It's become commonplace lately to talk about the serial television show as the novelistic medium of the 21st century—The Wire as a modern-day Dickens novel, Mad Men our Cheever, Friday Night Lights our Steinbeck. One could continue down the line, with Lost as our Michael Crichton and Desperate Housewives our Jacqueline Susann, but the lowbrow serial has been entrenched for decades now; it's the higher-quality stuff that's new.
http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2012/06/girls-mad-men-and-the-future-of-tv-as-literature/258469/
This article really speaks to the influence these new shows have on us. They are important cultural artifacts. They are emotional, complex, and make the viewers think about a variety of different issues. These shows are the great novels of our day. They have achieved the same notoriety. It sites the HBO show Girls as though it were a collection of essays, which I felt appropriate