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onscreen, not off.
    But another kind of televised intelligence is on the rise. Recall the cognitive benefits conventionally ascribed to reading: attention, patience, retention, the parsing of narrative threads. Over the last half century of television’s dominance over mass culture, programming on TV has steadily increased the demands it places on precisely these mental faculties. The nature of the medium is such that television will never improve its viewers’ skills at translating letters into meaning, and it may not activate the imagination in the same way that a purely textual form does. But for all the other modes of mental exercise associated with reading, television is growing increasingly rigorous. And the pace is accelerating—thanks to changes in the economics of the television business, and to changes in the technology we rely on to watch.
    This progressive trend alone would probably surprise someone who only read popular accounts of TV without watching any of it. But perhaps the most surprising thing is this: that the shows that have made the most demands on their audience have also turned out to be among the most lucrative in television history.
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    P UT ASIDE for a moment the question of why the marketplace is rewarding complexity, and focus first on the question of what this complexity looks like. It involves three primary elements: multiple threading, flashing arrows, and social networks.
    Multiple threading is the most acclaimed structural convention of modern television programming, which is ironic because it’s also the convention with the most debased pedigree. According to television lore, the age of multiple threads began with the arrival of Hill Street Blues in 1981, the Steven Bochco–created police drama invariably praised for its “gritty realism.” Watch an episode of Hill Street Blues side by side with any major drama from the preceding decades— Starsky and Hutch, for instance, or Dragnet —and the structural transformation will jump out at you. The earlier shows follow one or two lead characters, adhere to a single dominant plot, and reach a decisive conclusion at the end of the episode. Draw an outline of the narrative threads in almost every Dragnet episode and it will be a single line: from the initial crime scene, through the investigation, to the eventual cracking of the case. A typical Starsky and Hutch episode offers only the slightest variation on this linear formula: the introduction of a comic subplot that usually appears only at the tail ends of the episode, creating a structure that looks like the graph below. The vertical axis represents the number of individual threads, and the horizontal axis is time.

    Starsky and Hutch includes a few other twists: While both shows focus almost exclusively on a single narrative, Dragnet tells the story entirely from the perspective of the investigators. Starsky and Hutch, on the other hand, oscillates between the perspectives of the cops and that of the criminals. And while both shows adhere religiously to the principle of narrative self-containment—the plots begin and end in a single episode— Dragnet takes the principle to a further extreme, introducing the setting and main characters with Joe Friday’s famous voice-over in every episode.
    A Hill Street Blues episode complicates the picture in a number of profound ways. The narrative weaves together a collection of distinct strands—sometimes as many as ten, though at least half of the threads involve only a few quick scenes scattered through the episode. The number of primary characters—and not just bit parts—swells dramatically. And the episode has fuzzy borders: picking up one or two threads from previous episodes at the outset, and leaving one or two threads open at the end. Charted graphically, an average episode looks like this:

    Critics generally cite Hill Street Blues as the origin point of “serious drama” native