Today’s shows are qualitatively different from older, sophisticated shows like “St. Elsewhere” or “Hill Street Blues” or “thirtysomething,” all of which, though deftly written, were relatively formulaic. A “Hill Street Blues” episode inevitably ended with a slow cop car chase around the same alley that eventually brought the criminal element to justice.

The conflicts presented in “thirtysomething,” one of the best shows of the late 1980s and early ’90s, were even less remarkable: in one episode, for example, the pretty boomer mom Hope Steadman struggled to find a good-enough nanny for her infant daughter. Story lines sometimes stretched beyond a single episode but, for the most part, dramas were neatly resolved in the allotted time slot. Madcap antics sometimes arose (an “L.A. Law” episode involved a member of the ensemble cast in a gorilla suit) but these were incidental to the central action.

The high-octane, multilayered story lines that drive today’s best television represent one side of an opposition posed by Lev Manovich, a scholar at the City University of New York Graduate Center: narrative versus database. Database logic (that of the computer archive) tends to lack beginnings or endings, and thematic developments are not necessarily sequential. Professor Manovich has written that the database is simply a collection of individual items in which “every item has the same significance as any other.” One bit of information stands on equal footing with every other bit of information. Information is gathered, without a fixed order.

IN the first years of the new century, television seemed to be looking to find a competitive niche for itself in a media world increasingly dominated by the database logic of the Web. “Lost,” “Heroes” and other shows of this era (and films like “Babel” and “Traffic”) offered what I call “hyperlink television” and “hyperlink cinema.” Their “sideways” and flashback-laden narratives involved constant cutting back and forth among disparate characters, reflective of an emerging culture of sensory as well as existential multitasking. TV shows, like the rest of the world, started to operate at a frenetic pace.

Those shows made sense to Web-savvy audiences alive to the fun of skipping back and forth from one thread to the next, and to random-seeming series of nonlinear sequences directed mostly by whim, taste and mood.