I did think about posting this as a reply to a recent blog entry (sorry, forgotten the author) arguing Mad Men’s superiority to The Wire. Unsurprisingly, those words put through the search engine bring up so many posts that I couldn’t find it. Anyway, for me at least, that judgement will have to wait until Matthew Weiner has been given the chance to let his whole story play out. So, apologies if there’s a protocol breach. Anyway, my point (if a quarter-formed idea can be so-called) is wider than that.

There’s another entry around here at the moment, initially about the BBC, and which has a few too many too-long posts by me; to say the least, it’s pessimistic about television’s future.
And that is stunning. Because I think posterity will look back on our era and call it a Golden Age. But ages like that can disappear damn quickly. English verse drama effectively began around 1580: Marlowe, Kyd, Shakespeare, Jonson, the tail end of Beaumont and Fletcher, a few others. By about 1620 it was gone. And with the possible exception of Restoration comedy, that was pretty much it for English theatre.

Everyone’s list is different. Mine has Sopranos, Deadwood, Mad Men, the usual cable suspects. Networks would be represented by the Sorkin-era West Wing and House. There are others, of course. That’s the point. We’re arguing about whether Hamlet is superior to Lear. (If that’s too much for your canonical antennae to bear, then whether American Pastoral is better than Humboldt’s Gift or A Hard Day’s Night better than Blonde on Blonde.)

I think some great films have been made in the same period, but I don’t think any of them match up to Deadwood. Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead and Roth’s Human Stain would probably get my vote as the best novels of the last ten years—but not only do I think The Wire is a greater work of art than either, I think that may be the judgement of posterity.

But is it coming to an end? Just as television has finally worked out how to use the visual storytelling medium to do the things that film can’t, and to do them brilliantly, the means to do it could be disappearing. Something sad about that. Or am I being too pessimistic?