In a 2021 episode of “What We Do in the Shadows,” the ancient vampire Nandor goes to Atlantic City and is smitten with a slot machine themed on “The Big Bang Theory.” Later, he’s amazed to discover that “The Big Bang Theory” is also a TV show. “Very faithful to the slot machine!” he marvels.
There is not yet a series based on a slot machine — that I know of. But Nandor is on to something: TV today is full of Things Based on Other Things. Films have become TV series (including “Shadows,” an adaptation of a 2015 movie), as have books and superhero comics and podcasts and manga and video games.
Nandor is on to something else too. “Faithfulness” has become a watchword for adaptations, sometimes a measure of authenticity, sometimes a billy club to police divergences from a favorite story.
It’s a term that raises a lot of unanswered questions: Faithful to what, or whom? Do fans of the original work have more of a claim on the adaptation than everyone else? Can you be faithful and creative at the same time — and do people asking for faithfulness even want that? Or do they simply want obedience?
In its recent rebranding presentation, Max (the streaming service now known as HBO Max, which downsizes its name later this month) announced a slate of programming full of Things Based on Other Things. Along with a new “Game of Thrones” prequel adapted from novellas by George R.R. Martin, a series version of the horror movie “The Conjuring” and a “Big Bang Theory” spinoff (congrats, Nandor!), Max confirmed plans for a series repurposing one of Warner Bros. Discovery’s most valuable properties, the Harry Potter books.
Much of the response focused, understandably, on the news that J.K. Rowling would produce the adaptation despite the controversy — even among many Potter fans — over her criticisms of “the new trans activism.” But another curiosity in Max’s attempt to squeeze more blood from the sorcerer’s stone was its description of the series as “a faithful adaptation.”
Faithful compared with what? The books have already been adapted into eight films, whose adherence to the plots was as tightly monitored as the prison at Azkaban. But with a limited run time and no access to Hermione Granger’s time turner, they had to make cuts. A series, with a planned decade-long run and each season based on one book, would have the space, in the words of Casey Bloys, the chairman of HBO, to “dive deep,” i.e., to cram in everything on superfans’ “What the movies left out” lists.
More “faithful,” here, means more exhaustive — more committed to reproducing, at a healthy budget, the images already inside the reader’s head. And here’s the problem with faith: The aesthetic version, like the religious one, can lead you to higher insight and inspiration, or it can shackle you to the unforgiving literal interpretation of a text.
Adaptations are a devil’s bargain. They are made for a reason, to gain the advantages of brand recognition and a pre-existing audience. But that comes with the burden of expectations: fans of the original checking it against the source, some looking for a fresh take, others looking for a completist video illustration.
Or worse, they use “faithfulness” as a cover for small-mindedness. See the “Lord of the Rings” fans who objected to casting people of color to populate Middle-earth, or “The Last of Us” devotees who knocked the HBO video game adaptation for expanding the story of two gay characters to a full episode, supposedly on the grounds of “That wasn’t in the game.”
For a TV critic, the era of adaptations means every review involves new decisions and more supplementary material. Should you read the book, see the movie, play the game? Or should you go in cold, to better represent the many viewers who will come to the material the same way? I’ve done both, but you can never do both at the same time; once I had read the books that “Game of Thrones” is based on, I couldn’t un-read them.
But this is not your problem. The issue for viewers is that there are more and more series out there serving two audiences, the fans of the original work and the ones coming to the story new.
Here, I’m on the side of the newbies. Good TV can be challenging, but it should never be homework. If you need to have read or seen or heard a prior work to appreciate your show, you have made a bad show. The duties of reproduction (to realize something someone has already created) can be at odds with the duties of art (to create what never was).
True creativity requires not blind faith but a little treachery. The best TV adaptations use the distinctly serial and visual medium to re-create the emotion and spirit of the source, whittling away whatever doesn’t translate. HBO’s “My Brilliant Friend” hews reasonably close to Elena Ferrante’s plots, but it works as TV because it’s artfully directed and miraculously cast, using image and the nuance of expression to convey the inner lives of its characters without drowning in exposition or voice-over.
“Daisy Jones & the Six,” the series-length rock bifauxpic on Amazon Prime Video, had an open opportunity to rethink its source material. The novel by Taylor Jenkins Reid told the story of a fictional Fleetwood Mac-like supergroup in oral-history form, a device that worked on the page but required rethinking for the screen. As Eleanor Henderson wrote in her review of the novel for The Times, “the script format inherently limits our access to the characters’ innermost selves.”
Unfortunately, the adaptation by Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber (“500 Days of Summer”) fills in the gaps with mush. The series devotes a lot of energy to staging key performances and musical moments from the novel (which necessarily left much to the reader’s imagination), but the fleshed-out personal dramas and artistic struggles pile on the rock ’n’ roll period clichés. The result may be a faithful-enough audio companion to the novel. As stand-alone TV, it plays like a ham-handed “This Is Us” flashback.
If “Daisy Jones” ends up a listless cover band, Prime Video’s “Dead Ringers” is a brilliantly reckless experiment. Its genetic material is the 1988 David Cronenberg body-horror movie (itself based loosely on a novel, which itself echoed a true story), about the descent into madness of a pair of twin gynecologists, both played by Jeremy Irons.
The six-episode series reimagines its twin leads, the idealistic obstetrician Beverly Mantle and the ambitious biomedical researcher Elliot Mantle, each so clearly delineated by Rachel Weisz you might forget there’s only one of her.
Gender-flipping the leads reframes the original film’s ideas about the bloody machinery of childbirth — rooting the story in women’s reality rather than abstract horror — but the series does so much more. It’s a caustic, absurd comedy, a psychological drama of sibling dependence and a wry take on venture-capital medicine and privilege. (The sisters court an amoral opioid heiress, played by Jennifer Ehle.) Weisz and the writer Alice Birch have created a wondrous monster that firmly answers the questions too many adaptations fumble with: Why bother and why now?
I can’t say the same for Paramount+’s revamp of the 1987 erotic thriller “Fatal Attraction,” with Lizzy Caplan and Joshua Jackson as the principals in an affair that goes criminally wrong. It has good intentions in its update, with Caplan expanding on the problematic, bunny-boiling obsessive played by Glenn Close. But it ends up a tedious, mopey echo of upscale marital dramas like “The Affair” (which Jackson also appeared in) while being too constrained by the parameters of the original story to go anywhere worthwhile.
It’s fitting, I guess, that a drama about infidelity should fall into the faithfulness trap. In the end, adaptation isn’t a marriage. At best, it’s an open relationship. Faithfulness is a great quality in real life, but when it comes to fiction, betrayal inevitably makes a better story.
