Adapting Television and Literature

This introductory chapter outlines the long—(er) history of the television art-form—the problems that it has presented for serious scholarship; the critical emphasis on its sociological, rather than aesthetic, attributes; and the fraught question of canon formation, when applied to what was initially understood as a ‘medium’ designed to sell household products. Reworking those literary-based terms, canon and auteur, Giles proffers a judicious account of an era when British, not American television was considered to be the measure of literary-inflected television, which many saw as taking up literature’s ‘formal and thematic interpretants’ (Venuti, 2007). He takes as his case study the classic English comedy, Fawlty Towers, to argue that it is the ‘television of cruelty’ that has fed most distinctively into the experimental poetics of twenty-first-century comedy, tracing adaptation studies’ ‘non-canonical’ (Leitch, 2017) background alongside television’s adaptation of the literary canon.

This chapter investigates the process of normalisation and de-sensationalising manifested in the television adaptation of Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s tragicomic one-woman play, Fleabag (2013), arguing that the media transformation of her experimental monologue into an award-winning 2016/2019 TV Series, sponsored by the BBC in the UK and Amazon Prime in the US, exhibits a process of institutionalisation and content moderation inherent in the modern screen entertainment industry. From its premiere at the Edinburgh Fringe, to its critically-acclaimed, commercially popular adaptation on the small screen, Fleabag garnered a number of prestigious awards, including multiple BAFTAs and EMMYs. The factors involved in this precipitous rise to fame have been attributed, amongst others, to audience manipulation, direct address, narrative control, and the ‘precarious girl’ phenomenon. While these elements play important roles in the stage play and its televisual transformation, this chapter identifies a process of commercialism and normalisation, defusing various provocative issues in the play and relocating them in the heteronormative rom-com genre. This chapter finds that the gradual sanitising of controversial content to meet the demands of televisual media and its viewer ratings performs the role of arbiter of public morals, assimilating the despair of people who share the tribulations of the protagonist into the mainstream of situation comedy, thereby diluting the angst of the contemporary, alienated young woman.

The focus in this chapter is on Mitchell Hurwitz’s Netflix show, Lady Dynamite (2016–2017)—an audacious and challenging comedy, drawn from the real life of comedian Maria Bamford. In formal terms, the show moves fluidly across time periods, signalled by a number of different visual ‘looks’, with Bamford’s life and work treated as a kind of experimental memoir or scripted stand-up special. Beyond the relentless structural and stylistic zaniness, argues Taveira, lies a sobering and unflinching exploration of mental illness and resilience, presented as ‘Self-Help TV.’ By exploiting the genre of the self-help manual and its adaptation histories, Taveira explores Lady Dynamite’s attempts to both appropriate therapeutic ambition and also subject it to unsparing ridicule. Considering adaptation alongside its source text, Bamford’s stand-up oeuvre, and a history of adapting women’s stand-up for TV, including Roseanne (1988–2018) and Fleabag (2016–2019), Taveira introduces both scripted stand-up and the self-help book as ‘performative infidelities’ (Stam, 2017), literature worthy of study and adaptation that sprouts texts with their own extended, limitless afterlives.

In this analysis of how historical poetics helps to illuminate the contexts of production, Britt demonstrates how ‘auteurship’ can be adapted from film to television through recent crime-drama series by David Lynch (Twin Peaks: The Return) and Nicolas Winding Refn (Too Old to Die Young). The literary values that these shows espouse, argues Britt, are articulated through the notions of freedom and commitment—both the freedom given to TV creators in the new dispensation and the distinct value placed on freedom within the plots and the way that Lynch and Refn’s adaptations of the crime drama subgenre correspond to Jean-Paul Sartre’s concept of committed writing. Taking a loose interpretive stance on adaptation and using Sartre’s philosophical reading of literary poetics, Britt sees a framework of freedom, commitment, and other existentialist values as highlighting the literary shortfalls of Refn’s show, rather than lending it integrity as a radical or editorial adaptation; and as giving Lynch’s reworking of his iconic TV venture a multi-media countenance that expands the formal properties of the television platform.

