It's the world of the singular voice, too, whereas network television is full of narrative compromise.
Others, such as Jonathan Franzen, began to wonder if some compromise with older narrative conventions might not be the price you had to pay to bring the country into focus.
Either of these approaches could compromise the curriculum narrative of a patient considering genetic testing, which is followed by "performing" the genetic test, using DNA and protein alignments to identify mutations, and then mapping the mutations to the protein structure.
And with the businessman-turnaround artist narrative compromised, it became much easier for Romney's rivals to turn the focus to his moderate past and long list of flip-flops.
Mr. Price acknowledged that writing commercial-break cliffhangers and negotiating narrative compromises with network executives took some getting used to: "What I didn't want is a show where everybody is a hero every two seconds, and shots are fired every three seconds.
"These inclusions," one judge wrote, "compromise the state's narrative as a careful steward of public funds".
According to its own myth, only the DUP was able to change the terms of political trade from the Trimble era by calling the IRA's bluff when Mr Blair had refused to do so.Nor does it fit in with Mr Paisley's own personal narrative to compromise because of the threat to stop the pay cheques.
It's an elliptical slice of barely-glimpsed life, unfolding at its own pace, striking no compromises with drama or narrative convention.
But compromise with the old narratives was more overt in Serbia's Srebrenica resolution: by taking pains to avoid the word genocide, the resolution was widely interpreted in Bosnia as a further affront to the victims and a meaningless gesture.
That's a viable emotional basis on which to erect a democratic historical art, enriching a public's sense of a particular urban location and its narrative: a non-heroic, compromise solution, you might say, but in a context where compromise is exactly appropriate.
