Stay tuned? Americans ought to spend as much time catching up on real-life cliffhangers as they do on their favorite TV shows.

NINETEENTH-CENTURY NEWSPAPERS INVENTED the serial to boost their sales. Customers dying to know what had happened to the heroes and villains in Charles Dickens' latest comedy or Arthur Conan Doyle's most recent mystery would rush out to the newsstand and snatch up the current issue of the Strand or Times. Suddenly readers were consuming their fiction in a string of bite-sized morsels, each installment salted with a tasty cliffhanger that left them hungry for more.

A half a century later Hollywood cashed in on the appetite for serials, and soon millions of Americans were pouring into the local Roxy every weekend to catch the Saturday matinee, mostly in hopes of finding out what had happened to Cowboy Rex or Captain X in the latest chapter of their favorite western or sci-fi serial. How, spellbound audiences wondered, would our daring hero extricate himself from the fatal trap of last week's cliffhanger?

Television also has relied on serials, though mostly to fill its daytime schedule with soaps like Days of Our Lives and General Hospital. Primetime dramas tended to tell a new and different story each week, letting viewers catch an episode of their favorite cop or doc show without needing to know what had happened the week before. And as syndication and reruns grew to dominate the cable menu, viewers surfing the channels preferred catching stray episodes of programs like Law & Order because you never needed to know or care what had happened to these cops or lawyers in a previous show.

Some serials did make it into primetime. There were campy soaps like Dallas and Dynasty and classier programs like Upstairs, Downstairs and Middlemarch. And Ken Burns gave us those miniseries masterpieces The Civil War, Baseball, and JAZZ. Still, until recently, Americans have preferred their primetime TV dramas in separate, capsulated narratives that you can consume in an hour or two.

THAT STARTED TO CHANGE WITH THE SOPRANOS. MILLIONS OF viewers without HBO got tired of begging their neighbors and in-laws to tape the murderous misadventures of Tony and friends, and soon video stores were renting DVDs of seasons 1 through 5. Before you could say "badabing," video clerks were stocking the shelves with half a dozen other HBO serials. The Sopranos begat Band of Brothers, Six Feet Under, Oz, and Deadwood. Then Fox brought out 24, with Keifer Sutherland updating the Saturday matinee thriller, and ABC's Lost began tracking the adventures of folks stuck on a desert isle without cable.

This fall the rising demand for serials was met by new primetime shows like Jericho, the tale of a Midwestern town reeling from a nuclear attack, and Kidnapped, the story of a wealthy family trying to get their son back from kidnappers. It's almost guaranteed each of these episodes will end with a cliffhanger.

Folks renting these new TV serials are looking for the same sort of pleasure we find when we're stretched out on the sand with a whale-sized blockbuster by James Patterson or Danielle Steele. Like 19th-century readers curling up with one of Dickens' novels, we enjoy the pleasures of the long and complex narrative. The Sopranos and Deadwood are hardly War and Peace, but the sudden popularity of these shows (and the Harry Potter tales) proves we still have a taste for tales that are more than snacks.

IT SEEMS IRONIC WE SHOULD BE RECAPTURING AN APPETITE for long narrative fiction just when we seem unable to follow any story in the real world that can't be reported in a single broadcast. Our news and civic attention spans have shrunk to bite-sized pieces, and rollercoaster polls suggest the American public can't hold onto a story for more than one or two press cycles.

We were stunned when White House claims about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction proved to be lies, but began to jump as soon as the president started crying wolf about Iran. We were shocked when photos of Abu Ghraib splashed all over the Internet, but now listen calmly as our vice president explains the value of abusing suspects held in secret CIA prisons. Hurricane Katrina came, and we were enraged, and our reporters shocked--some even suggested there may be global warming. And then it was gone, and we are back to politics as usual. It is as if there has been a national outbreak of Alzheimer's.

Culture critic Neil Postman argued in Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (Penguin) that Americans are losing our ability to track the big stories, and that this loss of long-term memory makes us poor citizens and great dupes. So, too, Al Gore has warned that our shortened attention span keeps us from seeing the most important (and slowest moving) story of our lives: global warming. And for those of us who remember high school, George Orwell's 1984 offers a scathing critique of what happens in a society when the citizenry cannot remember the stories that ran in the press six months or a year ago.

But Postman and Gore and Orwell are not the first prophets or social critics to point out the moral and political problems of short attention spans and weak memories. The author of Deuteronomy tells his audience 47 times that they need to "remember" the story of their liberation from slavery so they will not enslave others. And the worst sinners chastised by the prophets are those who have forgotten that they, too, were once widows and orphans and aliens.

PERHAPS THE RETURN OF THE SERIAL WILL HELP us recover our appetite for the big, complex, and challenging stories in politics, economics, religion, and the environment. Perhaps the return of the serial will help us recover and hone our civic attention spans and memories. Perhaps it could even remind us to keep an eye out for the next cliff.

By PATRICK McCORMICK, professor of Christian ethics at Gonzaga University in Spokane, Washington.