The Quiet Hierarchy of Stories

 I like watching television.

It is a small preference, but one that often feels out of place in how intellectual lives are described. Reading fits easily into those descriptions. Television rarely does.

Public conversations about thinking tend to orbit books. Writers, academics, and public figures speak about what they are reading, what shaped them, and what sits by their bedside. Reading becomes shorthand for seriousness, discipline, and depth. Television appears differently, if at all. When mentioned, it is often softened or qualified. Something was watched casually. Something done only when tired.

And yet, many of our most shared cultural experiences now arrive through screens.

We have watched films and series that unsettled us, stayed with us, and shaped how we spoke to one another. Many people watched The Kashmir Files not as background entertainment, but as a moment of reckoning. It provoked discomfort, argument, silence, and speech. It travelled widely because it was accessible, not because it was shallow.

We watched Adolescence and recognised the quiet weight of growing up, loneliness, and vulnerability. Its power lay in what it did not overexplain. It trusted the viewer to sit with unease.

Long-form television has also given us characters whose complexity unfolded slowly, demanding patience rather than passive consumption. In Breaking Bad, Walter White’s transformation was not dramatic in a single moment. It was incremental, rationalised, and almost intimate. Viewers stayed not for spectacle, but to witness how justification slowly replaces conscience.

In Ozark, the tension often lived in silence. In Wendy Byrde’s calculated choices. In Marty’s moral numbing. In the way, survival reshaped relationships more than violence ever did. These were not simple stories. They were sustained engagements with power, fear, compromise, and consequence.

What often goes unnoticed is that this depth is not new. It has simply travelled.

Shakespeare’s works have long been treated as the pinnacle of literary seriousness. But for many contemporary viewers, the emotional and moral force of those plays arrived through cinema, particularly through Vishal Bhardwaj’s adaptations.
Maqbool, Omkara, and Haider carried the core of William Shakespeare into contemporary political and emotional landscapes. Ambition, betrayal, guilt, grief. The medium changed. The complexity did not.

The same is true of adaptations more broadly. Many people found it easier to watch The White Tiger than to read The White Tiger. The critique of power, class, and moral compromise remained sharp. Only the doorway into the story shifted.

This complicates the neat division we often make between reading and watching.

Reading carries an older cultural weight. It belongs to a time when access to books was limited and therefore revered. Moving images arrived later, shaped by ideas of mass access and popular consumption. Even as the medium has evolved, those associations linger. One form of leisure is easy to claim publicly. The other often remains private.

I read constantly. Most of it is tied to work. Research, writing, preparation, evaluation. Reading structures my days and shapes my thinking. It also accumulates. By evening, my mind often wants a different kind of engagement. Something immersive rather than effortful. Something that allows attention without demand.

So I watch television.

What interests me is not the choice itself, but how selectively we speak about it. Some forms of attention are praised because they resemble work. Others are quietly enjoyed, but rarely named.

We are fluent in talking about how we think.
We are far less comfortable speaking honestly about how we rest.

I sometimes wonder what our idea of seriousness would look like if we allowed both to coexist without explanation.

Maybe the real hierarchy is not between books and screens, but between the kinds of attention we allow ourselves to acknowledge in public.