The audience's habits moved, and the form moved with them

The argument

The second argument for this position is about how people actually watch. Proponents point out that the conditions cinema once relied on, namely a fixed showing, a trip out and a single uninterrupted viewing, are no longer how most people encounter long-form narrative. What has replaced them is a form that can be watched in a block or across weeks, paused and resumed, discussed between instalments and returned to years later. Proponents argue that a form shapes itself to the circumstances in which it is consumed, and that the serial is what long-form storytelling looks like once the audience is at home and in control of the schedule. They argue that the consequences are formal rather than merely commercial. Because a viewer can pause, a serial can carry more information per minute and can expect its details to be noticed. Because a viewer returns, it can defer its rewards. Because the audience talks between instalments, it can sustain ambiguity that a single sitting would have to resolve. These are the capacities proponents point to as evidence that the serial has taken over the cultural work cinema used to do. The conclusion is that the question is best settled by asking where the conversation is. When a culture argues about a story, examines its structure, quotes it and returns to it, that is the position cinema occupied, and proponents argue it is now most often occupied by serial television. The screens are smaller and the auditorium is gone, but on this account those were delivery arrangements rather than the thing itself.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Critics answer that the argument shows the audience has changed rather than that one form has become another. Watching at home with the power to pause is a different experience in kind: attention is divided, the image is small, the sound is domestic, and a work made for that setting is made for interruption. They add that the claim about where the conversation is depends on what is counted, since films still draw audiences and arguments, and the visibility of television talk partly reflects the platforms on which talk now happens. On that view the premises describe a real shift in distribution and habit and then draw an identity between forms which the shift does not establish.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] Fixed showings and undivided attention still exist and still draw audiences, so the premise overstates a trend as a disappearance. [Rejecting P2] Adapting to domestic viewing makes the serial a form built for interruption and for a small image, which is a difference from cinema rather than a continuation of it. [Rejecting P3] What a culture argues about is measured by where talk is visible, and that reflects the platforms on which talk happens as much as the works being discussed. [Rejecting C] At most it follows that serial television now does cultural work cinema once did alone, not that it is the same form.