What Happened to Great Stories? – What TV and Literature Should Learn from Each Other
Saturday October 26 at 12:00 pm - 1:30 pm EDT
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Hollywood screenwriter Michael Sonnenschein, The Common Reader essayist, literary critic, and Second Act: What Late Bloomers Can Tell You About Success and Reinventing Your Life writer Henry Oliver, and former screenwriter-playwright and now Interintellect founder-CEO Anna Gát lead a discussion on whether humans have lost their storytelling ability thanks to bitesize phone videos and binge-watching streaming services, or instead we’re living in a Renaissance of great TV and narrative actually. Join us!
“I loved almost every minute of ‘Succession’, but in a different way than I love every page of ‘Pale Fire’ or every line of ‘Hamlet’ (except for the ones I don’t really understand). I think television shows, ‘prestige’ or otherwise, are often ill-served by both their boosters and detractors, who make a category error in trying to find commonalities with literary forms which don’t really pertain. Television isn’t literature; it’s its own (sometimes great, sometimes not) thing that exists in its own aesthetic world, with particular potential creative successes and failures.” – Michael Sonnenschein
“The fact that audiences didn’t want the show to end, despite the title, is part of the problem: drama resolves; Netflix keeps streaming. Audiences don’t want art, they want something they can keep watching. This is why, despite the fact that so many successful playwrights worked on Succession, the episodes I watched felt generic, predictable, and familiar.” – Henry Oliver, The Common Reader
- Exclusive Q&A with Michael Sonnenschein AB '94
- How to Dress Like a TV Writer By Michael Sonnenschein
- Trivialising ourselves to death by Henry Oliver
- The Social Network Was The Most Important Movie of All Time by Byrne Hobart
- Why Novels are a Richer Experience than Movies by Erik Hoel
- Image Without a Metaphor by Vicky Osterweil
