Thanks, Tim.

"To his credit, Tim Minear is the Rocky Balboa of Fox show producers" -- FOX President.

Is Peter Ligouri the same person who said Drive was a testament to your illness?

I always wanted 'testament to my illness' as a title for this thread.

I'd never ever call myself the Dickens of anything, but I've used that same analogy -- that at it's best serial TV stories are us trying to do what Dickens did.

I've used that analogy too! Somewhere. I've always loved the idea of people waiting at the docks for the next installment...oh shit, I didn't use the Dickens thing for serial TV.

I used it for Harry Potter.

I had a whole email almost composed in my head to you about the connection between Dickens and serial television and how you are the Dickens of the TV world.

Out of my brain, pretty preggo lady! Not that I was writing an email, but I just had a conversation with a friend the other day about what makes effective serial television and how every writer should take a lesson from Dickens.

Dickens drew everything out forever because he was getting paid by the word! In high school English, the teacher wanted us to take turns reading Great Expectations aloud, and by halfway through the first day I was dying from listening to everyone else's slow painful reading, and when someone refused their turn and asked if I could read instead, I said yes, and after that? I read the whole gorram book to my ninth grade English class. Although it was probably the only classic any of them ever got all the way through, I never want to read Dickens ever again.

YDickensMV.

Dickens drew everything out forever because he was getting paid by the word!

Not true, actually. He published serially, and pretty much perfected the economic model (which made it possible for people to make a living as writers after the end of patronage and before the advent of advances, incidentally) - but the number and length of parts was contracted in advance. Like, say, a season of TV. Anyway, his novels are no longer than most others of the period: it's just what the publishing market of the time went for. But it's a big ol' urban myth that it was sloppy editing or just dragging things out indefinitely.

(Plus, Dickens was also a magazine publisher, so he was paying by the installment as well as being paid -- hardly an incentive to abuse the system.)

t /cranky ex-victorianist

"To his credit, Tim Minear is the Rocky Balboa of Fox show producers"

Oh the fun to be had with this.

But it's a big ol' urban myth that it was sloppy editing or just dragging things out indefinitely.

Charlotte Bronte was paid by the word, though, right? That's why Jane Eyre is about a hundred pages too long.

Maybe there will be a bronze statue of Tim smoking a cigarette outside the office.

Amych is in my brain! I'm not a victorianist by any stretch of the imagination (more of an early modern kind of girl, but please don't ask me why). But last semester in one of my grad classes I found myself defending Dickens's penchant for wrapping up each loose end with an analogy to tv serials that have both a season long arc and episodic narratives within that long arc.

I'd never ever call myself the Dickens of anything, but I've used that same analogy -- that at it's best serial TV stories are us trying to do what Dickens did.

In reality, I'm not a huge Dickens fan, outside of Hard Times, Tale of Two Cities and A Christmas Carol, all of which I adore.

But recently in "reading" (and I use the term VERY LOOSELY as I only read the first 82 pages then I scanned 4 other disconnected chapters looking for the mention of the most minor character for my final) Bleak House, I encountered some of Dickens's notes for the story. I was amazed at how he had a grasp of each character and where they were headed, at least from a character perspective. And how he was able to hold it all together for months on end. Amazing, really. Even if I think of Bleak House as interminably boggy, I have great admiration for it.

What I am interested in, then is the victroian readers' experiences of Dickens. Since it was serialized, did they read it the way I watch TV in the first run? And does my modern reading of it as a novel in one go, not drawn out over months most closely line up with a watching an entire season of TV on DVD?

And as I think these things, I begin to realize I have Way Too Much I'm procrastinating from.

These thoughts brought to you by the part of my brain that is already tired of my thesis.

What I am interested in, then is the readers' experience of Dickens. Since it was serialized, did they read it the way I watch TV in the first run? And does my modern reading of it as a novel in one go, not drawn out over months most closely line up with a watching an entire season of TV on DVD?

I always find that I prefer TV Dickens adaptations to reading the novels, and I think it has a lot to do with his plots being originally written for serialization.