Novels are better than television. For a long time this thesis underwrote nearly all literature that tackled the subject of TV. In the canonical TV novels of the 20th century, the tube invaded your home (White Noise), fractured your family (Memories of My Father Watching TV), zapped your political will (Vineland), and, consumed in high enough doses, induced psychosis equivalent to the most brutal chemical addictions (Infinite Jest, A Fan’s Notes, Requiem for a Dream). From Richard Stern’s 1960 proto–reality TV satire Golk onward, literature dramatized the obvious truth about the idiot box: there was a steep psychic cost to the bottomless American need to be entertained, a need that could only be met by what Barbara Kruger called “continuously acrid signals” — emanations from a piece of evil furniture that fried its viewers’ minds with ideology, junky chatter, and footage of civilians being humiliated, plus commercials. “No good,” wrote George Trow in 1980, “has come of it.”

Literature belonged to a higher order of entertainment. A good novel got better, not worse, the harder you paid attention to it. If never wholly insulated from market demands, fiction at least didn’t have to appeal to advertisers or Nielsen ratings. A novel never got anybody elected President. Even the most TV-attuned literature, argued David Foster Wallace in his big 1993 survey of television and then-contemporary fiction, maintained aesthetic aspirations beyond anything pre-prestige television could offer, striving to “reconstruct a univocally round world out of disparate streams of flat sights.”

People don’t really talk like that anymore. An essential divide between the vast wasteland of television and the fertile biomes of literature persisted from TV’s formal maturation in the 1950s roughly through the beginning of the millennium, when television became “quality” and people stopped writing novels about how watching too much of it can amuse you to death. Suddenly, it turned out, watching TV wasn’t bad for you after all — in fact it was good for you, pretty much as good as reading. Or, as Brett Martin put it in Difficult Men, his history of the writers who led TV into its prestige era, “a medium with a reputation somewhere beneath comic strips” rapidly underwent a transformation “closer to another explosion of high art in a vulgar pop medium: the Victorian serialized novel.”

Novels are better than television, but the surest way to make money from novels is to write with television in mind.

Shortly after TV began to think of itself as novelistic, TV studios started turning their attention toward actual novels. Television had mostly left literature alone before the prestige revolution — fewer than ten TV shows produced annually prior to 2000 were based on existing literary properties — and most of the books that did get adapted (Little House on the Prairie, Pride and Prejudice) had been published decades before they found their way to the small screen. By 2020, with streaming platforms and premium cable channels churning out near-instantaneous adaptations of some of this century’s most critically and commercially successful novels, new book-to-TV projects were appearing to the tune of eighty or ninety a year. These adaptations offer a neat, if partial, index of trends in scripted television throughout the boom years preceding the 2023 WGA strike. Some became residually prestige “must-see” entertainment (Game of Thrones). Some were the slickly made products of streamers’ short-lived interest in auteurs (The Underground Railroad), while some confirmed HBO’s continued dominance over an upper-middlebrow market that Amazon and Netflix briefly tried to corner (The Sympathizer, Station Eleven, My Brilliant Friend). Some were pandemic-era discourse machines that finally got homebound viewers to shell out for Hulu (Normal People, The Handmaid’s Tale). Some had “little” in the title and Reese Witherspoon in the cast (Little Fires Everywhere, Big Little Lies). Most became inconsequential puff that nobody, even the original novels’ most dedicated readers, seemed to pay much attention to.

For the besieged contemporary novelist, options beget options .

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From this uninspiring ecosystem a contradiction has emerged: TV has cannibalized literature’s dominant place as a leisure activity, reached for its most successful properties, dumbed them down, made them worse; at the same time, for individual novelists, the adaptation boom has arrived just as nearly every other path to financial stability has crumbled, from the formerly writer-supporting sectors of journalism and academia to book publishing itself. Where a talented, fortunate, not-quite-blockbuster writer could once plausibly aspire to a sturdy midlist career, a novelist today who isn’t Sally Rooney or Liane Moriarty is lucky to sell a new book for $60,000 or $75,000 — what the novelist’s agent calls a “very nice deal” but which feels more like “very poor compensation” for all those years of drafting and revision. But that $60,000 advance could turn into six figures if the book is optioned — and if the show miraculously gets made, maybe the writer could end up with a role in the writers’ room, or a credit as a producer. For the besieged contemporary novelist, options beget options — and fiction writers, even the best of them, find themselves pulled ever further screenward.

