TV and Books

I've ben reading Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier. It's a fantastic book, definitely one in the loooong line of English and American naturalist/realistic books of the late nineteenth and twentieth century about flimsy, uncertain little girls who dream of stepping up into the upper class and do due to marrying into this higher society, and struggle to succeed merely by being blank, by having no affect and allowing other people to project the persona they wish to see onto her.
Rebecca is an interesting twist, though. From the very first sentence, the reader is put into the position of wondering just what is the narrator talking about? She very, very gradually gives us one clue after the last that lets us gradually begin to understand what the plot is and wonder what we don't yet know. Information is made available to us tantalizingly slowly, but just enough is fed to us to make us interested for more.
Lately I've been really impressed with the way TV shows keep the delicate balancing act of a complicated and sometimes convoluted plot in the air, each ball leaping from one hand to the next in a parabolic arc, and really disappointed in modern novels' ability to do the same thing. The novels I've read lately hve been sort of pseudo-intellectual exercises in examining themes that mdoern reviwers say are important, whereas some fo the shows I've been watchign have actually subtlely examined the sam themes, all the while weaving them into complicaed, soap-operatic plots involving multiple characters with realistically developed motivatiosn (all those things they told us were bourgeois when we were in college). For instance, every idea about race ad colnialism that The Darling by Russell Banks crammed own our throats, Battlestar Galactica handled rather deftly. Maybe my expectations of literature are unrealistically high and mine of TV are abnormally low; I'm not sure.