Fannish Friday

[lirazel]

I know I've made a post about this before, but I always get such fun answers that I'm revisiting it.

1. Tell me which book/book series you'd like to see made into a television show. Assume that the showrunners understand exactly what you love about the original, the casting is perfect, it's not too long or too short. Everything goes as perfectly as an adaptation could. What would you most like to see as a show?

I'm asking specifically about shows as opposed to movies. I'm interested in what you think could make either a limited series (let's say at least 3 episodes) or an open-ended one, something that needs more space to breathe than a film can provide.

2. Alternatively, tell me about a book/book series that has been adapted to TV, but that didn't do it very well and you wish someone who really got the heart of the text could take another shot at it. (TV, please! I'll ask about bad film adaptations in another post!)

3. And/or tell me about a book/series that you think should not be adapted to TV or film because you just can't imagine it actually working! The stuff you love most about it just wouldn't translate to a visual media!



For question one, my answers always include the Benjamin January series, which could easily do a short season (say, 6 or 8 episodes) for each book. Mara: Daughter of the Nile would make a great limited series of 6ish episodes, imo, and so would Robin McKinley's Sunshine. When the Radiant Emperor duology is finished, it should get the full C-drama treatment! (It will not.)

I would love to see a really good Queen's Thief adaptation, but I do not think the one currently in development for Disney has a snowball's chance in hell of satisfying me.

For question two, the obvious answer for me is the sequels to Ken Sullivan's Anne of Green Gables. The original 1987 one based on the first book is so close to perfect! I love it so! And then the second two just abandon the canon! (Well, they steal some stuff from Anne of Windy Poplars, which is one of the weakest of all the books! I find it inexplicable!) I would give anything for a really good adaptation of, say, Anne of the Island--Anne and her girlfriends at college!!!!! I want it!!!!

I am also tempted to put the Dublin Murder Squad series on here. The first book was adapted, and I really liked who they cast as Cassie, but...I got bored with it? And didn't finish it? And yet I would looooove to see The Likeness as a mini-series! But only made by the right team!

For question three, the most obvious answer is most of Faulkner. People keep trying to adapt his most stream-of-consciousness novels, and...it doesn't work! Sorry! You can't make The Sound and the Fury or Absalom! Absalom! work! You miiiiight get away with something like Sanctuary, but even that would be a stretch.

Till We Have Faces also wouldn't work! I just don't think Orual's thoughts, which are the whole book, would translate to voice-over. It would feel heavy-handed and clunky.

I think mostly Code Name Verity would make a fantastic short series, but the central "twist" would be almost impossible to pull off in a visual format, so I'm not sure it would actually work, though I'm interested in whether y'all think it would.

Comments

[rekishi]

Hmmmmmm. I can answer this! Maybe.

1.
Coldfire, with the right amount of visual and practical effects, could be awesome. Assuming money is no object, I think the text has the right amount of visual cues to make it awesome, plus it's just a great story.

Another one I personally think would work well are the Arabesk books, because it has just the right amount of mind-fuckery that would work very well on screen, plus we'd get more visual cues about ageing and that damn fox would be a delightful confusion on screen. Not sure how they would address the reveal about Zara, but I'm sure it could be handled well.

2.
Rings of Power.

3.
The Silmarillion, because after the mess they made of Rings of Power, I can't imagine that ever ending will.

And while I'd LOVE a Malazan Book of the Fallen adaption, I don't think it's doable. The scale is too epic, the visual effects needed are simply not there and making all the different continents and warrens would probably not work. I'd love if it were, but I don't see it as possible.

[elisi]

Dune with the casting, visuals, budget etc from the new movie, but with time to allow the story to breathe properly, rather than cutting huge chunks.

[dolorosa_12]

I was actually going to say Benjamin January for the first question as well. In general I'm not interested in seeing adaptations of books I really love, but Benjamin January would be an exception, in the right circumstances. The first is that obviously US anti-black racism, slavery, and a lot of trauma relating to these things are at the heart of the series, and it would require careful scriptwriting, direction and showrunning to make sure they are depicted intelligently and sensitively. The second is the specific multilingual context of 1830s New Orleans — the show would need to be cast with actors who were equally comfortable in French and English, and, in the case of Ben (and several others) able to manage fluent Spanish, German, and quotes in Latin and Greek as well.

I also feel that the James Asher series would make a good TV adaptation!