Novels are better than television, but the surest way to make money from novels is to write with television in mind — and this is a paradox to which novels themselves are increasingly attuned.

By now the fantasy of book-to-TV money is as established a part of literary life as teaching undergrads or soliciting blurbs from Gary Shteyngart. Accordingly, some novelists have begun to treat adaptation the same way novelists have always treated their material conditions and constraints, as plot. A loose cluster of recent novels share an interest in exploring the uneasy, mutually needy relationship between writing (or reading) fiction and making (or watching) television. These new TV novels are texts in which the publishing and entertainment industries explicitly jockey for cultural dominance, in which TV is examined from within a form it’s assaulted — texts in which fictional novelists elegize that “television is the novel of our times” (as in Danzy Senna’s Colored Television) and fictional screen actors celebrate that “TV is like reading a novel” (as in Justin Taylor’s Reboot).

As if dramatizing novelists’ aspirational shift from critical viewers of TV to active participants in the entertainment industry, these books focus on TV’s production more than its consumption, bearing less resemblance to the White Noise–era brain-rot canon than to the slightly older genre of the Hollywood novel. (All the new TV novels take place, at least partially, in Los Angeles.) Like Didion’s restless stars in Play It as It Lays, or Gore Vidal’s lusty acting instructors in Myra Breckinridge, or Evelyn Waugh’s expat script doctors in The Loved One, the subjects of these texts are entertainment workers, anxiously adapting their white-collar labor to suit the demands of a volatile industry. They are actors whose paychecks have been throttled by streaming (Reboot), performers whose daily rhythms are transformed by the reality TV market (Porochista Khakpour’s Tehrangeles), and — most frequently and most illuminatingly — writers, for whom the television industry holds some promise of money, emotional fulfillment, or mere stability (Reboot again; also Colored Television, Curtis Sittenfeld’s Romantic Comedy, and Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s Long Island Compromise).

As a rule the new TV novels make use of familiar Hollywood-fiction tropes. It’s a literature of dimming stars, smoggy drives through flammable chaparral, frequent benders, prostitutes. Flash periods of productivity where somebody bangs out a script in a week. There’s at least one genre-disorienting tour through the facades of a studio lot, like the masterpiece sequence in Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust, and plenty of languid musing about the vicissitudes of fame, often delivered poolside. But from these familiar sex-and-rage dynamics a certain antagonistic energy has been drained. Absent from most of the new TV novels is an older literature’s icy confidence that what we’re reading is independent from — or even superior to — the entertainment business, once invariably portrayed as a phony and craven industry run by “intellectual stumblebums,” as West wrote. In the new TV novels, instead, a reader can detect a version of what Kathleen Fitzpatrick, in her study of “the American novel in the age of television,” called “the anxiety of obsolescence”: an apprehension — expressed sometimes bitterly, sometimes with acceptance or opportunism — about literature’s diminished, even parasitic status relative to TV’s cultural might. This is fiction that appears to see itself in the way the former sitcom star who narrates Reboot sees his ex-cable cohort: “Nobody cared how we defined our era anymore, because our era was over.”

The most explicitly anxious of the new crop, Senna’s Colored Television, follows Jane, a novelist trying to complete a long-gestating second book while living in LA. (“Being a novelist in Los Angeles was not unlike being an Amish person,” Jane informs us, cleanly summing up the position from which all the new TV novels speak.) Jane’s novel is unwieldy and unfinished, and she and her artist husband earn so little money that they’ve begun permanently house-sitting for more successful acquaintances. Their current arrangement belongs to a friend from Jane’s MFA program, who has abandoned literary fiction to become a accomplished television writer. Inhabiting her friend’s fancy life, Jane — who begins the book with a practically Adornian attitude, feeling “superior to anyone who was not doing the work of high art, of elevating the culture” — starts to reluctantly sense that television has been “the bright, glittering industry that had hovered behind [her] for years while she stubbornly hunched over her novel, pretending not to notice it.”

