Book to TV adaptations

[jo]

We had a discussion last year asking if you would rather have your favorite book adapted as a long-running TV series or a mini series. This is a different question about book to TV adaptations.

A new series, Rebus, just started on the BBC this weekend that is an adaptation of the Ian Rankin Detective Rebus series of novels. When the adaptation was announced 2-3 years ago, it was made clear that this was going to be more of a re-imagining of the Rebus series rather than a faithful adaptation of each book. I've watched the first two episodes now and this is certain the case. I read the Guardian's review of the series, and then read through the reader comments. Most were fairly negative because "it wasn't like the books" -- too many things had been "re-imagined" for a lot of book fans. People who hadn't read the books were more positive about it. (For the record, I've read all of the Rebus novels and I'm really enjoying the TV series so far.)

This is the age-old dilemma when it comes to adapting a book for TV (or even film). Are you a purist -- where the adaptation has to mirror the source material as closely as possible? Do you refuse to watch any adaptation of a fave book because you're sure they'll ruin it? If plot-wise, the adaptation is fairly faithful, but the casting deviates from the book -- e.g. certain characters are either a different gender or race/ethnicity from their book counterparts, or maybe the actor(s) just don't look at all like how you pictured them -- does that put you off too much? How flexible are you when it comes to adaptations -- is it enough if they capture the spirit of the characters and the novels, even if the series takes a fair bit of liberty with the rest of it? Where do you draw the line?

Comments

Great topic!

[8hyenas]

I like it when it's more "inspired by" because then it's like getting a little more of the source material.

If I haven't read the books (Like with The Big Door Prize) I feel like shows based off books tend to have a richer backstory and the comfort of knowing the story/world is completed in case of cancellation. Also there are some genres of books I don't read at all and find dull (murder mysteries) but love the tv adaptations.

I guess my least favorite scenario is a tv show faithfully following a book I've read, I just don't see the point of watching if I already know what's going to happen. The same way I don't like spoilers for shows. I can retract this if I last read the book decades ago (Interview with the Vampire).

Re: Great topic!

[jo]

After I posted, I realized that in more recent years, I've found book series because of TV shows, e.g. The Expanse, the Game of Thrones series, the Outlander books, etc., rather than had books I love be adapted for TV. I agree that too faithful an adaptation is not ideal, but if there are certain key scenes or plot points that get changed too much, or even left out completely, that does tend to annoy me. There were a couple of completely invented things that were added to the Outlander TV series that were unnecessary and didn't really work, and still piss me off to this day, but on the plus side, they also left out a lot of the sillier/eye-rolling stuff from the books, so maybe it balances things out.

[mcbangle]

I guess my best answer is... it depends. In general, I care more about an adaptation capturing the feeling of the original than about it following the plot beat-for-beat, and a lot of adaptations have improved upon the originals by cutting out or changing bits that haven't aged well (or were never that good to begin with). That being said, I won't deny that I've been disappointed more than once by adaptations that cut out or changed my favorite scenes or characters from the originals - especially if that scene/character was the one thing I was most looking forward to seeing ever since I heard it was being adapted!

I rarely imagine book characters in my head as I'm reading them - I guess my brain just doesn't do that - so I can't recall a time when I was disappointed by a casting announcement.

I don't think I've ever refused to watch an adaptation because I was afraid it would ruin the original for me, and I've seen many bad adaptations. I guess for me, the original and its adaptation are two separate things and my opinion of one doesn't influence my opinion of the other. I realize there's lots of people who feel differently about that, though (or at least a very vocal minority).

[jo]

I rarely imagine book characters in my head as I'm reading them - I guess my brain just doesn't do that - so I can't recall a time when I was disappointed by a casting announcement.

Same! I actually get annoyed with excessive description of a character sometimes -- I mean, unless it's Anne of Green Gables, odds are a character's hair colour is completely irrelevant to the plot.

I realize there's lots of people who feel differently about that, though (or at least a very vocal minority).

I don't get involved in fannish stuff at all, not my scene, but yeah, I have nonetheless encountered that very vocal minority on social media in relation to some adaptations. The Outlander fanatics in particular can be very insufferable. I keep wanting to reply to them "No one's forcing you to watch the show if you hate it that much!" but I get the feeling a lot of them live to hate watch.

[olivermoss]

I'd prefer it if the book and show were different things. I mean, they are always different things so it's better if they acknowledge it and run with it. If nothing else, the show is going to be written in a different era with different values. I'd rather let the concepts adapt to a new environment than try to shove it in a shape that doesn't fit.

The only time I've seen a super faithful adaptation work was the original Constantine series. It was amazingly close to the comics. I was impressed... however I'd have actually preferred it if they'd updated the language a bit since they didn't make it super clear what year it was set in.

I am a purist in a way. I reject the idea that any book or movie really captures a book. Changing bit plot points is rarely a big deal, the devil is in the details.