In general, I'm not keen on TV (or film) adaptations of books I really love, and particularly if the first attempt wasn't great, I'm not interested in any further versions. However, I feel with a bigger budget, a better cast, and a bit more care, Philip Pullman's Sally Lockhart historical mysteries would do well. It's a series that takes campy Victoriana penny dreadful concepts and plays them straight as mysteries, while infusing them with really perceptive social and political commentary. One thing that I felt really didn't work in the original adaptation was its colourblind casting — while normally this is a worthy aim, in the case of these books race, racism, and its intersection with Victorian colonialism really play a big role, so having non-white actors cast as establishment figures watered down this component of the source material.

For your third question, I'm tempted to say Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, even though it was adapted for TV as a BBC miniseries. But it emphatically didn't work! This in part was due to the fact that it needed more episodes — the book is long, and complicated — but also because it is just such a literary work. I don't mean that it's 'high literature' (whatever that is), but that its power as a story is fundamentally linked to its format as a written text, and it loses a lot when translated to the screen.

I also don't think any book whose story involves human characters interacting with the divine should ever be adapted to the screen, because even if it's a cosmology where gods take physical form, I think it's impossible to convey this with human actors without it looking cheap, weird, and unconvincing.

I really enjoyed the adaptations of the Tana French books, but I never read the originals so I have nothing to compare them with!

[seekingferret]

I really want an adaptation of Matt Fraction's comic The Order, and I think it could work well as a Disney Plus miniseries.

It's from an era in Marvel comics where every state had a government chartered Avengers team and The Order is the California team, based in LA and deeply tied to the Hollywood mythmaking machine. The male lead is the guy who played Iron Man in some movies, trying to be a superhero in real life. The female lead is Pepper Potts. It has all sorts of meta stuff but it's not meta for meta's sake, it's a real neat look at the question of what makes a hero, and also at how Hollywood makes heroes and then consumes them.

And I think at this point the MCU has enough depth to let a show really poke at that in context. Also it'd be fun to have a good excuse to bring Gwyneth Paltrow back into the MCU.

[evewithanapple]

1. The Lions of al-Rassan. I think the sheer scope of the book would get lost in a movie - they'd have to cut too much - but a limited series would give the plot more space to breathe. For a long time I wanted Emanuelle Chriqui as Jehane, but she's aged out now. I still really want Marwan Kenzari as Ammar.

2. I breathe absolute fire whenever I remember the mess they made of Women of the Otherworld. I don't think they ever really cared to adapt the books so much as they wanted an existing name to slap on what was functionally an original series, but they strip mined just enough from the books to make me furious about what they changed. Whitewashing one of the leads was the thing that pissed me off the most, but they also screwed the author over - they optioned just the werewolf books, they added characters from other books and when she said "um, excuse me?" the excuse they gave was that these characters had appeared in crossover books, so they technically were within the terms of their agreement. COINCIDENTALLY, not only did this involve casting a skinny woman as a character who's consistently described as chubby in the books, it also meant that her canon love interest (not white) was excluded, and they hooked her up with a white character instead. FUNNY HOW THAT HAPPENS.

3. You know, I'm not sure - recently it was announced that KJ Charles's The Secret Casebook of Simon Feximal had been optioned for TV, and the reason that specific title was selected out of all her books is because it lends itself best to a serialized format. Definitely some of her books are too No Plot, Just Vibes for TV - I love Band Sinister, but it would not be able to sustain multiple episodes - and even my personal favourite, Think of England, is probably too static to spread across a whole show. It could make a great movie, though.

[duskpeterson]

1) The Lymond Chronicles.

"I would love to see a really good Queen's Thief adaptation, but I do not think the one currently in development for Disney has a snowball's chance in hell of satisfying me."

I haven't been following the details. How bad is it turning out to be?

"sequels to Ken Sullivan's Anne of Green Gables"

Agreed. :)

"Till We Have Faces also wouldn't work!"

I haven't reread it in a long time, but mainly-thought stories are hard to adapt. The only one I've seen done well - which utterly breaks the rule that you can't stick closely to the original book and make a good movie - is Brideshead Revisited.

[theseatheseatheopensea]

I saw this post at work earlier today, and was really looking forward to answering your questions! Here I am! :D

1. El Unicornio!!! I would love a mini-series (because it's a story that definitely needs needs more space to breathe, and a movie wouldn't be enough!) with the adventures of Melusina! "Everything goes as perfectly as an adaptation could" would be a key thing here, because it would need to get both the playful magical realism and the (somewhat veiled) queer meaning of the novel just right!

2. The 2020 adaptation of Dracula. I thought it was terrible!

3. Definitely "Invisible Cities". Maybe it's because I don't have enough imagination and creativity, but I don't see how a TV series could capture/translate this book. (Also, I agree with you: "Till We Have Faces" wouldn't work at all!)

