The show, which aired on Rai 3, a channel of RAI, Italy’s national public broadcasting company, earned only a modest 500,000 average viewers per episode. But it was popular on social networks and garnered an unusual amount of international press (admittedly, hardly all positive) for an Italian production. The Italian literati gleefully panned “Masterpiece” from its debut, arguing that its premise made a mockery of the writers’ craft: The solitary, often banal process can’t be turned into “challenges” or sound bites, they said. And of course, they’re right. But these criticisms miss the bigger picture: In post-Berlusconi Italy, maybe it will take a TV show to make books cool again.

Today, on average, Italians watch TV for over four hours a day; about one-third have made at least one application to a televised quiz show. Italy’s rate of TV viewership is among the highest globally, behind that of the United States. But America is also by far the world’s largest national book market, by publishers’ revenues. In Italy in 2013, according to the country’s National Institute of Statistics, 57 percent of the population hadn’t read one book for nonacademic or nonprofessional reasons. Some 10 percent of Italian households did not own a single book. According to the 2013 Survey of Adult Skills by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, nearly 70 percent of the country of Dante and di Lampedusa is unable to “understand and respond appropriately to dense or lengthy texts.”

At the government level, however, no steps are being taken to promote a literary culture. Italy’s culture budget was cut by over 50 percent between 2000 and 2011, particularly following the economic crisis, when arts funding was first on the government chopping block. Programs like France’s National Book Center, which awards grants to writers who have published at least one book, and Missions Stendhal, which helps young authors travel abroad, are glaringly absent. Instead, Italians have television.

In its early days, TV played a significant, unifying role in a country with deep but diverse cultural pockets and a short political history. Says Aldo Grasso, a professor of radio and television history at Catholic University in Milan, “Since its birth, television was the main source of information and knowledge for most Italians.”

In the 1960s, when widely divergent Italian dialects predominated, TV helped popularize an “official” version of the language. A show called “It’s Never Too Late” taught basic literacy, hosted by a schoolteacher and supported by the Ministry of Public Education. The program followed the national elementary school curriculum and was augmented by books and materials published by RAI.