[executrix]

I'm an Old, so my usual response to any change (televisual or otherwise) is They Ruined It. Nevertheless, I think they usually do ruin books. I love both the Slow Horses books and the TV series, and Gary Oldman is brilliant but they won't let him be slobby enough to be the real Jackson Lamb. (This is also true of Dalziel in the Dalziel and Pascoe TV series, which I dropped after one mediocre episode.) There's no real reason why Louisa *shouldn't* be Black, so I was unsettled for only about ten seconds. I don't know if Roddy Ho couldn't possibly be skinny, I imagine him as chubby. Shirley doesn't look enough like a demonic chaos agent. River is spot-on, though.
However, the tv version of The Man in the High Castle, which doesn't make a lot of sense, is much, much more cogent than the original book.

[rodo]

I used to be someone who was usually very unhappy with an adaptation, until I realized that the problem was often me. A lot of what I expected had more to do with what the canon was in my head than what was actually possible to put on screen - which can be quite tricky when books so often rely on being in the character's head. I've been a lot happier with adaptations since I figured that out and accepted that other people might put a different spin on things.

[tinny]

IDK. It depends, I'd say?

I love love love adaptations in general, because seeing what they changed, and why, is interesting in and of itself. And I often have the feeling that novels have better plots than original tv shows, so turning novels into tv shows usually turns out to be a good idea.

I've seen very faithful adaptations (the first series of Game of Thrones was scene-for-scene in some places), and also some that just turned the novel on its head (Guardian changed everything, including robbing us of the happy ending the novel had), and everything in between, but I usually enjoy them all. Sometimes I decide that the novel is better, sometimes not. I like the process, in any case.

Re: Great topic!

[tinny]

I guess my least favorite scenario is a tv show faithfully following a book I've read

Absolutely! I watched the first episode of Good Omens and then figured there would be nothing new, so I dropped it again. I've later heard from other people that they did change quite a bit, so maybe I should have stuck with it after all. (Well, there's always time. :D )

[exitmouse]

I feel like I'm being so wishy-washy with the "It depends" answer. Broadly I do want them the same, after all, there's a reason why I loved the original book! At the same time if nothing else, books and film - whether movie, miniseries, or tv series - are fundamentally different mediums. An extreme example would be: You literally couldn't make House of Leaves adapted to screen without a lot of changes*. There has to be differences, if only for time, pacing, funds, what have you... but I also have a certain amount of sympathy for people upset at changes given that yes more than a decade later I am still big mad that they cut/changed my favorite scene from the first Game of Thrones book. Did it ultimately matter to the overall story? No, not really. But it mattered to me!

That said, especially when it comes to say more popular older books generally written by white men, I DO love the updating of the source material to be more inclusive to get to see myself and my friends more reflected in the cast, especially if it's done with thought and care rather than just to try to get diversity points and score that sweet 'conflict!' word of mouth. There's also wonderful moments like one character's fate changed in the Sandman TV show that, when asked about it, Gaiman said he didn't want comics fans feeling like they knew everything that was going to happen. I also did my own Chronicles of Amber fancast for mostly Oberon's children on my tumblr a little bit ago.

Ultimately though - a bad or different adaptation doesn't make the thing I loved stop existing. For example, the scene I love they cut in Game of Thrones still exists in A Song Of Ice And Fire, and I can read it anytime I want even if I don't get to see the awesome actors playing it out.

* I have actually put a lot of thought into this and have my own idea of how to do it and keep The Vibes.

Re: Great topic!

[exitmouse]

I mentioned in my own comment down below, but I read the Sandman comics back in high school in the early 00s and not since then. So watching the TV show was fun because I only broadly half-remembered the sort of main touchstones of the plot and not much else. There was one character I was so worried about because I couldn't remember what happened to her, and I was so relieved when she was okay that I started crying. Come to find out when I looked it up later, I had a reason to be worried! In the comics, it ends very badly for her in a very cruel way, I had totally forgotten! Someone asked Gaiman on his tumblr why the change for this minor character who doesn't really impact the plot otherwise, and he had the wonderful answer along the lines of "I didn't want comic fans to feel like they knew everything that was going to happen."

[jo]

more than a decade later I am still big mad that they cut/changed my favorite scene from the first Game of Thrones book. Did it ultimately matter to the overall story? No, not really. But it mattered to me!

I totally get this. As I posted in a reply to someone else, there were a couple of completely invented things that were added to the Outlander TV series, one plotline in particular, that were unnecessary and didn't really work, and still piss me off to this day. I will not rewatch those particular episodes.

I don't tend to imagine characters in much/any detail when I read, so I'm not usually bothered by more inclusive casting decisions. However, I do remember one instance where the character in the book was Native American, and in the TV adaptation, was cast as African American, which I found odd. I mean, Indigenous people are more underrepresented on TV (and in books) than African Americans, so why do that?

[exitmouse]

Oh man, that sucks re: outlander. Less so now but I was a huge weeaboo when I was a kid/teen so I was always getting worked up about changes made from the manga into the anime, though I think in some cases it really did make a huge difference when you added all the little things together! (The endgame romance for the main character in the Bleach manga was very well projected from the start - but from the perspective of the anime, it came out of nowhere!)

