I’ve had this quandary since the new Fox show called The Passage began earlier this year. I read Justin Cronin’s book called The Passage, maybe a year or two ago and it was SO great. Fully developed post-apocalyptic setting with characters I cared about and rooted for, characters I was proud to like.
Now here comes Fox with their “adaptation” (I’m using the term so loosely I’m afraid a Viral may come through my screen and bite my hand off) and one of the executive producers is none other than Mr. Cronin himself, the writer of the book.
Fox, obviously with Mr. Cronin’s approval, has butchered the heck out of the story, making male characters female, turning time on end, and taking out most of the “heart and soul” of the story and replacing it with great action, but still, action not heart and soul.
At first I watched the beginning episode and liked it, but was disgusted at how the story was being changed so much. I kept watching it though. The book snob in me cannot believe I do this. The TV/movie action lover in me wants to kick the book snob’s ass.
My question is, to this show specifically or any show/movie current or past, how do you justify liking the battered and changed versions of books we see on the screen?
The beginning of the book, dealing with Amy and her mother, was some of the most heart-rending I’ve read, the TV show dumped that and did nothing to evoke the same pathos. I didn’t bother to watch after that. I was hoping the series would be great, but the show did not do enough to hook me.
It depends on if the changed story is still a good story.
For example, The Expanse, TV show has played merry hell with the timeline of the books, introducing characters out of order and such, and has eliminated several story lines, and altered at least one of the better character interactions from the book. But it’s still a great story.
The movie The Running Man pretty much only shares a title with the original book, and the general theme of “reality TV where they kill you”, but its still a fun movie.
A post apocalyptic vampire show like the Passage would be incredibly expensive to make. The books weren’t set RIGHT after the apocalypse like walking dead, it was one or two generations later. It would take a Game of Thrones like budget for sets and CGI to do justice to what the real story is supposed to be. If you want to enjoy the show we got you have to realize there was never any chance of getting the real story on screen.
A show that only pleased those who read the book would flop like a fish.
So when adapting for the screen or TV, you have to cut elements that don’t work well and make changes to those that do with an eye to making it interesting to those who never heard of the book.
By realising that the book I love is still there, completely unchanged, for me to go back to any time, allowing me to enjoy the new thing on its own merits. Same for remakes of beloved movies or shows, or prequels and sequels that completely mess with the canon established by the original. So yes, I might think Prometheus is dumb - it doesn’t actually change Alien, Same for this series and the book trilogy - they are always waiting for you to read them.
But… that’s the story. If you’re not going to make a post-apocalyptic series, why adopt a post-apocalyptic book? Not jumping ahead in time in* the Passage* is like filming a version of Lord of the Rings where the hobbits never leave the Shire. I’m all for free adaptations, but there has to be some resemblance to the original plot, otherwise, why bother?
I was very pleased with the ITV adaptation of Trollope’s “Doctor Thorne”; the characters and incidents they eliminated weren’t particularly relevant to the heart of the story. My only criticism was that they “Downton Abbey”-ized it a bit, with more focus on beautiful people making pithy remarks; it didn’t quite have all of the quaintness of a book written in the mid-19th century.
Removing the apocalypse from the Passage, IMHO, is not equivalent to changing the Victorian setting of Sherlock Holmes - it’s removing the whole crime solving thing. The two examples you gave, and even House, are Holmes stories because they’re about an idiosyncratic genius who solves mysteries using observation, deduction and knowledge. The Passage, in turn, is about humanity’s survival after an apocalypse (it’s also about love and the connection between human beings, but we’ll put that aside for now). If you want, you can set the story in space or in an alternate 19th Century, but the fact that the protagonists are among the few remaining humans left after a great disaster is non-negotiable. Without that, it’s a different story.
SPOILER ALERT: THIS POST WILL TELL YOU THINGS ABOUT THE FINALE, IF YOU DON’T WANT TO HAVE THE STORY RUINED, DON’T READ THIS POST.
These are the things that changed between the book and the movie that bother me the most:
Babcock is now a chick which wants to have relations with the guy who made her a Viral. In the book Babcock was a man, and he called and controlled the Virals.
Amy had a relationship with her mother and with the nun, Lacey, who was a nun, not an ex-G-Woman. In the book, Lacey had a negative experience in her past, and that is what drives her actions, which is never brought into the TV version at all. In the show Amy’s relationship with her mother is basically non-existent and her mother is not shown as loving, not yet anyway.
The best characters, i.e. Peter, Alicia, Hightop and the old Grandma and those with them, are introduced very early in the story. We had to wait for an entire season of the show to have an answer as to whether these characters would be included at all. Obviously they will be, as we now know from the finale. (Side note: Did Amy look like a bad ass (in the words of Wolghast) at the end or what?
The connection that will come at the very end will never be able to be made by the viewers of this show and I think that is very sad. Because this is not a story just about living in a world where 95% of the things which are still alive want to eat you, the action part I get and I totally appreciate it. I love action shows. But for this one, I wanted it to be more about the connection between these characters and how that is what in the end will save them, even if their physical bodies are killed.
I also wanted to say that Digital C brought up the point about the cost of making this show truer to the book would have kept the show from being produced. This is not something I had thought of and I appreciated that comment. It made me look at this version of the story in a different light.
One last thing, I would love to see an interview with Justin Cronin now and have him discuss how he feels about this version of his story.
