The biggest thing I like about TV and movies today is that studios have realized that they can tell big, long stories. The perfect example is the Lord of the Rings trilogy. But there are a number of examples of longer story telling on TV. Because of DVD sales, TV shows are no longer forced into 21 or 42 minute episodes. Now we have shows like 24, The Wire, Veronica Mars, and Prison Break that tell the stories that don’t fit into nice 42 minute bundles (I would have mentioned Lost, but Lost is an example of a show that has forgotten that it actually needs to tell a larger story).

I have been dreaming of a TV version of my second favorite fantasy epic of all time–George R.R. Martin’s “A Song of Ice and Fire.” It turns that out HBO just optioned the rights to the series. I’m pretty excited about that. I really hope it does well because it would provide more opportunities for good long-running story telling.

Martin is not a perfect writer. He needs an editor to cut down his books by a few hundred pages, but he is good. Because he tends to be long-winded and because he includes too many extraneous story lines, it is quite possible that a TV series would be better than the books.