One early morning I found my daughter on the sofa, eyes glazed over, having spent the night binge-watching River, a spooky and brilliant police procedural on Netflix. This seemed self-indulgent and vaguely decadent, so I reproached her as parents must. A while later it struck me that I had been channeling my grandmother who, some fifty years ago, had taken exception to my obsessive keenness on reading fiction. She had cautioned me against this vice for which she had a term: novelbaazi.
Streaming serial fictions is the modern equivalent of reading novels. Long stories told in cumulative episodes have been with us for a while but it's only now that digital technology has advanced enough to make video fictions consumable in a way that's nearly as convenient as reading paper novels. The most basic advance is the simultaneous availability of the whole story so you can inhale it at once if you want or in two or three bursts of blissful immersion.
The problem with the conventional model of broadcasting was that the story was rationed out by someone else. Weekly, even daily episodes made the experience... episodic. You could argue that the great Victorians serialized their novels in magazines and there is something to be said for the anticipatory excitement that serialization creates. I read Georgette Heyer's Black Sheep, serialized in Woman and Home, over several months, around the same time as my grandmother was trying to wean me from fiction. It might have helped the magazine's circulation but it did nothing for me as a reader: it was a bitty, broken-up experience that perversely withheld the extended communion, the readerly submission that long fictions require.
Also, till recently, there was an unwieldiness to watching serial fictions on a television. It was a static, public business, constantly liable to interruption and competing claims on screen time. It had no way of reproducing the unsociability that's central to the fiction-reading experience. Television watching is inevitably a familial affair and two viewers add up to a congregation. Great fictions, as every reader knows, are solitary revelations.
Streaming creates the necessary conditions for unsociability. It makes serial fictions private and portable. I can see why the young do their watching on laptops: it's a private screen that belongs to you alone. You can carry the story with you; something the dead-wood novel has allowed us to do for more than two hundred years, but it needed fourth-generation internet access on state-of-the-art mobile devices to achieve the same thing for video fictions. The other day, returning from university in an Uber cab, I found myself watching a Brazilian story called 3%, dystopian science fiction about a future made up of predatory elites and the desperate masses, probably inspired by the success of the Hunger Games. I was watching it wearing earphones on a four-inch screen, as oblivious to the traffic around me as I would have been with a novel. I was inside a taxi I had summoned with my phone, watching a film playing inside that phone. For the middle-aged, the present is a foreign country. They do things differently over here.
What delighted me most was the ability of Netflix to pick up where I had left off. The episode of 3% began exactly where I had stopped watching it on the television at home. Some miraculous bookmarking in the Cloud allowed the geniuses at Netflix to ease me in to the story without the tedium of fast-forwarding to find my place. Even better, the story began a few frames earlier for the sake of continuity. The economy and elegance of this persuaded me that the see-able novel had arrived.
There are, though, some things that paper fictions can teach their digital heirs such as the proper way to signal the transition between one chapter (or episode) and the next. The title sequence might have been a useful way of branding the serial in olden times when it was telecast episode by episode over days and weeks and months, but to persist with it when the whole point of streaming services like Netflix is to encourage continuous viewing is infuriating.
Do I really need reminding that I'm watching Peaky Blinders when I've nearly lost my sight watching a whole season in an evening? I can see that HBO is hugely proud of the animated map that leads into every episode of Game of Thrones, and it might have served a purpose in the telecast version, but to subject the committed viewer to this interminable cartoon in between episodes is exactly like a reader being confronted with the novel's cover after every chapter. Why can't streaming services include an option that allows the viewer to opt out of both the title sequence and the redundant summary of the story thus far signaled by "Previously..."? The discreet screen equivalent of the blank space at the end of a chapter, say a dark screen held for a couple of seconds, would both indicate the break in narrative and allow the viewer to remain immersed.
It's also now clear that the best way of translating novels onto the screen is via serial video fiction, not the standalone film. Thirty five years ago, queueing up to see the Tin Drum, I didn't believe that Grass's great novel could be made into a film. As it happened, Volker Schlöndorff managed the impossible: faithful to both the novel and his medium, he made a great film. It worked, though, through precis and pruning; it left out the incidental pleasures of Grass's style, his perverse digressions. I would follow Oskar through four six-episode seasons, happily. Likewise, the drawn-out Russian gloom, the moral squalor of a novel like Crime and Punishment can't be contained in a film; there isn't the time for it. But watching Breaking Bad, following with horrified fascination the devolution of Skyler White, the protagonist's wife, it became clear that serial video fiction was the form most likely to do justice to the longueurs of the novel.
For the Indian novel, the Netflix-style serial would be a gift. Midnight's Children, for example, could play out on screen in the languages that make up its fictional landscape without baffling the viewer, thanks to subtitles, while allowing the multi-lingual middle-class desi the rare pleasure of drinking in his world in all the languages he knows.
Streaming video helped us embrace subtitles. For viewers who have read their way through long Danish serials, following the polyglot Bombay of Midnight's Children portioned out into episodes would be child's play. Unlike the mainstream movie, which is aimed at theatre audiences, audiences that dislike the distraction of subtitles, the Netflix serial is aimed at the individual 'reader', for whom Babel can be neatly resolved.