Although its starting-point is a graphic novel that uses the totems of the superhero genre, Damon Lindelof’s Watchmen sequel presents itself as a mind-bending crime drama, situated in a counter-historical ‘present day.’ Thus, Lindelof’s claim that he was not so much producing an adaptation as a ‘remix’ is true: the series effectively ‘remixes’ the crime genre, introducing foreign elements into a knotty story of historical injustice. Drawing on notions of ‘preemption’ (Toni Pape, Figures of Time) and ‘durational slippage’ (Mark Amerika, remixthebook), Twomey examines how Watchmen moves past murder, corruption, conspiracy and cover-ups to press the crime genre to its limit, also taking in war, vigilantism and space/time travel. History and counter-history collide, as the legacy of Jim Crow and Klan ideology, on the one hand, and civil rights discourse and anti-war protest, on the other, re-emerge in twenty-first-century Tulsa—anticipating recent debates about Critical Race Theory, The 1619 Project, and police reform, which draw attention to the darkness that still haunts American identity.

Maurice Leblanc’s gentleman thief, Arsène Lupin, has a long and complex relationship with Sherlock Holmes, his British counterpart. In fact, it was the latter’s renown that inspired both the genesis and content of the Lupin œuvre, at the dawn of the last century. A similar dynamic still operates in the contemporary avatars of each character, the BBC’s Sherlock (2010–17) and Netflix’s Lupin (2021). This chapter examines the nuances of the Sherlock-Lupin dynamic through the lenses of popularity and fandom, evident in both the plotlines of each show and in how they approach their source-texts. However, where Sherlock presents a modern-day retelling of Doyle’s tales, Lupin insists on fandom as a way of appropriating not only the text, but also the ‘powers’ attributed to its protagonist. In outlining how the two series approach their intra-textual fans, then, the chapter draws on the precepts of reception and celebrity studies, in their capacities to shed light on the more fervent and obsessive spaces within the public sphere. Complicated by these relationships, the chapter explores the association that the shows’ creators have with their subject matter, and how they use ‘adaptation’ to articulate the connections audiences have with new iterations of beloved characters.

In this chapter, I consider Heartstopper as an adaptation that transforms its source material by elaborating on the emotional moments that represent what Oseman calls the “Heartstopper moments” (Wang). I play with this idea because they are heartstoppers in the sense that they represent moments of emotional upheaval within the storyworld but also invite an emotional moment of enchantment for the audience. I use this term “enchantment” to point to an element of surprise that satisfies a knowing audience. This enchantment, I argue, is represented in Heartstopper, especially in moments of bliss between Charlie and Nick, and is also fostered for the viewer through the Heartstopper doodles that make the affective enchantment visible. I argue for the combination of recognition with surprise or enchantment to counteract what Vera Tobin calls the “curse of knowledge.” This combination of knowledge and enchantment aligns with an ethical connection enhanced by wonder.

‘Shakespeare on television’ has had a consistent presence over the last thirty years, but one of its lesser-known examples is the subgenre of ‘Shakespeare for children.’ A collaboration between BBC Wales and the Russian Soyuzmultfilm Studio, Shakespeare: The Animated Tales (1994), features twelve canonical Shakespearean plays, including Hamlet, his longest play, and The Tempest, his last solo play, through half-hour episodes. Another series, titled Shakespeare in Shorts, released by the BBC Teach Online Program in 2018, adapts six plays into substantially condensed three-minute episodes set to modern music, also including Hamlet and The Tempest. Such changes in scale and narrative reach thus involve complex forms of the hypertextual. This chapter considers how these broadcast and online animations, which present heavily truncated narratives of Shakespearean plays, differ from extensive projects such as BBC Television Shakespeare (1978–1985), An Age of Kings (1960), The Spread of the Eagle (1963), The Wars of the Roses (1966), ShakespeaRe-Told (2005). Through an evaluation of the presence and treatment of (conventionally perceived) iconic lines, moments and episodes in the selected tales, this chapter explores how the synthesis of voiceover narration and the Bard’s lines (both spoken and sung) in each episode accentuates the theatricality of the tales.

