In Serial Killers, Steve Sailer discusses the precursors to modern serial dramas like Mad Men:
In its time, thirtysomething was probably the best written and certainly the most realistic show on television (my twentysomething new bride and I watched it wide-eyed as we learned what was in store for us). For a few years, it had a limited but lucrative yupscale demographic enthralled over whether Michael and Hope would be able to make their marriage work and other questions that seemed a lot more interesting at the time than they do now. (At this point, I can mostly just remember Miles Drentell, the ruthless Sun Tzu-quoting CEO of the trendy ad agency where Michael worked.)The downside of “And then what happens?” is that the answer usually turns out to be “A whole bunch of stuff.” While satisfying at the time, serials tend to be consumable only once. For example, although thirtysomething was immediately influential within the entertainment industry, it was almost forgotten by the public once its run was over in 1991. (It wasn’t even released on DVD until this year).
A reaches back to some even earlier precursors to such “novelistic” shows — actual novels:
Novelists have given up publishing their works in installments, even though that was hugely profitable for numerous 19th Century novelists, such as Charles Dickens. His books were typically serialized in 20 monthly installments of 32 pages of text and 16 pages of advertising. The protracted death of Little Nell in Dickens’ serialization of The Old Curiosity Shop turned into an ongoing international tragedy. At New York’s piers in 1841, American fans would shout out to docking boats from England, “Is Little Nell alive?”Tom Wolfe, who had long denounced 20th-century literary fiction for not showing us The Way We Live Now (an Anthony Trollope novel that was, of course, serialized), published his first novel, The Bonfire of the Vanities, in 27 installments in Rolling Stone in 1984–1985. Jan Wenner paid him $200,000 for the rights, and the pressure forced the vastly ambitious Wolfe past the writer’s block he had developed after spending years hinting broadly that one of these days he was going to show all living novelists how fiction should be written.
Unfortunately, Bonfire didn’t make much of a splash in Rolling Stone … because it wasn’t very good. It was a first draft, and Wolfe’s first drafts turned out not to be as good as Dickens’s had been. Moreover, there are obvious problems inherent in going public with the beginning before you’ve written the ending. (This has been a particular conundrum for American TV serial dramas because the writers don’t even know how many years the show will run. Thus, they tend to start strong and peter out. In Britain, however, fixed durations serials are more common.)
Wolfe then rewrote Bonfire after doing the additional research necessary to change his protagonist’s career from Wolfe’s lazy initial choice — writer — to a much more timely and under-publicized one — bond-trader. Revised, Bonfire became a huge bestseller. A long string of subsequent real-life incidents all the way up through the Duke lacrosse rape hoax that seem like plot twists out of Wolfe’s tale of the hunt for “the Great White Defendant” has cemented its status as the Great American Novel of the 1980s.