Not really in that case as fairly few novelists actually wrote with the feuilleton format in mind (Dickens, Eugène Sue and Dumas being some of the better known exceptions). Most novels published as feuilletons/serials (eg: Hugo's, Flaubert's, Balzac's in France) were just regular novels, split into installements by the buyer after they'd been written (and quite often, after or alongside regular publication).

The "bloating" had far more to do with the tastes and aesthetics of the time than with publication (if anything, the writers who didn't write for feuilletons and had more time to polish their stuff were even more descriptive, disgressive and long-winded than writers like Dumas or Dickens. Dumas for example used to make scene-by-scene plans of his books before he went to sell them to a newspaper. He wasn't forced to stretch or shorten, usually. ). Readers didn't like too many ellipses in a story, and as most did not travel much outside their city or village, nor had they access to any visual material, giving a lot of descriptions of how everything looked was how they wanted their novels to be.

The real shift of style in novels coincided with progress in other areas. People started travelling more, and be better educated, and not long after there were photographs, and cinema, and more and more illustrated books as printing those became cheaper. I suspect the sudden shift to much shorter books has a great deal to do with the economical crisis after 1929, followed up by the shortages during and after the two world wars that forced writers to make shorter stories, as it became more and more difficult to sell a big 19th century style novel to a publisher. Then those came back for a while, and now again for essentially economical reasons bookstores and publishers prefer shorter books.


For TV series, I'm not sure I agree with your points. The format has been around for almost as long as the medium, concurrently with the series of self-enclosed episodes. It fell out of fashion for a while - at least in the USA where the self-enclosed episode format really dominated for a while (when the TV offering became much larger - people had more choices - and before the spread of VCR made it possible to catch up) as the networks preferred shows that people could start watching at any time and could miss an episode of, but after a few serials were really successful it's back in fashion again and has been back for quite a while now.

The real change in writing style is that a lot of series are leaner/more focussed now. At first they were more like big budgeted soap operas, with many minor characters and side storylines. They're written more in a cinematographic style or a more novel-like style nowadays, but I don't see the writers still "struggling" much with that (except quite a few had to adapt to the shorter seasons to develop a story - most shows did so simply by focussing more on main storylines, to the new balance between action and drama on screen (in some shows, not in all genres) and the fact on many networks the shows have gotten shorter over the years to fit in more advertising - and so on).