Who doesn’t love a film or TV adaptation of their favourite book? Well, quite a few people actually. Adaptations can be fraught, and can leave fans disappointed. It’s almost inevitable that an adaptation will disappoint some people who love the source material.
I finally got around to watching Netflix’s Shadow and Bone a few weeks back, and I thought it made some interesting choices. It got me thinking about what I look for in an adaptation. As usual, I’m not here to claim any authority on the topic of adaptations and what they should or shouldn’t change! But I did want to look at some of the reasons these changes can occur, and how much each type bothers me.
TV adaptations can let you see your favourite moments from a book play out in front of you
Personally, this is the main reason I want an adaptation to be as close as possible to the original. I want to see all my favourite moments. What will this conversation sound like? How will this setting look? I want to see the scenes in my imagination brought to life.
Naturally, a lot of what you see in an adaptation won’t quite match up to your imagination. This can be for obvious, practical reasons. I often find that my imagined version of a fictional world is pretty fuzzy, made up more of impressions than specific images, but even with that vagueness it’s easy to feel that the version on screen is somehow off. Of course, sometimes scenes are changed in subtle (or not-so-subtle) ways to make them easier to adapt, which can be frustrating even when it makes sense. In general though, it’s fascinating to see something from the page translated into three dimensions.
Not everything in a book translates well to an on-screen adaptation
We all know that some things just work better on the page. This can be one of the reasons for tweaks to the book. When you read, you get a direct window into the thoughts and feelings of characters. When it comes to a visual medium like film and TV, it’s harder to do that effectively.
Pivotal moments that rely on a character realising something, or making a decision for themselves, have to find a way to represent that visually. While sometimes disappointing, these changes can also be interesting. In the book Shadow and Bone, we see the day that Alina was tested for Grisha powers. Without really knowing what she was doing, she suppressed her power and successfully hid it. While easy enough to describe on the pages of a book, this would have been a tough scene to pull off, since there’s not much to look at there. In the Netflix version, Alina is injured, and uses that to stop the Grisha testers from getting an accurate read of her abilities.
At times like this, it makes complete sense to tweak the original material.
Changes for the sake of run-time can be harder to swallow
More frustrating, if equally necessary, are the changes that come about to save time. Some moments, choices or plot points of books come about in ways that would be challenging to explain in a film or TV adaptation. A character observing something, making a connection, and then using that knowledge to their own benefit, can happen quite quickly in a book. The explanation of that sequence of events can play out within a single paragraph. It’s a little harder to show that efficiently on screen.
This can be why side characters often seem to lose moments that show them doing something particularly interesting or intelligent; there just isn’t room in a film to have all of those moments play out the way they can on a page. So the main character ends up getting all the glory.
TV adaptations suffer less from this, of course. Several 30-40 minute episodes can give the writers far more time to play with than a single movie. That doesn’t mean you never lose those small, but vital, character moments. It just means you can typically fit a few more of them in alongside the main plot line(s).
Sometimes TV adaptations will choose to make changes that aren’t just for the sake of clarity
Shadow and Bone made some serious tweaks in the transition to Netflix. One was expanding the diversity of the world, a move which had mixed reactions. Another was a major change to the relationship between the main character, Alina, and her childhood friend Mal. Changes like this can significantly change the feel of a story, even without having an obvious impact on the plot as it plays out.
This can come about because the original author wants to take the opportunity to update their work, or have it better reflect the way they would write it if they were starting it again today. It can be a way to give fans a different experience to the book, or a response to the knowledge that fans wanted more or less of a particular element of the story.
It’s sometimes impossible to know the exact reasons a change was made – and fans often disagree vehemently over the necessity of any changes. As much as I want to see a faithful adaptation of books that I’ve loved, I can also really enjoy these moves away from the source material. Personally, I think it’s fun to see a different take on a story that I love. And hey, at the end of the day you can always go back and re-read the book!
How faithful do you want film and TV adaptations to be?
Are you okay with large changes, giving you a substantially different story to explore? Will you only tolerate small, necessary changes to make a story work on the screen? Or do you prefer absolute purity of adaptation? Let me know your thoughts – especially if there’s an adaptation you thought did a great (or terrible!) job with a beloved book.
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