Nothing I’ve seen in the first couple episodes of this series screened for critics has left my jaw on the floor-perhaps I missed something Tolkien readers would have caught-but I also see a show patiently figuring out how to turn a bunch of Tolkien para-texts, not into a novel, not into a movie, but into a TV show. Julia Louis-Dreyfus’ Great New Comedy Is the Kind You Don’t See Anymoreįive Theories for How Succession Will End HBO Max Launched Its Rebrand in Just About the Grossest Way Possible What else I can see, though, is that it’s a show working very hard to build a world that viewers will want to hang around in. I can see the ways in which it adapts not just the books but Jackson’s films, and I can also see the ways in which it’s adapting, say, HBO’s adaptation of Game of Thrones.
I don’t know whether The Rings of Power is a “good” adaptation of whatever it’s an adaptation of. It’s often a labor of love and duty, but it’s also a labor that requires you to know when to depart. Those faces on the screen are not transpositions, they’re interpretations. But even the most fastidious adaptations lay claim to this difference, too. They might demonstrate this by wildly diverging from the original stories or even eschewing those stories wholesale. But the moment these works are adapted, those translations become something on their own. I’m not bragging about all of this reading I haven’t done. And fans can buoy such adaptations in repayment for their dutiful service. A screen adaptation that really seems to capture the element that makes you love your favorite book can be a miraculous thing. Fans of these works are rightly invested in their success.
Martin’s Fire and Blood (the basis for HBO’s The House of the Dragon). The past few weeks alone have seen a widely-reviled new Netflix Jane Austen adaptation as well as long-awaited screen transfers of Neil Gaiman’s The Sandmanand George R.R. John Mandel’s, My Brilliant Friend, based on Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels, and, of course, the multiple installments of the Sally Rooney-verse. For the prestige TV crowd, there’s been The Underground Railroad, based on Colson Whitehead’s novel, Station Eleven, based on Emily St. Marvel and DC’s cinematic universes are exclusively adaptive, and the Harry Potter people just keep making Harry Potter movies undeterred by the rising and falling fortunes of the various people involved. It’s no secret that a great deal of contemporary blockbuster media is rooted in the adaptation of popular books and comics.
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