[chestnut_pod]

1a. Someone please fix up the Song of the Lioness books a la 2019-Watchmen-meets-Babysitters'-Club-adaptation. (I am aware this is a very tonally odd comparison, but I mean fixing what is broken and leaving alone what isn't, with a high degree of social analysis, but still For Tweens.) And yes, the eyes must be purple and the horse must be palomino!
2. I'm just not enough of a TV-watcher to know what's been done lately or to really want more TV… I can think of a few things that I just want more of, not necessarily done differently -- more setting-translated Fingersmiths, more of Mushishi, etc.
3. *endless Silmarillion scream of petty frustration*

(I want to say my dream films before I forget! Mohsin Hamid's Exit West, Rita Indiana's Nombres y animales, and The Tombs of Atuan. I also wish to register my assertion that the Silmarillion would make at least three fantastic ballets.)

[nnozomi]

Oh man, I have so much to say about this :)
1. The first thing that comes to mind is that these pictures of the actor Wang Yang give me tremendous Aral Vorkosigan vibes, and I would love a Chinese live-action version of the Vorkosigan books. Casting Miles would always be hard, but I think the series could be arranged into a cdrama very satisfactorily (ideally without censorship, oh dear. I can't imagine what the Chinese censors would make of Barrayar and Komarr.)
Also a number of police procedural-type mystery series--I think there's already a Rivers of London series in the works? Other good ones would be Cynthia Harrod-Eagles or (as a Japanese quasi-period drama) James Melville. Also Lee Killough's near-future mysteries would be a lot of fun on screen if the budget was big enough to play with.
Also I think Pamela Dean's Secret Country series might work surprisingly well on TV, if the child actors were good enough and the script was faithful to the books; they're very visual.

3. Mysteries that wouldn't do well on TV: Fred Vargas' Adamsberg series, I feel like the particular degree of...mostly benign weirdness...? set up by the text would not be translatable on screen.
The Teixcalaan series would be visually absolutely gorgeous, but I feel like they're so reliant on language in various forms that a TV version would lose something, plus trying to figure out "alien, but not very" plausible costuming would be a nuisance.
The Marlows books also rely so much on interiority that it would be very hard to relate to the characters in the same way on screen.

[skygiants]

When I have answered this before I have said Kage Baker's Company books and that is still the wish of my heart, but I also personally would have a lot of fun adapting DWJ's Dalemark books in sort of the way they did the Witcher TV show -- three parallel timelines for baby Moril, baby Mitt, and the full Crown of Dalemark adventure where they're all hanging out together so the viewer gradually learns their backstories as they learn about each other. (Spellcoats can be a special miniseries tie-in event.)

[dollsome]

1. I have had a suspicion for ages that a Princess Diaries TV show that follows the books more closely, set in the early 2000s in all its pop culture glory and horror, would be SO funny. I would love to get to see Grandmere in her true evil form. (No offense, Julie Andrews my -- our! -- beloved!)

2. Game of Thrones, lol sobbbb. Especially as the seasons went on and you started to realize that a lot of really important stuff from the books was going to get left out. (Lady Stoneheart!! WHY!) Perfect cast; agonizing writing decisions. This is so obvious it does not need saying, but here I am, saying it!

3. Piranesi! I just think the mystery is so beautiful and there would be no way to convert it into visual storytelling, because a big part of getting immersed in the book at first is going, "Is this character ... a human, or not??"

[luinied]

1. "The Locked Tomb", because I love that series so much. Yes, it would be hard, and yes, it would have to do things quite differently to get the vibe right, but I think with that wild cast of characters it could be done. I'm leaning towards animation, but if Taika Waititi wants to do it live action I'll give him the benefit of the doubt.


2. I'm joining the Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell bandwagon, because it's not like I didn't have fun watching the adaptation we got, but there was so much it missed. I feel like it would need to do some sort of wry voiceover shenanigans-- maybe along the lines of Good Omens?-- for the footnotes, or maybe some other technique, I don't know. But I think it could be done better.


3. "His Dark Materials", which, on the surface this seems like it should be easier to adapt than either of the others I've listed, but honestly, after two adaptations we got I think maybe it can't be? Not that those two didn't make mistakes that are 100% on them, but the more I think about it the more I'm convinced that the series only works as the precisely done writing it is, because it's such a subtle thing in so many ways. Maybe it could work as a comic, but I don't think a TV or movie can really manage.