Books into TV shows

 In classic Hollywood if a book was going to be adapted, it was for the film industry (or radio). There wasn’t really a question about it. When “prestige television” became a thing about twenty years back, it opened up a new avenue. There had been, some forty years ago, the concept of miniseries, such as The Thorn Birds or Roots, but regular TV stuck with regular TV concepts. Then HBO started leaning heavily into original programming, and the stakes were raised. Today it’s as easy to find a book adapted into a movie as a TV show.

The only streaming service I have is because I’m a Star Trek guy, and since I don’t have cable and I finally broke my network viewing habit (I used to very easily have something to be excited about every night), my discovery of new shows has become more limited than I might’ve previously imagined. Recently, though, I’ve been watching a lot of shows adapted from books.

I just finished the first season of Get Shorty. Based on the book by Elmore Leonard (and previously adapted as a John Travolta movie), by the end of the season you can kind of guess that it was inspired in part by Breaking Bad, a show about a guy who becomes a gangster somewhat accidentally. Admittedly, a large part of what broke my TV habit was the spate of shows everyone admired that I found deplorable. I see nothing worth liking about Walter White. The more critics embraced antiheroes who were probably straight-up villains, the less interested I became in the results. But Chris O’Dowd, in the final episode of Get Shorty’s first season, is literally looking at the camera as it dawns on him that his scheme to escape gangster life by becoming a movie producer has...completely backfired.

The whole season has shown how inextricably the process played out. There’s no mystery, no ambiguity, no pretensions that he started out with the best of intentions but somehow ended up in a position he could never have imagined. He suffers no illusions, his best friend has fewer scruples but actually seems more innocent, and his family, for whom he too is attempting to do this, is lost to him in quick order.

Anyway, so it’s an interesting show. The highlight is an apparent dimwit actor who’s unexpectedly brilliant while performing, a revelation that comes late in the season, a subplot that’s mostly in the background, never especially emphasized (except with a random flashback). It epitomizes the rich possibilities of this version of the story, which uses different characters but the same basic premise as the book and the movie. (We get one nod to the original lead character, Chili Palmer, who arrives at the movie studio at one point just ahead of our actual cast, just the back of Palmer’s car and his last name being used.)

I enjoyed HBO’s Watchmen, a sequel to the original comic. I adored Catch-22 with George Clooney. Good Omens was a hoot (all three of these were miniseries, admittedly). BBC’s Dirk Gently was pretty great, a show that lasted two seasons. It’s based on a couple of books (and an incomplete one) by Douglas Adams. 

Neil Gaiman’s Sandman is currently being developed by Netflix. Attempts have been made for years to get an adaptation done. This is one of the great comic books, a true literary marvel that incorporates...everything imaginable into its plot (Morpheus, the King of Dreams, has been imprisoned for years, only to discover freeing himself results in confronting everything he did before). If approached even remotely for the scale it deserves, the Netflix version would necessarily be something quite special as well.

Admittedly with my Space Corps stories, with the lead one anyway (Seven Thunders), I was always envisioning movie adaptations. The bulk of them, though, were actually outlined as TV seasons, even though I’ve been working on reverse-engineering them for book format (ha!), which has meant removing overly episodic elements (I’m a Star Trek guy; that what I had to work with, okay?). The funny thing about these recent TV shows is that they basically function as extended movies. The much-discussed Snyder Cut of Justice League is basically going to function as a miniseries in this fashion, four hours cut up into segments. Even Star Trek: Picard was described by producers as a nine hour movie, which has apparently become the way these things are routinely talked up.

TV has come a long way. It becomes easier to create cinematic experiences, at least cosmetically, and the storytelling draws established movie actors. Films then become a medium of compact art. (Almost like a really good TV episode.)

I wonder if any of this affects how books are written. You can’t really say that a TV show is necessary to capture all the beloved details of a book, since shows like Get Shorty can reinvent them anyway, and besides, if you wanted all the details of the book, you already have the book. Different mediums ought to produce different results. Will publishers seeking TV adaptations (this is easy to see with comic books, where a creator will lean heavily into a concept without bothering to develop it, because the movie version will do it for them) look for ways that will streamline the process?

We’ll see!