TV drama is the new literature, says Salman Rushdie - Telegraph: Hailing the writing quality in hit US series such as The Wire, The Sopranos and The West Wing, he described television as “the best of both worlds” giving writers the kind of control over plot and characterisation previously enjoyed only by novelists.
“In the movies the writer is just the servant, the employee,” he told The Observer.
“In television, the 60-minute series, The Wire and Mad Men and so on, the writer is the primary creative artist.
“[My agents] said to me that what I should really think about is a TV series, because what has happened in America is that the quality – or the writing quality – of movies has gone down the plughole.
"If you want to make a $300 million special effects movie from a comic book, then fine.
"But if you want to make a more serious movie… I mean you have no idea how hard it was to raise the money for Midnight's Children."
Philip Hensher, the Man Booker Prize-shortlisted novelist and literary critic, said that the range of characters in some long-running US dramas is comparable to that seen in some of Dickens’ greatest works.