How do you break down "The Godfather" into 10-13 chunks to show over the course of three to four months? This evolution of short-season TV shows that seems to have blurred the line between "series" and "mini-series" appears to have expanded the movie into a giant story. This is what to the surprising (to me, anyway) success of "Game of Thrones." A novel far too long and dense to be properly adapted into a movie was very well adapted into a TV show (and as a fan of the Godfather novel, I am now forced to wonder what could have been if they had been able to use the cable TV season format, rather than limit it to the truncated film adaptation, that is nonetheless extremely long for a feature film). However, the key point here is that now that they have finally found the right visual format to showcase a decent-sized novel, they are just doing what has already been done for a couple of years - tell a dense, character-and-plot-driven story with a full, drawn-out treatment, but as a result, we have to look at these TV seasons as a complete work, rather than a collection of individual stories.

A season of "Modern Family," one of the few network shows I still follow as closely as the shows I discuss here, seems like an anthology of humorous short stories, compared to the series of novels that are the seasons of Sons of Anarchy and Dexter. But you can't read a novel in bite-size chunks as stand-alone works. How satisfied would GRRM or RJ readers have been with a monthly novel detailing a couple of events of the greater stories of their novels? Actually, given some of the former's delays, they might have been happier, but the chopping of the latest novels of each writer's series into more than one book has definitely had an adverse effect on the creative success (and by the torpor of the WoTMB, the fan interest as well) of those works. ToM & AFfC might have been the worst individual books of their respective series, but with each one, there is some hope for the overall product, given the thematic connections visible with tGS & DWD, respectively. That is, I believe the dilemma for the individual episodes of the modern cable TV show (Or at least the ones on FX & the premium networks, not the USA, SyFy & TBS fare which imitates the patterns of network programing much more closely). We are no longer getting a series of stories with a thematic connection or unity, we are getting bits and pieces of a greater work, which are too interdependent to fully appreciate on their own. Watching them as a whole on DVD or TiVoing them until the end of the season might very well be the solution to properly experiencing the story.