The New York Times dissects the advent of the novel to television adaptation with a focus on Jennifer Egan’s A Visit From the Goon Squad. Craig Fehram breaks down the differences between television and movie adaptations in arguing that “where a movie means paring a novel down, a TV show can mean breaking it wide open.”
In an earlier essay at Salon, Laura Miller also took on the novel-TV marriage, asserting “while not exactly soul mates,” the two “have a lot more in common than the novel and theatrical film.”
(Via Vintage and Anchor)
One response
While Fehram’s topic is adaptation, I think he overlooks the experience of people like David Simon who are creating original television series that are novelistic in scope, structure and execution. Once he bring Salmon Rushdie into the mix he really needed to give Simon a call. Rushdie will discover the limits of creative control once the directors step in, and he realizes he needs a team of writers to maintain a series. It will be the same old Hollywood story: the director or producer bringing in the re-write guys to address cinematic shortcomings or simply out of their own creative ego, things will change, and the final product will likely not be simply an articulation of the novel. Probably the closest thing would be Grenada Television’s Brideshead Revisited, and I would need to go back an re-read the novel and then watch the entire series again to be certain how closely it is in fact a direct adaptation, rather than a new creation.
Disclaimer about Simon: yes I’m a fanboy and contribute to the Back of Town blog that follows and dissects the show closely all through the season, and I do so because I think its brilliant (in part because it is novelistic and unlike anything else on television, even the Sopranos).
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