Definitely more than 5. I want to say it was 12 hours, but I may be off there.

It's in three complete box sets. So I think it might be more than 12.

Probably my faulty memory, then. I just remember that a co-worker loaned me about 6 videocassettes.

Heh, thanks, but I'm pretty much just spouting the Trollope fannish party line. He cheerfully copped to being a shitty plotter -- could not for the life of him do what Dickens did with the elaborate stories within stories within stories, the ability to keep six or seven subplots not only going simultaneously but weaving neatly in and out of one another, and the frequently occurring but rarely asspully HSQ.

Trollope focused instead on small human fuck-ups: the inappropriate crush you can't quite smother, the secret agonies of doubt, the words you want to take back even as they're sailing out your mouth, the quiet resentment, the pride you choke on, the badly mistaken promise you feel honor-bound to keep, with occasional forays into the deeper waters of disintegrating marriages and custody battles and what goes on in the mind of an upright, properly reared, very straitlaced person of name and money who commits violence against another human. He really couldn't plot, but he loved humans and their fucked-up, brave and foolish spicy brains and he was so very good at writing them down.

The Pallisiers is a 26-part series (50 minutes each).

The Pallisiers is a 26-part series (50 minutes each).

::swoons::

the frequently occurring but rarely asspully HSQ.

I beg your pardon! Asspully HSQ coincidences were the lifeblood of Dickens! Movie versions of his works always do the sudden hand-wavy thing in the middle, because the coincidences are so hard for a modern audience to swallow. (I enjoy them, in a "Oh no you didn't!" way, but they're like #3 on the "What not to do" list for novel-writing.)

I offer you my considered response: Nuh-uh!

I dunno. Dickens's HSQs and resolutions never feel asspully to me because they always feel emotionally true to the world he's created. They're fantastically coincidental, but his world is itself so fantastic that the HSQs don't ever ping me. They may be hard to swallow in a blunt real-world logical way, but seen through the Dickensverse lens they always feel (to me anyway) justified. I can't think of one occasion in which I felt like he'd written his way into a corner and yanked a coincidence ex cloaca to get himself out of it. They're improbable and absurd, but they always feel like something he had in the back of his mind from fairly early on, not something he seized on as a last resort.

I didn't like the prospective-husband-switchy thing at the end of Bleak House, but offhand that's the only HSQ that's felt wrong and unearned to me. (I was hugely relieved by it, but it still felt weirdly cheaty and manipulative.)

Dickens is great characters and a view of their society. As to plot, I once heard a parody of Oliver Twist that relied heavily on the phrase, "just happens to be," and ends with, "which means the whole things was ONE BIG COINCIDENCE!"

Trollope is actually a good storyteller when you realize that his forte is everyday people going through their everyday lives doing everyday things.

I always feel sad that some "Wire" characters don't live in the Dickensverse and get to be...I dunno, President of Liberia? I mean...I hate when Dickens does that, but there are characters that you *really* want it for. But the Simonverse is pretty much Not About That, so...

Trollope is actually a good plotter when you realize that his people are everyday people going through their everyday lives doing everyday things.

Still and all, he never wrote anything that you'd read just for the plot. For the characters, and for what happens next to them, but not so much for what happens next, period. You'd never see a horde of New Yorkers descending on a dock and screaming, "What happens to Lady Glencora?!?"

I love both these writers dearly, but in my brain they live in completely different spaces and hit different pleasure centers. Trollope is for people and lives and choices, good and bad, that are utterly familiar and utterly true; Dickens is all about endless invention, characters almost larger and more real than regular humans, and showoffy grandiose storytelling for storytelling's sake. The wild coincidences aren't asspulls, they're integral to the unlikely glory of the entire improbable enterprise.

Anyhow, in my brain.

Good God, for the first time in forever I want to go back to school. Somebody stop me, for the love of all that's holy.