Network television might be set in its ways, but, if history is any indication, that won't be enough to stop a business model shake-up. Take the serialization of Charles Dickens’ Tale of Two Cities, for example. Installments of the novel appeared each week in a journal and readers had to wait to find out what happened. The serial novel was popular in those days for many reasons including low literacy rates (people paid others to read the chapters out loud to them) and the fact that it was cheaper to pay a little each week instead of paying up front for a whole novel. Tale of Two Cities was so popular that, towards the end of the novel, the public waited impatiently at the dock for the journal to be delivered from the publisher. There were even reports that people jumped into the water to swim to the ships that were carrying the final chapter.

Whether people really endangered their lives in order to be the first to read the end of a story or whether my high school English teacher, who first told me the legend, was just trying to get us to care about reading, the style of reading eventually changed. Now that literacy has grown and consumerism has taken on its current form, we rarely see serials, which have been very clearly replaced by novels (except a few exceptions by horror novelists Stephen King and John Saul). We can read a whole novel at whatever pace we choose. We are not at the mercy of the next shipment.

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Why Live Television Doesn't Stand a Chance Against Binge Watching