[Televisionary]

Happy birthday, Mr. Dickens. Over at The Daily Beast, we're celebrating Charles Dickens’s 200th birthday. You can read my latest feature, entitled "Happy Birthday, Charles Dickens! Lost, NCIS, Big Love, Veep Writers on His Legacy," in which I talk to TV auteurs including Lost 's Carlton Cuse and Damon Lindelof, The Thick of It and Veep creator Armando Iannucci, NCIS 's Gary Glasberg, and others as they reflect on how Dickens’s work has influenced storytelling on television. Today marks the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Dickens (1812–1870), but the popularity of the writer of such novels as Great Expectations, Bleak House, A Tale of Two Cities, and David Copperfield—to name but a few of his immortal works—hasn’t diminished in the time since his death. In the pantheon of great English-language novelists, Dickens reigns supreme for a number of reasons. He was a master storyteller who created unforgettable characters—a menagerie that included th