Throughout its comparatively brief history, television has always been seen as second-rate, called the boob tube, the idiot box, and at one point, rather famously, chewing gum for the eyes. The quipster was Frank Lloyd Wright, the architect.

But the worst criticism of TV has always come from academia, usually English departments, where professors rip it up for a variety of offenses, including wounding, perhaps mortally, the novel. If one follows that line of reasoning, America was once a nation in which the novel was adored, when its fine citizenry plopped down on the couch each night for a good read, if necessary by the light of a candle or an oil lamp.

That of course is nonsense. Decades ago, only the small few were regular readers of books of fiction. America was a far poorer country, far less educated, and such leisure time was a privilege of the well-to-do only.

More to the point, though, television has not killed or crippled the novel. There's now more fiction than ever before, while television itself has become more like the novel in its ability to tell stories in an engaging way.

That's the argument being made by Kathleen Fitzpatrick, an associate professor of English and media studies at Pomona College. She is the author of a new book, “The Anxiety of Obsolescence: The American Novel in the Age of Television,” in which she argues that TV and the novel can actually coexist, and do, rather brilliantly.
 
Fitzpatrick argues that television is in fact increasingly an intellectually challenging, novel-like literary form. 

“There will always be the pulp novels and porn magazines of television, too,” she writes to Media Life in an email, “but there are clearly some programs that are making a lasting impact on American culture in a way that must beg the question of what the literary is.”

What Fitzpatrick has seen in recent years is a sort of bifurcation of television, a split in two dramatically different directions. There's been the rise in reality TV, which she thinks of as a fall in effect, a dumbing down of TV into entertainment lacking both nuance and complexity.

But at the same time, there's been the rise of such series as  “Lost” and “Deadwood,” which Fitzpatrick notes are distinguished by extremely sophisticated narratives. Their capacity to be intellectually engaging places them in the company of the novel. Says Fitzpatrick:

“We have been in the midst of a kind of ‘golden age’ of television for the last eight years or so, at the same time the lowest common denominator on the tube keeps getting lowered. It’s fascinating.”

Like novels, “Deadwood,” “The Gilmore Girls” or Aaron Sorkin series like “West Wing” and “Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip” require viewers to concentrate carefully on a very intricate, literary-style of dialogue. They need to pick up on whole streams of references to other cultural phenomenon, references reaching outside the storyline, she argues, and they must understand the nuances of the relationships that drive professional and public life.

Series like “The Sopranos,” “Six Feet Under,” “Deadwood” and “The Wire,” are of a different literary style, but they still require the viewer to do heavy interpretive work to really understand the meaning in the stories.

In that, Fitzpatrick believes that these narratives go beyond being simply novelistic. In their ambitions they aspire to be the Big Novel, a "Gravity’s Rainbow," the dense but richly complex novel by Thomas Pynchon, to name one Big Novel, or David Foster Wallace's "Infinite Jest," for another.

Just why this is happening now, so many years after the TV flashed onto the scene, may have something to do with the internet, she says. She believes the web fosters discussions and has led people away from passively watching. It also enables producers and writers of shows to see what people think about of their shows.

The impact, believes Fitzpatrick, of this more literary TV is to make people more creative and inspire them to write. More people are writing than ever, she says, although some of this writing takes place in forms we might not notice, such as fan fiction.

And even with all these new forms, Fitzpatrick does not believe this is sapping talent from the craft of novel writing.

Folks have always worried that good writers would rush to Hollywood to find fame and riches, first for movies and then for TV. It has not happened. What has happened is the competing media both end up better for it. Says she: “I would argue that some of the best writing being done in the American culture in the last decade has been done for television.”

Meanwhile, in popcult for the week ended Oct. 1, the celebrity-voiced animals of Sony’s animated “Open Season” took the top spot at the box office, ahead of Kevin Costner’s latest come-back vehicle “The Guardian” and forcing last week’s No. 1, “Jackass: Number Two,” down to third place.

In DVD rentals for the week ended Sept. 24, according to IMDb.com, “Lucky Number Slevin” retained the top spot, with “United 93” and “The Sentinel” holding in second and third.

On iTunes for the week ended yesterday, The Fray’s “How to Save a Life” stayed in the top spot, ahead of last week’s second-place Snow Patrol’s “Chasing Cars” and new list entry “Smack That” by Akon.

And in books, John le Carre’s “The Mission Song” entered the New York Times’ hardcover fiction list in third, behind stalwarts “The Thirteenth Tale” by Diane Setterfield and Brad Meltzer’s “The Book of Fate.” On the USA Today best sellers list, Kim Edward’s “The Memory Keeper’s Daughter” kept first place with Augusten Burroughs’ memoir “Running with Scissors” in second place.