Dickinson, the 2019 Apple TV+ series created by Alena Smith, is a very queer YA adaptation. As argued elsewhere, queer and adaptation are parallel terms, both shaping the ways that we approach or reflect on given texts. In other words, ‘To adapt is to modify … To queer something is to make it strange or odd … or transform it. To queer, then, may be to adapt’ (Demory 2019). Dickinson is queer in its representation of the poet as a passionate young woman sexually involved with her sister-in-law (reflecting recent scholarship on the misrepresentation of Dickinson and her manuscripts). But its queerness also queers the literary canon and destabilises conventional narrative forms; in its queer approach to history and time, Dickinson invites and encourages queer spectatorship. In other words, as a ‘revisionist adaptation’ (Stam 2017) the show works to reveal the queerness of the poet and her work that was already there, subverting the conventional biopic through what has been called a ‘dramatization of literary history’ (Lyall 1915) to represent Dickinson as an ordinary young woman. Dickinson’s treatment of time and history thus entreats its viewers to reexamine their preconceived ideas about nineteenth-century literature and culture.

Through a host of characters, Jane Campion’s BBC UKTV series Top of the Lake: China Girl (2017) draws on and reflects a diverse adaptation network, focused on transnational communities such as nations and suburbs and those who threaten their cohesion. From historical Australian serial fiction to Fyodor Dostoevsky’s 1871 novel Devils, revolutionary manifestos and oral histories, Campion appropriates a variety of texts to analyse glocal social embodiment, questioning the white supremacy of Australia’s screen culture, using what Anne Anlin Cheng has termed “Ornamentalism.” As nations converge in the series, Worthy considers the intermedial practices of television culture, including international streaming on OTT platforms, to question the slippery nature of influence and transnationalism, and how Campion interprets them in a modern Australian context. This chapter is forward-looking in its interdisciplinary approach—analysing the limits around the texts deemed appropriate for literary studies as a way of showing television’s capacity to denaturalise certain divisions in society and culture, while also considering the intermedial limitations of texts, and of the media that convey them.

The recent BBC limited web series A Suitable Boy, released on Netflix with much hype, is an open invitation to recall Vikram Seth’s 1993 bestseller novel by the same name (the BBC television drama/miniseries based on A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth, Director: Mira Nair/Shimit Amin, Adapted by Andrew Davies, original release: 26 July–24 August 2020, No. of series: 1, Episodes: 6). While the mixed reaction with which this airing was met is evidence of the general challenge of adapting a literary text to the brand-new web series format, this six-part series, in particular, draws attention to a complex transnational aesthetic dynamic that has hidden problematic reverberations. Going far beyond Oskar Walzel’s 1917 promising direction of the ‘reciprocal illumination of the arts’ through structural comparisons between different art forms, the latter-day underlay of multiple, contesting readings of this adaptational exercise makes that initial pathbreaking assertion seem woefully facile. In my essay, while attempting a reckoning of what is abrogated and what appropriated, I will address the prickly implications of this adaptational exercise which not only opens up multiple cultural perspectives but which also positions itself as a fraught interrogation of the ideas of colony and post-colony in the context of market concerns.

This chapter follows the path that Ralph Ellison initiated in 1952, when he incorporated blues, jazz and gospel elements into the fibre of Invisible Man, his debut novel. I suggest that the path in question—which can be seen as continuing through soul, funk and hip-hop—extends into the FX television show, Atlanta. Its creator, Donald Glover, exploits the same vein of absurdist politics (albeit in a more comic fashion) whilst addressing the central question that animates this tradition: What is Blackness? I then argue that the progenitor of the tradition is Franz Kafka, and that the numerous uncanny and inspirited points of contact between the author’s work and Atlanta forge an intertextual relationship between the two—a relationship that could also be described as ‘adaptational.’ Moreover, just as Atlanta’s Afro-Kafkan interventions accentuate the politics of race, so too does Kafka’s first, abandoned, novel, Amerika, possess transnational elements that highlight ethnic difference, even (briefly) anticipating the notion of négritude. Finally, I suggest that the intertextual dynamic is most pronounced in Atlanta’s much-maligned third season, where the relocation to Europe exposes the undercurrent of frustration that brings German-Czech author and television show into a mutually revealing, transcultural exchange.

This afterword considers the relationship between adaptation studies and television studies. It argues that adaptation studies has neglected television’s extensive use of adaption and suggests a number of reasons for this. It offers a list of topics for consideration, including Origins, National context, Commerce, Access / Archives, Heterogeneity, Authorship, Genre, Stardom, Televisual Aesthetics, Audiences, Technological Change and Continuity.