When Jane’s literary agent hits her with the nightmare phone call — the novel, a sprawling multitextual exploration of “mulattos in America,” is a bust — she lightly cons her way into a meeting with her old friend’s TV agent. It’s easy, Jane finds, to narrate a long-repressed professional interest in “a medium she’d looked down on for all these years, as if it were junk food.” The TV has hummed quietly in the novel’s background, transfixing Jane’s iPad-baby son and couch-potato dad, and Jane can summon all kinds of evidence for the medium’s cultural hegemony:

“I just find novels are not where the fire is these days,” Jane said. “I want to influence the culture more directly. And trust me, English professors, the people who study literature for a living, they don’t even talk about novels anymore unless they have to — they just stand around the water cooler talking about what they watched last night .”

The TV agent’s response is hardly reassuring. “Books are still alive, hugely important,” she tells Jane. “Where do you think we get our IP?”

Jane pretty quickly falls into a seductive new life as a TV worker, collaborating with a celebrity showrunner named Hampton Ford, who likes her idea for a “comedy about a kooky but lovable mulatto family.” Surrendering to the streaming economy appears to solve the problems with which novel writing is freighted: the ambitious premise of Jane’s novel, dismissed as unpublishable by a risk-averse book industry, proves the basis for network-friendly “diverse content” when retooled for the screen, and shaky private ideas about character arcs and B-plots become the collaborative domain of a screenwriting team. Jane writes it all down in a marbled notebook, and the studio bigwigs shower her with praise for acting so much like “a real live writer.”

It’s a literature of dimming stars, smoggy drives through flammable chaparral, frequent benders, prostitutes.

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Compared to “the purgatory of the midlist author,” life in the writers’ room sounds appealing, and basically plausible. The free-flowing kombucha and uppers in the writers’ room, the underclass of assistants with hopeless dreams of making actual cinema, the thrum of #OscarsSoWhite-era corporate antiracism: Senna captures the lesser rhythms of contemporary studio life with an authenticity likely rooted in her own experience adapting her novel New People with the celebrity showrunner Kenya Barris, of black-ish fame. (One imagines that the recent Hollywood success of Senna’s husband Percival Everett, whose novel Erasure formed the basis of Cord Jefferson’s ill-conceived American Fiction, may have provided additional inspiration.)

As happens often with book-to-TV projects — especially when the work being adapted is subversive, political, or formally “ungainly,” as Jane’s editor has it — Netflix pulled the plug on New People before it got made. But even a truncated encounter with the TV industry’s incentives appears to have impressed itself on Senna’s prose style, which in Colored Television successfully achieves a kind of televisual quality. Like most of the new TV novels, the text is stylistically unornamented, heavy on dialogue, with a plot driven by decisions that are hard to imagine realistic human characters making but which might pass unnoticed in a forty-minute episode with lots of other stuff going on. Senna is so comfortable writing in an essentially commercial register, and Jane’s attitude toward her new line of work so sanguine, that it’s an actual surprise when Hampton Ford steals Jane’s novel manuscript and turns it into an Emmy-winning blockbuster series for which Jane receives no compensation or credit. The novel ends with Jane screwed over and still poor, failing to convince her neighbors that she was the brains behind their favorite program, like Joel McCrea in the prison sequence in Sullivan’s Travels. It’s a neat trick, and a dark one: we thought we were enjoying a story (entertaining, if credulous) about a novelist carving out a role (empowering, if mercenary) for herself in the TV business; but all along we were reading an old-school polemic about the evils of TV and the mortal perils of selling out. I was reminded of a younger character’s lament for the hippies in Vineland: “Minute the Tube got hold of you folks that was it, that whole alternative America, el deado meato, just like th’ Indians, sold it all to your real enemies, and even in 1970 dollars — it was way too cheap.”

