TV Tuesday: Transformations

[yourlibrarian]

Congratulations to Shogun for winning the Emmy for Best Drama, Best Actor and Best Actress in a Drama series! In its case it was an adaptation from a book that also stands in comparison to an earlier miniseries. How far can an adaptation go with changing the characters for TV before it no longer works for you as a viewer?

How about changing other major things such as setting, tone or parts of the plot?

Comments

[jo]

Most adaptations that I've watched, I've not read the books, and likely won't, because once I know what happens, doesn't seem like there's much point in reading the source material. It also seems that the type of books I like best (mostly police procedurals), aren't the sort of books that get adapted, and I will watch certain genres that I won't (generally speaking) read (e.g. fantasy, more straightforward drama/relationship sorts of things). So on the whole, I rarely get too bothered by adaptations because I simply don't know the source material. There are some exceptions to all of that, where I have read the source material and watched that adaptation, e.g. Outlander, The Expanse, Game of Thrones, Handmaid's Tale... probably others, but those are the ones that come to mind.

Overall, I've been totally fine with the adaptations, and even preferred them in some cases because the source material wasn't all that great. Game of Thrones, I'm looking at you. I know everyone bitches about the last few seasons, when they "ran out of source material", but honestly, most of the books were just one big bloated mess. The Outlander books also lean towards silly and bloated on a lot of levels, so I've really loved that the series has really streamlined things and also changed a few things in favour of historical accuracy. There has been only one significantly liberty that the Outlander showrunners took with the plot that really pissed me off, and to this day, I will not rewatch the two episodes in question because of that. It was a completely unnecessary change and while I've read all of their justifications for doing it, they don't hold up. But everything else they've done has largely been really excellent.

One of the biggest diverging adaptations for me recently was the new Rebus series from the BBC, based on Ian Rankin's Detective Rebus books. Very loosely based. It's more of a re-imagining than an adaptation -- not based on any of the actual books, and going back to Rebus as a much younger cop (before he is promoted to DCI). Also moved it forward in time. In the books, Rebus served with the SAS in Northern Ireland. In the show, I think maybe he was in Afghanistan -- or was that only his brother? Anyway, point is, it's more of an "inspired by" rather than a straightforward attempt at adapting the Rebus novels. It would have been easy to get really upset about the changes -- lots of commentators on the Guardian review sure did! But I really liked it (helps that I really like Richard Rankin as an actor).

[yourlibrarian]

Some points here I can really get behind. There are quite a number of popular book series where the authors become more self-indulgent with each installment and book bloat is a definite problem. (I've noticed this is often the case with long-running fanfic as well). TV is pretty anti-bloat because of the high costs for each minute (and person) on screen. So while there are sometimes non-essential scenes for mood reasons it's rare to see stuff go on and on. (To me, non-essential mood stuff includes the obligatory "walking down a corridor to create suspense" which annoys me so much I always forward through it).

As you note, the source could also well be improved on in different ways. But I especially like your point about the re-imagining vs adaptation. On Saturday I posted a rather long comment for Speak Up about the original Father Brown series (which seemed to closely follow the books) vs the new Father Brown series, which -- even just 2 episodes in -- seems a clear "inspired by" rather than "based on" series. Given how long it's been running and its spinoff, obviously faithfulness to the original source was not that important!

In the case of the Agatha Christie re-imaginings I remain unimpressed. I am not fond of her spy/thriller stories or romance stories -- in fact I skipped a good part of her last one, Passenger from Frankfurt, which was 50% bloat and repetitiveness! But her mysteries were pretty tightly written and a recent re-read shows they continue to hold up quite well in terms of structure and narrative. Changing the focus of a story can be tricky because you don't want the reveal to come out of left field and you also need to care somewhat about the characters.

[misbegotten]

I'm enjoying the TV adaptation of Interview with the Vampire way more than I ever did the parts of the books I read back in the day. I like the changes they've made to the characters in terms of racial identity and age. I find them more complex characters as a result, and more interesting.

But I generally prefer adaptations that are more about the spirit or themes of the source material than about faithfully translating page to screen.

Shogun makes me think of the Richard Chamberlain Bourne miniseries from many years ago. It was way more faithful to the books than the Matt Damon movies, but the books were mostly about Vietnam-era politics! I enjoyed both adaptations for different reasons.

[yourlibrarian]

Oh, I didn't even realize that there had been a Bourne miniseries! Yes, I can see how that would be a big difference.

[delphi]

I'm pretty laissez-faire about adaptations overall, especially across different mediums, where I believe you want to think outside the box and take a view of what's going to work in the new medium rather than how to preserve elements of the previous one. I'm generally always good thinking of a television adaptation as a remix, or fanfic - taking some element of another story and making a TV show out of it, including when that means substantially changing the setting, tone, or plot.

Where adaptations lose me tend to be in two places. The first is completely arbitrary: when it leaves behind the biggest thing I loved about the original that it could have fit into the adaptation. I don't think that makes something a bad adaptation, but it does make it a story I'm probably less interested in, if it's not adding other things that appeal to me. The second is when studio concerns or the commercial drive to make something a "four-quadrant" show results in it being less diverse, less progressive, or more generic in the name of being more profitable or an otherwise "safer" investment.

[yourlibrarian]

Yes, unfortunately too many of that last one 😒 One problem I have is when they call something an adaptation when it's really an "inspired by" story. Was just perusing Britbox today to add items to my watchlist and discovered there had been a version of Christie's Sparkling Cyanide done...yet the description didn't sound anything like the original story! Why not just do a series of "inspired by" Christie style stories, or spin out new ones with characters from different stories?

[tinny]

Haha, Guardian. :DDD They're very far apart, and I love both.

Funnily, a lot of cdrama is based on novels, and I adore adaptations as a concept anyway. I usually take it in stride and like to compare the two versions, no matter how far apart they are.

I generally think that novel/book characters are better thought out than tv characters usually are, and I like tv shows based on novels for that alone. It's always nice to have a good, deep basis to stand on, even if the tv show then doesn't go where I expect it to.

[yourlibrarian]

I was noticing when watching a 70s book adaptation that they called it a dramatization, which spoke more strongly, I think to it being a faithful version. However I suspect that that's not used these days because instead we have, say, dramatized documentaries with actors doing scenes, so the term would be confusing.