Whatever next? How plot grips us, from Dickens to Line of Duty

How do the best stories work? John Mullan examines what today’s TV dramatists can learn from the masters of the trade

How we love plots – and how we look down our noses at them. Our plot hunger can be measured by the current provision of lavish, plot-heavy TV drama. First there were all those Scandi-noir murder mysteries. Now the BBC’s prime Sunday night slot is given over to one elaborately plotted thriller (Undercover) after another (The Night Manager). No longer satisfied with the mere whodunnit, the prime-time audience can satisfy its plot hunger with the elaborate conspiracy narrative of the BBC’s Line of Duty or the psychological indeterminacy of ITV’s Marcella (is the detective herself a killer?).

TV drama, especially the one-off mini-series, is where we can go for the special pleasures of plot. Yet plot lovers who are also novel readers might think that these are guilty pleasures. In the contemporary novel, it sometimes seems that the delights of plot have been contracted out to genre fiction – to detective novels, thrillers, chick lit or spy stories. In the Victorian age, novelists such as Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins treated the compulsive powers of plotting as fiction’s strongest resource. The most literary novelists respected the engrossing powers of plot: even George Eliot’s Middlemarch has at its heart a secret tale of seduction, larceny and hidden identity waiting to be uncovered. Yet nowadays we admit the enjoyment of plot as if it were a low kind of self-indulgence – irresistible but ignoble. It is what makes a Robert Harris novel unputdownable, but not what we any longer expect of serious fiction.

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