Sharing Senna’s (not to mention Pynchon’s) caustic approach to the boob tube is Reboot, Justin Taylor’s densely entertaining satire of a culture wrecked by recycled intellectual property and TV-addled conspiracy thinking. Reboot is framed as the celebrity memoir of a former cast member on a fictional 2000s network drama, a gimmick that places it in a lineage of washed-up-star narratives. (Hollywood novels from Darcy O’Brien’s A Way of Life, Like Any Other to Elmore Leonard’s Get Shorty feature actors gone to seed, their drinking problems and terminated marriages serving as perennial reminders of the industry’s unkindness toward those who are, as Didion starchily puts it in Play It as It Lays, “not quite so immune to time.”) Here television itself has a faintly washed-up vibe: the novel follows its narrator, David, once a teen heartthrob in the O.C. mold, as he embarks on a quest to enlist his fellow has-beens in a reboot — arguably the exemplary aesthetic form of a stagnant culture industry circling the drain of its own IP. David, in any case, could use the money, because “Rev Beach streams didn’t pay like cable rerun residuals in days of yore.”

Even more than Colored Television, Reboot is preoccupied with the economics of television labor. The former Rev Beach crew (now representing varying points on the former-child-star damage scale, from “indie film darling and sex god” to “Q-pilled anti-vax activist”) discuss their work in a high-octane pop patois that resembles some reference-crammed TV fiction from the DeLillo era, but with a heightened emphasis on the financial risks and rewards of the biz:

I can’t pay rent or tour my jam band with Olivier Assayas’s esteem for me. And I never should have tried to produce and direct and star in a shot-for-shot remake of The King of Marvin Gardens. When you’re watching the movie, you think the hard role to live up to is Bruce Dern, so you take Nicholson to make things a little easier on yourself, but then you realize . . . And having James Franco as Dern was not a great call. Dano had said he’d do it, but James had already grown the mustache. Now Zendaya’s pissed at me because she did the Ellen Burstyn part, and obviously this movie is never seeing the light of day.

Like Senna, Taylor arranges for a literary type to encounter this content-zonked milieu. His writer figure appears, marbled notebook at least proverbially in hand, in the form of Molly, a TV blogger on the Rev Beach reboot beat. (Taylor, an astute observer of our most abject contemporary modes, nails the tone of most TV “criticism”: David, writes Molly, currently “does some voice acting for a video game that, unfortunately, I can’t tell you anything about because I am an adult woman who has had sex before.”) Like Jane, Molly lives in financial precarity and holds most of the TV industry in contempt (David’s work is “for stupid incel babies,” she submits), really aspiring to make use of her MFA in “speculative nonfiction” — a good joke about literary culture’s self-imposed marginalization, made better by Taylor’s own ongoing tours of duty through the MFA and small-magazine trenches.

The introduction of Molly, who interrupts the actors’ chatter about Guardians of the Galaxy to quote Coleridge from memory, makes clear that we have thus far been reading about pretty dumb people. But what might, in an older novel, have played out as a snobby war of the cultural worlds — intellectual writer versus witless actors, highbrow versus lowbrow, literature versus TV — instead begins to fold in on itself. Eventually it’s revealed that the “celebrity memoir” we’re reading has in fact been ghostwritten by Molly, which explains why our video-game-voice-actor narrator is always citing Woolf and Walter Benjamin, among other suspiciously Justin Taylor–approved figures. By the novel’s end we also learn that Molly has made some additional money by optioning one of her blog posts to the same production company rebooting Rev Beach. These are major financial Ws for an early-career critic with heaps of student debt — but Molly’s very nice deals, of course, arrive only thanks to the precise pop-cultural forces she’s scorned as the domain of “rich people get[ting] marginally richer by feeding us steaming heaps of nostalgia . . . while the fucking world burns.”

It occurred to me, watching Molly achieve all the TV-supplied opportunities that Jane (a spikier and more avant-garde writer, we suspect) badly wants and doesn’t get, that these two characters might illuminate two possible outcomes of the same grim dichotomy. On the one hand, a lethally rotten entertainment industrial complex, designed for stupid incel babies, that makes everything it touches dumber; on the other, a whole class of desperate people — writers — who have no choice but to reluctantly get close to it anyway.

Of course, reluctance isn’t the only attitude writers can have. Plenty of new TV novels, alas, betray a sincere admiration for television and the people who make it. In Porochista Khakpour’s Tehrangeles, for example, a reality TV deal offered to a Kardashianish family of ultrawealthy Iranian Angelenos might have been the premise for some degree of Senna-style culture-clash satire and trash-TV farce. Unfortunately the novel ends up siding with the culture industry: its would-be starlets are so toxic and horrible that the only diegetic voice of reason comes from the TV show’s unnamed producers, who observe the heiresses’ chaotic truth-booth confessions (vaccine denialism; pretending to be Italian) like a media-savvy Greek chorus. Celebrities are so crazy, the novel seems to say — thank God TV exists to demystify them!

