It's Been a Week, and No, I Haven't Finished Orange is the New Black

 
Although it was released a week ago, I'm only on the fourth episode of Orange is the New Black. I know I wrote about my excitement for this season last time, but... something happened.

As I was looking down the episode list, I realized that each one ranges from 50 minutes to an hour in length.

And really, who has the time?

This thought reminded me of a 2009 interview with Bitter Old Coot (and occasional novelist) Philip Roth. When asked about his prediction that novels would no longer be read in 25 years, he answered:

I was being optimistic about 25 years really. No, I think it’s going to be cultic. I think always people will be reading them, but it’ll be a small group of people — maybe more people than now read Latin poetry, but somewhere in that range… It’s the print. That’s the problem. It’s the book. It’s the object itself. To read a novel requires a certain kind of concentration, focus, devotion to the reading. If you read a novel in more than two weeks, you don’t read the novel really. So I think that that kind of concentration, and focus, and attentiveness, is hard to come by. It’s hard to find huge numbers of people, or large numbers of people or significant numbers of people who have those qualities.

This is how I'm coming to feel about long-form television. Though I don't have to watch a whole episode in one sitting, Roth is right that breaking focus takes something away from the experience.

A 50 minute episode of OTNB may be only 6 minutes longer than an episode of, say CSI (minus commercials), but that difference is big in a show which requires undivided attention. I can nod off to Royal Pains and not miss a beat, but if I miss a line or two of a Piper monologue, I need to rewind.

Have shows like OTNB doomed themselves to cultic irrelevance? Maybe, but I choose to look at the possibilities the Internet offers. Streaming television undermines the relevance of time formats. Though cheap acting, and no broadcast schedule may invite longer episodes; I think it's a matter of time before some visionary rediscovers the power of concision. My prediction: Netflix's next big hit will run 30 minute or less episodes.

The Internet can be a powerful creative tool if you let it. My current non-fiction project, The Concise Companion to Tax Lien Investing, figures to be around 10,000 words when finished. In the past, this would have been unpublishable. It's way too short for a book. That doesn't matter anymore. With online self-publishing, I can make it as long or short as it needs to be. The shape of media in the 21st Century remains undefined, but this sort of freedom is its greatest virtue.