I feel like the "switching one POC for another" tends to fall into the area of insincerity for diversity, and it tends to bother me too. Like - while yes, they did cast a Brazilian actor for Sunspot in the New Mutants movie, the character is specifically Afro-Brazilian and the actor they got for him has pretty light skin! And the director made a lot of questionable comments about it after the fact that took it from "Ah, thoughtless, kind of cringe" to "Now I'm suspicious of your motives" ... my best friend is indigenous as well, so I tend to hear a lot of talk about (almost inevitably poor) casting choices when it comes to Native American characters.

That said not to be all doom and gloom - we've come a long way from Mickey Rooney in Breakfast at Tiffany's, and I hope things continue to get better like they seem to be.

[china_shop]

I try to approach adaptations as transformative fanworks, keeping in mind that not all fanworks/interpretations are for everyone, and some are really out there. Sometimes, there's a fundamental aspect that will make me nope out without even trying them, or at the very least will make me wary in a kind of "this is what appealed to me about the source; without that, why would I bother?" way. (*side-eyes the casting for Murderbot*)

[yourlibrarian]

Either I haven't seen many books I've read be adapted or else it's a matter of the two happening close together. A big exception is Agatha Christie works, as many of those have been adapted, some of them many times.

If I use those as a guide, then I much prefer a faithful adaptation. I found myself quite annoyed with the Branagh films. There have been various good adaptations for TV though. In fact, I wonder if TV adaptations are generally better than films because they don't have to compress so much.

That said, sometimes the things cut out make for a better story. I've read a number of the Inspector Lynley mysteries and I found I preferred the TV adaptations because they cut out a lot of things I wasn't interested in to begin with in the books. However I had an issue with the casting of his work partner because she was not physically anything like the book character.

[dancing_serpent]

I'm very much in the "it depends" camp. Recent example is 3 Body Problem. I watched the cdrama first and really liked it, then I read the book - and found out the drama was an almost scene-by-scene adaptation, with a bit of added personality to the characters to make us feel for them and understand them. Because the author is great at science, but not great at writing characters, and the drama made them into people instead of plot devices. I really liked those changes!

Then there's the Netflix version. When I started watching, I liked it in the early stages. I was wary about them taking it into a more international setting (white saviour trope, hello!), and I didn't understand why they split the main character into six different ones who all experienced just parts of what he did. The answer came later and pissed me off. This was an easy way to create interpersonal drama and conflict between the leads, because they didn't know or understand what the other had gone through. So, instead of science we got relationship drama.

And then they added hundreds of civilian casualties into a situation that was already horrifying enough without those in the book/the c-drama version, and I was reminded that those are the guys who made GoT. So, this adaptation might be thrilling and well made, but it's not a faithful one, and I ended up disliking it immensely for their cheap means of adding conflict.

[queer_scribbling]

I'd say it depends. When I was younger, I tended more towards wanting adaptations to mirror the source material as closely as possible, but sometimes, I think it was a reaction to feeling like adaptation was a stand-in for 'the thing you liked about the book won't be as profitable as adding in a love interest'.

I went through a bit of a Stephen King phase as a teen, and having source material that was darker, more complex, and often old enough that some details could stand to be approached differently opened me up to having some flexibility about adapting a book. Getting a chapter in the perspective of a side character who helps out the lead bully where he kills small animals could be skipped over in an adaptation, say, and I think it's The Stand that has a longer extended version where King added back in stuff he was advised to edit out in the shorter version of the book. So, unless someone really commits to making a series instead of a movie, sometimes King's books have a bit too much to be quite so faithful.

There can be changes that fans consider for the better, like some stories getting another woman with dialogue or not just using an all white cast, but it can depend a bit on the fate of certain characters and how new characters get treated. (Like, adding another woman to the cast but then adding a plotline where she was almost sexually assaulted.) However, I can still understand why some book fans don't want 'too much' change in an adaptation. Luxuriating in a known world/plot and approaching an adaptation almost like a comfort re-read can mean that adding in new characters and changing the plot feels too much like a different story. For example, from what I've heard, the adaptation of Artemis Fowl went too far for some.

Details got a bit long:

The first book is about a 12 year old kidnapping a fairy in order to access her magic to heal his mother, and it's A Thing that Artemis had to put effort into finding their world (and they wind up not underestimating him just because he's a human). The film adaptation starts out with setting up a world where the Fowl family has known about magical creatures for a few generations, and Artemis has to save his father who was kidnapped by a fairy with the help of the fairy character he kidnaps in the book. It's sort of like they wanted to use the second book's plot, but the father was actually being held by the Russian Mafia. I'm not sure where this whole 'father stole the object called Aculos' detail is coming from in the film's description, but I have a horrible feeling that Juliet was de-aged to be the same age as Artemis in order to plant the seeds for a love interest in a sequel.