Full-throated rapture for the idiot box pulses through Curtis Sittenfeld’s Romantic Comedy, another recent novel about the TV industry as seen from within. Sittenfeld dispenses with satire or critique altogether; her narrator, an aspiring journalist turned TV writer, feels only euphoric affection for the Saturday Night Live–like comedy show she writes for:

Hearing the famous [opening] line never failed to release something in me, some ecstasy that was like lifting the tab on a soda can, or maybe like having an orgasm, or maybe like knowing I’d have an orgasm in the near future — some excitement and anticipation and nervousness and delight .

TV as orgasm: this is the logical conclusion of a line on the first page of Colored Television, an observation about Jane and her husband’s weary evenings delivered with a sociological sting, that “movies were the new sex.”

Like the exiled literati in The Loved One, arriving from London to find to their dismay that “the Hollywood ground did not permit the larger refinements of cricket,” our writers are foreigners.

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Sittenfeld’s novel invites us to join in her plainly earnest love of television and its longest-running late-night sketch-comedy program. The first third of Romantic Comedy is structured almost as a manual, or I guess a literal TV guide, providing endlessly detailed timestamped directions — pitch meetings on Monday afternoon, table reads on Wednesday, and so on — for any wannabe Colin Josts among the reader base. On the third or fourth page of a description of the layout of SNL’s studios, I was struck by the degree to which Sittenfeld’s writing recalled the dishy, behind-the-scenes texture of a celebrity profile — or in this case a making-of hagiography like Jason Reitman’s Saturday Night. Perhaps this is one avenue for the new TV novel: not access journalism, but access fiction — literature that provides a peek behind the curtain at an industry that everyone, by design, looks at but few people see up close. What’s offered is access, as well, to celebrity — every new TV novel I’ve read has featured characters who are close to fame, although they rarely, in the present tense, possess it. The protagonists are faded stars, or they’re on the make; or else celebrity appears in a secondhand way, outsourced to some other character whose glamour is witnessed from afar by an observant outsider — usually, of course, a writer. Whether these outsiders’ observations are cutting or credulous in tone varies novel to novel, but what we get in any case is some partial exposure to the daily rhythms of the very famous in contemporary America: the first-class travel, the double-taking fans, the risk, always distantly present, of being filmed in public on someone’s smartphone.

Plus the real estate. (Reboot: “Celebrity is status. It can be won and lost. . . . Fame, on the other hand, is territory. It’s land.”) Inevitably these novels, even the most TV-loathing ones, bring us to the homes of stars, like the maps sold to tourists on Hollywood Boulevard. Described by the awestruck non-famous — by characters who are merely visiting, house-sitting, stopping by, passing through; who belong, in the end, to the renter class — the architecture of the very wealthy emerges as an allegory for the ambivalent, always-contingent attitude of the novelist who has found himself peeping into the TV industry only temporarily. In Patrick Nathan’s The Future Was Color — another recent entertainment-business novel, distinct in its focus on 1950s cinema rather than 2020s television — a B-list sci-fi screenwriter spends a week in Malibu at the seaside mansion of a Norma Desmond–like forgotten star, whose “house was a sprawling, Roman kind of thing meant to look ancient but was infested with appliances and electricity and carpet the color of cake frosting.” The novel’s communist protagonist (who will go on, like Reboot’s Molly, to write “essays and reviews” for “this or that little magazine or weekly”) is enchanted despite himself: “It was the kind of home — if the word wasn’t too obscene — that seduced even the most ethically resolute.”

