MY BEAUTIFUL BOX-SET BINGE

Dear Readers,

Carlo and I are working hard on Shattered, which will be published in October by Hamish Hamilton. Once this is done - it should take another week or so - we will be back blogging. The piece below was published in the Guardian six years ago, and is about my love for television.

My dispatches will always be free and open to everyone. If you have the means, and believe in paying for good writing, please do become a paid subscriber. Your contributions go towards my care, which include physio, massages, hydrotherapy and equipment, all of which is essential for my physical maintenance.

Love to you all,

Hanif

If you really want to know about it, I will own up. I’ve barely left the house in the last 18 months because I’ve been watching what for me seems like a lot of TV, around five hours a night. And I can’t say that a moment of it – apart from, say, the second season of Mr Robot – feels like wasted time. There are scenes in Mad Men and Transparent that are as accomplished and lovely, as profound and truthful, as anything I’ve seen in the cinema. And the episode in Breaking Bad where the former chemistry teacher Walter White buries the money he has accumulated by selling crystal meth – transforming the spoils into waste or shit – is one of the most illuminating in all art.

Apart from the news, sport and documentaries about the Beatles, I hadn’t watched much television since the 1980s. Nor, as a young man, did I consider writing for TV. It was too compromised; and, with a few exceptions, the overall standard was low. As for the movies, many of the film directors wanted to be artists rather than storytellers, a vanity that ruined many directors and displaced writers. The screenwriter’s best hope was to resemble a back seat driver, yelling mostly unheard ideas from behind. It looked as if the truest test of the good dramatist was his or her ability to script plays.

This was before I discovered that, far from alienating either viewer or writer, television was the great social integrator. Everyone was watching it. I could talk about it with my mother, my teenage kids and their mates. Visiting friends in whichever country, I learned that, like a secret passion, everyone had their favourite shows, had strong opinions about them and couldn’t wait to hand you your coat so they could continue with series six of The Good Wife. Before you left, they would, however, probe you for your favourites, for something decent that they might be in danger of missing. It could easily provide the most passionate exchange you’d hear all day. You can imagine, now, someone watching television shows for the sole purpose of having something to say at dinner.

Aaron Paul and Bryan Cranston in Breaking Bad (2008). Photograph: Allstar/Sony Pictures Television.

When I was 15, a kindly editor at a notable publishing house, finding a novel I wrote promising, would visit me in the suburbs on Sundays to teach me to write. What he emphasised was character. Using an idea derived from EM Forster, he taught me that writers should make the individuals they created “round” rather than “flat”. You could accomplish that by the addition of details, often contradictory, because that is the way people are, and soon you would see right through them to their skeleton and they would move around almost of their own accord.

The television show is ideal for the exploration of character under pressure because of its duration. I recently watched all 86 episodes of The Sopranos, followed by all of Breaking Bad; then I did Gomorrah. I would happily have watched more. The slowness of Mad Men – interestingly, a show derived from literary origins: you cannot help noticing in it the shadows of F Scott Fitzgerald, John Cheever, Richard Yates and John Updike – disoriented and irritated me until I adjusted to its rhythm. You get to see the characters in bed, in the kitchen and at work; you understand how politics and gender division produce them, and, uncannily, how little freedom they have. Length makes for complexity. Seeing Tony Soprano in and out of the bathroom with an upset stomach, or taking his beloved daughter to university before murdering an acquaintance with his bare hands, is not something there would be space for in The Godfather.

Julianna Margulies as Alicia Florrick in the Good Wife. Photograph: Justin Stephens/CBS

I grasped how far television had advanced, that it had replaced pop music as the major creative form, when I noticed that the best writers – from The Sopranos’ David Chase and Mad Men’s Matthew Weiner to Transparent’s Jill Soloway – recognised it as an event. They had long given up on the idea of showing that crime doesn’t pay. They had also kicked out the soft idea that audiences like sympathetic protagonists. Television writers saw that the audience loved to see deceit, manipulation and evil: people doing what they wished they could do, had they been blessed with the balls, greed or stupidity. (Remember, Alfred Hitchcock said: “The more successful the villain, the more successful the movie.”) And the new television added an extra, brilliant thing: it kicked out the happy, redemptive ending for ever. The long-form show is perfect for examining cut-throat capitalism because all these series are concerned with the amassing of money, which has now come to justify any malfeasance. The only attempt at virtue is the idea that the purpose of the money is to provide security for your family. (Never mind other people’s families.) This extreme nihilism is central to the beautiful, sadomasochistic horror of Gomorrah, for instance.

The quality of imagination in any society is directly related to opportunity, to the amount of space it can find, and whether there is belief in the possibility of dreaming, risk and experiment. While the works I’ve examined are often about the terrible mystery of human destructiveness – as well as about the replacement of humane values by materialistic ones – their existence is a tribute to the writer’s signature.

As importantly, they are also a compliment to the erotics of collaboration, an appreciation of the work people can do when their imaginations run together. Such TV shows employ numerous directors, producers and actors. They are an opportunity for writers – who are being manufactured in the creative writing course in their dozens – to make a living in popular forms.

The best art – Hitchcock, the Beatles, Picasso, Miles Davis – combines experiment with popularity, taking the audience from somewhere familiar to somewhere new, exploring the not-yet-said.

Now I am afraid I have to go. I woke up worrying about Don Draper, and I am more than keen to be back in the office with him.