The Argument For TV as Literature
Television shares structural DNA with novels and plays. Both rely on narrative arcs, character development, dialogue, and thematic layering. When you watch a tightly scripted limited series like The Leftovers or Succession, you are consuming a form of serialized storytelling that uses many of the same literary techniques as a novel. The question of whether it counts as literature usually comes down to how strictly you define the term. I spent a decade teaching AP English before moving into curriculum design, and the debate over television in the classroom was never just academic. It had real consequences for student engagement and assessment.
Can Television Be Considered Literature And Taught In English Classes
The short answer is yes, with caveats. Longer answer follows. Literature, broadly defined, is any written work of imaginative or artistic merit. Television scripts are written works. They are also performed works, which adds a layer of direction, cinematography, and performance that a novel does not require. This difference matters. A scene in a novel is mediated entirely through prose. A scene in television is mediated through image, sound, performance, and editing as much as through dialogue. When you teach television alongside traditional texts, you need to account for that difference. Students who have never analyzed a script may treat a show the same way they treat a novel, focusing only on dialogue and plot. That misses half the material. The camera tells you things the characters do not say. The editing rhythm creates meaning. A lingering shot on an empty doorway can carry more thematic weight than three pages of exposition.
One practical workaround I developed involved having students transcribe a single three-minute scene line by line, then separately annotate the directorial choices: camera angles, cuts, lighting, blocking. You compare the two documents. The gap between what the dialogue says and what the scene actually shows is where the analysis lives. This method usually takes about twenty minutes per scene but forces students to engage with the text actively rather than passively watching.
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Common Pitfalls in the Classroom
Not every show works for this approach. A procedural like NCIS or Law and Order operates on a formula that deliberately avoids subtext. The dialogue is functional. The structure resets each episode. These shows are fine for media literacy, but they do not reward the kind of close reading you would apply to The Americans or Fleabag. Choosing the right text matters more than most teachers realize. Another issue is time. A good semester can cover maybe four to six full episodes if you are doing this carefully. That is not a lot of content. You cannot replace a novel with three episodes and claim equivalence. The tradeoff is efficiency, not coverage. You gain depth in visual literacy and modern cultural relevance. You lose breadth in canonical survey. Schools also vary wildly on copyright and licensing. Playing episodes in a licensed classroom under fair use is generally acceptable for educational purposes, but distributing copies to students or streaming them outside school hours crosses into gray territory. I learned this the hard way when a colleague got flagged by the district for uploading episodes to an unauthorized file-sharing drive. The workaround is simple: use library-licensed streaming platforms like Kanopy or Swank, or pull clips through the school's official streaming credentials. Budget for this. It is not free, and it should not be an afterthought.
Assessment and Standards Alignment
If you are including television in an English course, it helps to anchor it to established standards. Common Core ELA standards for reading literature and informational text, particularly the ones about analyzing how structure and style contribute to meaning, apply directly to television when you treat the script and the production as complementary texts. Anchor standards for media literacy also fit naturally here. Assessment design follows the same principle. Do not ask students to write about what happened in the episode. Ask them to analyze how a specific formal choice creates meaning. A prompt like "How does the editing pattern in the opening credits of Succession establish the show's central theme" forces a level of close reading that most students will not reach on their own. You may need to model this process first. Watch the scene together twice, once for content and once for form. Then scaffold the writing. I found that rubrics emphasizing textual evidence and formal analysis tend to work better than generic literature response rubrics. Television demands that students justify claims about visual and auditory choices, not just thematic ones. A rubric that separates evidence from analysis and gives weight to both tends to produce clearer grading and more honest student work.
Where This Approach Breaks Down
Television does not replace traditional literary study. It supplements it. Students who only encounter narrative through episodic television often struggle with the sustained attention required by a novel. The pacing of television is engineered to hold attention through regular resolution points and cliffhangers. Novels do not operate on that schedule. If you swap one for the other entirely, you may leave students underprepared for longer forms. Some programs also lack the textual stability that print provides. A script goes through drafts. The final version you screen may differ from what was originally written. If your course requires citation, use the published script when available, such as those in collections from Simon & Schuster or Faber, rather than relying solely on the aired version. This keeps your analysis grounded in the authored text. There is no universal list of suitable shows. The best selections depend on your course goals, your students' backgrounds, and the time you have. Television works best in English classes when it is treated as a text to be read, not as entertainment to be consumed. The shift in expectations changes everything about how students engage with it.