Aversion to private property, seduction by the actual spoils of wealth: this dialectic, so suggestive of the literary writer who knows better than to hope for real financial success but does anyway, surges throughout these novels. Frequently the homes of the very rich are described with a deadpan, almost bitter style, like that of 21st-century literature’s most famous writer/house sitter, The Line of Beauty’s Nick Guest — the voice of someone whose yearning familiarity with the ruling-class object-world comes from reading about it, or seeing it on TV. Khakpour’s novel, set during Covid lockdown and thus unusually housebound in its setting, archly invokes a lurid kingdom of Instagrammy glitz signifiers: marble bedrooms, a “Grecian infinity pool,” the “beloved Guest Bedroom Five, with its hand-painted de Gournay chinoiserie wallpaper in a tranquil cornflower blue.” The borrowed screenwriter’s home in Colored Television, meanwhile, is

a special house, witty and whimsical, historically significant in the architecture world. Inside, the kitchen was so stocked with gadgets and fancy Scandinavian pans and gleaming counters, it almost made Jane want to cook.

Visiting LA, Reboot’s narrator stays in his (much more successful) former costar’s mansion, where the lawn

boasted not one but two Louise Bourgeois spiders, which, from this angle, seemed to be scheming against the silver Koons dog cowering in the shadow of a weathered steel Serra plate.

More steel in Romantic Comedy, which like Tehrangeles traps its wealthy characters at home during the pandemic — here’s Sittenfeld’s writer-narrator’s impression of a pop star’s Topanga Canyon estate:

The kitchen was also large and open, with a massive wooden island and a stainless steel refrigerator and a stainless steel range and an entire wall of floor-to-ceiling windows that revealed a long rectangular pool set in a patio of terra-cotta tiles. . . . The aesthetic was Casually Fancy Southwestern and The Color White.

Outside, inevitably, the sun shines over eucalyptus, traffic, ominous wind. But it’s the interiors that underscore the alienation of these literary writers who have found themselves on the wrong coast. Like the exiled literati in The Loved One, arriving from London to find to their dismay that “the Hollywood ground did not permit the larger refinements of cricket,” our writers are foreigners: to California’s shocking landscapes, to the machinations of showbiz, and to the ways of life — thrilling, resentment-inducing, always a little defamiliarized — made possible by inexcusable wealth.

Well, not everyone writes about wealth as though it’s exotic territory. Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s Long Island Compromise is a novel clearly written by someone who loves rich people, loves property, and above all loves television. More than any of the other new TV novelists, Brodesser-Akner has already successfully traversed the fiction-to-TV pipeline — in 2022 her first novel, the bestselling divorce dramedy Fleishman Is in Trouble, was adapted into an FX miniseries — and the new novel, warmly received by the kinds of book reviewers who presumably, as Senna writes, “stand around the water cooler talking about what they watched last night,” betrays itself as the work of an author who’s already gotten a taste of life as a screenwriter and showrunner, and who’s back for more where that came from. Its prose doesn’t just suggest future adaptative potential but appears to actively anticipate it. A period-piece beginning (Long Island, ’80s, wealthy Jewish enclave) has the texture of a series of establishing shots, with a level of descriptive specificity seemingly directed toward a set-dec department somewhere. When cars are mentioned, the make and model is named without fail. Era-specific breakfast cereals are labeled by brand, furniture is described down to its composite material (“laminate fiberglass”), and every room the omniscient narrator enters has a pleasing Mrs. Maisel–style colorscape, e.g.

In Walter and Bea Goldberg’s new avocado-colored kitchen, Bea closed the clunky door to her humongous new microwave, setting it for three minutes to cook from a recipe book titled Dinner Like Magic! Five Minutes With Your New Microwave (published by the company that made the microwave) and dialed her matching avocado-green long-corded landline phone to ask Marian Greenblatt . . . who was standing in her newer, mustard-colored kitchen on her own matching landline phone.

A little color here and there can’t hurt, of course — it’s right there in the title of Senna’s and Nathan’s far superior novels. And surely, in any case, the nostalgic details are part of the novel’s beach-read appeal. But as the gratuitous descriptions of fancy stuff pile up, one detects a commitment less to atmosphere or historical realism than to filmable mise-en-scène — not literature, but dramaturgy.

Long Island Compromise’s made-for-TV quality grows more acute as it drifts beyond discontinued appliances and turns toward character, dialogue, and action. On the very first page, while stepping into his “Cadillac Fleetwood Brougham,” the family patriarch gets kidnapped. A masked stranger grabs him, and then “someone else — there were two men — pulled the keys from the lock and settled himself into the driver’s seat.”

