I have actually had a pretty good week! I got the new Dresden Files book in a book giveaway on Kindle, I got a reply to a fanmail letter I sent to a fantasy author, and I re-read The Lightning Thief. Question for you guys: if I wrote out annotations to the Percy Jackson book series, would you guys be interested in seeing them?
Lent is coming up sooner than you think, by the way.
TV Adaptations Are Not Always Better
Last week, I ranted a bit about the Percy Jackson TV show. Maybe it was a bit harsh. But think about it, and a recent article I saw about the Netflix adaptation of The Witcher, got me thinking. That article pointed out that in the last decade or so, fans have seemed to prefer asking Hollywood to adapt their favorite stories into shows rather than a movie, and that it doesn’t always work out, and I kind of wanted to expand on that.
If you weren’t around before the streaming boom, generally when a fandom wanted their favorite book/comic/game/cartoon to reach a larger audience, they pushed for it to be adapted into a live-action feature film. There were a ton of repetitions of, “The book is always better!”, sure, but it was still the most popular idea. And we all knew why the book was better–it wasn’t as constrained by time, or budget, which caused the film adaptations to have material get cut or reworked to fit those limitations. And those are the good examples; sometimes, directors and screenwriters didn’t read, or outright didn’t like the source material at all. See the film adaptation of The Dark is Rising.
And then came Game of Thrones.
Okay, yes, book-to-television adaptations certainly existed before Game of Thrones; they weren’t rare. But the HBO series proved to be wildly successful, and for a while the production had a great relationship with the novels’ author. And you know, it was HBO, so it definitely had the budget to depict a lot of the crazy things in the fantasy novels, like big honking dragons, especially once it had built up a massive and loyal fanbase. The series being episodic made people realize that there wouldn’t be such a huge constraint on time, and so with the format of prestige television, or big budget streaming shows on things like Netflix, a lot of fans decided that television was the way to adapt things.
The thing is, it’s still not immune to the problems of film adaptation.
Like, time constraints! Several episodes gives you more time to cover events, sure, but at the same time, there is still a limit on time that you don’t get in a book. And given that it has to be episodic, you have to pace things a certain way. I’m a lot less harsh on the Percy Jackson episode on Medusa than a lot of people because, given the subject matter, recognizability of Medusa, and the format of a television show, it made sense to give that scenario an entire episode, and to do that you need to change the material considerably.
And then you have the budget. A big television show might have a similar budget to a big film production… but that’s spread out over several episodes. The Percy Jackson film that adapts the same book as the second season of the television show has gorgeous shots of a massive hippocampus–a mythical creature that gives the protagonists a ride. The television show has several hippocampi appear…in the distance, never up close, and we’re told they give the characters a ride rather than see it happen, because they blew the budget depicting other things. Which I get, you know, you have to make decisions about what to prioritize, but it is very noticeable that the show doesn’t get a chance to depict everything in the story.
One of things I tend to point out is that in fantasy and science fiction shows, where it’s assumed that you will have a lot of fantastical imagery or beings, shows will often fall flat. If you’re wondering why so much of the Halo television series isn’t about Master Chief blasting aliens, like in the games, well, it’s because they don’t have the budget for that much CGI. If you’re wondering why there are so few faeries in the Roku Spiderwick show, it’s because they don’t have the money for it. Yeah, overall there’s a lot of money; but for individual episodes? Nope. And you can say use practical effects all you want, but that still involves hiring more actors or prop-makers or whatever.
Television is also much more unstable as a medium. You generally get one season greenlit at a time, and that means that you don’t know if you’ll get time to reach later material, so you jam pack a season full of as much as you can and hope that you get to other stuff down the line. Percy Jackson does this with Percy and Annabeth’s relationship, speedrunning how they feel about each other. That show’s not alone in this; the Netflix Shadow & Bone, among other changes, adapts two books in its final season instead of one (as it did in its first season), making a weird narrative mess that rushes through Plot points. They didn’t know if they’d get a third season, so they might as well finish the story arc as well as they could instead of making too bad of a cliffhanger.
All of that is assuming that people have time to develop the story as well as they could. There’s a fantastic series of video essays about The Witcher series that points out that many of its design decisions were based on how rushed the series was. They had the budget, and they had the talent, but they didn’t give themselves time to develop those into a polished product, leading to some odd choices in the way things look–the Nilfgaardian armor comes to mind here.
So this assertion that I keep seeing, that if our favorite books or whatever are adapted into a television show, it’ll all be golden and faithful to the source material: well, no. That’s no guarantee. It might be, or it might veer off in its own direction instead, maybe intentionally or because of the limitations that still exist on the medium. It could still turn out very badly as an adaptation. I think we’ve gotten to the point that more and more people are realizing that a TV adaptation isn’t a cure-all, thankfully, but I still see the idea trotted out like it’s one. It can work, if done mindfully, but it’s far from a fool-proof solution.
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