Adam Gopnik reflects on the reason for our obsession with long - form television series and sees a link to the current brevity of all our other forms of discourse. "As communication, public and political and spiritual, becomes ever more condensed - as newspapers close and are replaced exclusively with Instagram feeds, as texting becomes ever more enciphered and as the demotic slang of teens, which we will all speak sooner or later, becomes ever more abbreviated then we can expect, or dread, ever longer compensatory popular narratives." Producer: Sheila Cook.