I can’t remember encountering a line like “there were two men” in a novel before. It seems to me like the point of fiction is to present information — the basic mechanics of who’s in a scene and what they’re doing — in more artful and controlled ways than that. But you could imagine how neatly the line would translate to a screenplay, KIDNAPPER 1 and KIDNAPPER 2 entering the frame.

After its endless cold open, Long Island Compromise leans into its TV-ness and turns into yet another novel about screenwriting. One of the kidnapped patriarch’s sons, Beamer, has, in the present, become a washed-up screenwriter with a series of big-budget action movies under his belt. His longtime writing partner, Charlie, has abandoned their dumb franchise to write a Succession-ish prestige cable series called Family Business, “about a family in Queens whose adult children were engaged in a constant fight for taking over the family factory.” The TV show — Charlie claims it offers “catharsis, drama, something new, something that advances on the form” — is the only real work of art to appear in the Long Island Compromise universe, the antithesis of the schlocky and incoherent action scripts that we watch Beamer write out over the course of a punishing 150-page bender. It’s striking how much aesthetic and even moral power the novel assigns to this fictional cable drama:

Family Business arrived right on time. It was the first show to synthesize everything that economists (like Charlie’s father, an econ professor at Brooklyn College) had been saying for years and show the actual front lines of the disappearance of the middle class. It consumed the culture and the Emmys for its first year on air; it launched ten thousand think pieces and even was responsible for some renewed labor organizing in the younger generations and at least one piece of legislation regarding inheritance taxes.

The breezy journalistic voice here — seemingly imported from Brodesser-Akner’s job as a New York Times Magazine features writer — obscures a wildly bullish fantasy about how people watch TV, and what TV can do. The fantasy resembles what Todd Gitlin, in his 1986 anthology Watching Television, called Reagan-era television’s native ideology: a “false populism which flatters the population for its good judgment and passes for democratic.” It’s a fantasy of TV as an effective vehicle for social critique and even change, in which a well-written, expensively made, bingeable drama can magically produce progressive policies — a fantasy wherein Orange Is the New Black led to prison abolition, or Succession got America to stop watching Fox News, or The White Lotus inspired a dictatorship of the proletariat. Perhaps it’s merely the extrapolation of a personal daydream: Long Island Compromise is itself about a trio of adult children dealing with their inheritances from the family factory — essentially the same premise, of course, as the fictitious Family Business. Is Brodesser-Akner describing the reception she imagines the Long Island Compromise TV show (currently in development with Apple TV+) receiving? The fantasy, in any case, gets one thing right. In it, television is all-powerful to a degree that fiction could never dream of.

Existing for now as merely a nationally bestselling work of fiction, Long Island Compromise illuminates a newish kind of literary territory: the novel that sounds like TV, that was clearly written in order to become TV, that constantly reminds us how great TV is. The TV novel, in this iteration, willfully inherits all the crappy formal impulses that used to get novelists so worked up about cable television — “the hackneyed plots, the unlikely dialogue, the Cheez-Whiz resolutions,” as DFW taxonomized — but packages it all with the contemporary sheen of “prestige.” If this emergent strain of fiction doesn’t quite endorse a wholesale inversion of the old assumptions (what if television is better than novels?), it at least scrambles them, pointing toward the possibility that TV has become more like fiction and fiction has become more like TV — and neither is very good.

But they are different, and as the best of the TV novels show, fiction can still do things TV can’t. Senna’s unyielding antagonism toward the entertainment industry and its rapacious, tokenizing, mediocrity-embracing logic, for instance — no television show in the world could honestly accommodate those critiques. Likewise Taylor’s baroquely unflattering pop-cultural inventions, which add to a critical ambition and experimental shagginess that networks and streamers don’t, by design, risk attempting. (That’s not to say that Reboot could never be adapted, but Taylor’s best jokes really are too literary to translate to the screen — one strains to imagine, for example, a TV version that could sustain the novel’s ongoing bit about a production of Cosmopolis: The Musical.) Television has, as its older critics and chroniclers understood, furnished us with a vast constellation of consequential junk, a nearly limitless stream of acrid signals that need decoding. The question for contemporary novelists is how to continue doing so in ways that don’t, in the end, make us wonder why we’re reading in the first place.