Is TV Drama the New Novel?

Riffing on a remark made by Jane Tranter, the BBC’s head of fiction, at a recent Royal Television Society event, The Guardian’s Leigh Holmwood asked the very interesting question:

Should TV drama be taken as seriously as other forms of more ‘high art’? And has it really supplanted the novel as the “narrative of our times”?

Even more intriguing than the question were some of the answers Holmwood received such as this one:

I’m not convinced. Television is culturally extremely important but to say the TV drama has supplanted the novel as the “narrative of our times” is perhaps a step too far. The novel is still incredibly important – book sales are high and the novel has great influence over other art forms, in a way that television does not.

At first blush this sounds right, but even in the UK, book sales are not as high as all that. And as much as they would like to deny it, the type of books that are actually selling are of no greater intellectual weight than what passes over bookseller counters in the States: James Patterson potboilers, bodice-rippers and party-political screeds, mostly. A far more telling answer is one of the most recent on The Guardian page:

Last time I had a long flight, I didn’t take along a book. I took series one of The West Wing to watch on an iPod. Drama – as proven by The Sopranos, The Wire, and even pulp TV ‘airport’ fiction such as Lost and 24, can be every bit as engaging as a good book, and – thanks to ongoing narratives – can last a lifetime (or seven seasons…)

What say you?