a practical sense in which I think Steve is wrong about how The Sopranos and Madame Bovary are going to stack up. In a hundred years, even high definition TV images are going to look as old fashioned as hand-cranked silent movies. And, the acting styles and camera styles are going to feel outdated. When you tell your kid that Citizen Kane is the greatest movie ever made, there’s not a chance she’s going to prefer it to Pulp Fiction. So, if The Sopranos stacks up to Madame Bovary in 100 years, it’ll only be because both are only ever viewed if your English teacher asigns them.

I actually didn’t mean to say in my original comments on Steve’s wonderful book that the great books are better than the great TV shows. I only meant to say that books do something valuable beyond what Steve points to when he’s defending video games and television. There’s nothing about videotape that makes it a medium incapable of containing art. I just don’t know how to do the comparison. There are points of similarity between Emma Bovary’s story and Carmella Soprano’s. In my heart, though, I think Madame Bovary, Sense and Sensibility and Ulysses are better than The Sopranos. (On the other hand, I’d argue for The Sopranos over Dickens any day.) Perhaps part of it is that Flaubert didn’t have the luxury of 100 hours, so he expresses more of the world in shorter bursts, and that tells us something about how the world bodies forth its infinite meaning. For me, part of the awe of art is its ability to transcend its own limitations. ( Yes, I do find something wonderful about well-rhymed poetry.) Having a hundred hours relaxes the limits. That doesn’t mean art can’t happen there. It just makes it very hard to compare it with more limited forms.

Are such cross-media comparisons meaningful in any case? On the one hand, no. They’re just too different. On the other hand, I’m confident that The Odyssey is better than Gilligan’s Island, so apparently I do think such comparisons are possible. It’s only when you get to the best of each medium that the discussion becomes as meaningful as whether wearing your baseball cap backwards makes you look stupid or, for that matter, whether bloggers are journalists. [Technorati tags: StevenJohnson ebigfy sopranos]

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