This is the golden age of TV drama - if you can find it

CULTURE SHOCK:Television continues to thrive, but multi-channel viewing, downloading and DVDs have dispersed its old audience

CULTURE IS always going to hell in a handcart. The golden age is always long ago. But we are living, right now, through the golden age of the television drama series. (Or, to be frank, of American TV drama: there hasn't been a great British series since Our Friends in the Northor a great European one since Heimat.) There have been superb American shows in the past, and there is a lot of dross now. Yet when cultural historians look back on our time, they will see it as the age of The Sopranos, The Wire, Mad Men, Curb Your Enthusiasmand other brilliant shows. They will say that this was the era when TV drama matched and then surpassed the production values and narrative skill of the movies and the social complexity of the classical novel.

And yet, there is a profound irony in this flowering of the form. TV drama’s golden age is coinciding with the collapse of TV itself as a public, communal medium. Production is excelling; consumption is fragmenting. Just as writers and producers have really got the hang of creating large-scale public narratives in which social values are tested and questioned, the watching of TV drama is becoming a much more private, atomised experience.

There was a time when drama series were public rituals that shaped the week's conversations and could even aspire to a profound influence on public policy. Cathy Come Homemade homelessness an urgent political issue. The Riordanswas a common point of reference in Irish culture. Organisers learned to cancel events that clashed with The Forsythe Saga because everyone would be watching it. The Boys from the Blackstuffwas referenced in chants on the football terraces. We know that this time is over and is never coming back. Multi-channel viewing, ease of recording, internet downloads and streams, and DVD box sets have broken forever the idea of millions of people watching the same thing together for the first time.

But the consequences of this inescapable reality are being made much more profound by the gutlessness and lack of imagin- ation of those who really run TV stations – the schedulers. They have simply given up on the idea of trying to make even the best dramas communal events. Shows that should be mainstream viewing are now confined to graveyard slots on the assumption that almost no one will want to watch them as and when they are broadcast. As a result, even some really great drama struggles to find a responsive audience.

Think, for example, of what is by far the best depiction of the Iraq war, David Simon's Generation Kill. No station in Ireland or Britain had the guts to make it what it would have been a decade ago – a flagship, prime time series. (Channel 4 eventually and unenthusiastically screened it in an 11.20pm slot.) The most egregious current example of this loss of nerve is Vince Gilligan's Breaking Bad. With the possible exception of Mad Men(and with Simon's new series Tremejust beginning), it is easily the best drama on television at the moment. From a rather hackney- ed premise – middle-aged man discovers that he is dying of cancer – it spins out into a gripping exploration of the borderlands between decency and evil, crime and normality, suburbia and savagery.

The central character, Walter White, is an overqualified high-school chemistry teacher in Albuquerque. Faced with his imminent demise and his miserable public salary and pension, he launches himself into a secret life of cooking high-grade crystal meth.

The journey on which he embarks is both classically tragic (evil done for good motives) and darkly, surreally funny (innocent abroad and out of his depth). The combination of a tight, narrow story – there is a small core of continuous central characters and the action is strictly sequential – with this moral complexity makes for a drama that is as accessible as it is richly textured.

Breaking Bad, now in its third season in the US, has been showered with Emmy awards and critical acclaim. There is wide recognition that Bryan Cranston (best known as Hal in Malcolm in the Middle) gives, as Walter, one of the great screen performances of our time.

He plots a steady course through horror and farce, remains completely convincing as his deceptions become steadily more outlandish, and becomes ever more moving as each necessary cruelty strips away another layer of his self-respect.

Breaking Badis actually quite mainstream. It has a white, middle-class family at its centre. It does not have the byzantine narrative complexity and street rawness of The Wireor the relentless violence, sex and profanity of The Sopranos. It is perfect 10pm midweek viewing. So how come very few people have seen it? How come even Amazon doesn't stock the box set of the second series? (I ended up getting it from a dealer in Australia – crystal meth might have been easier to source.) Because TV schedulers have decided that large audiences are not capable of sticking with anything edgy.

If it's not Desperate Housewives– if, like Breaking Bad, it begins with a middle-aged man in his underpants in the desert – it's strictly for the insomniacs.

There’s a double loss here. The public misses out on one of the joys of a great TV series – talking about it. You can’t discuss an episode even with those who are actually interested in the show because (a) they have recorded it to watch sometime; (b) they’ve already watched the entire thing on an illegal download or (c) they’re planning to buy the box set.

But there’s also a loss for the TV stations. By losing their nerve and simply going with the flow of audience fragmentation, they are abandoning, without a fight, their old role as curators of a large part of popular culture. Any institution that loses contact with the cutting edge of the form on which it feeds is moribund. The golden age of TV drama may herald the death of TV.