12 - Literature on the small screen: television adaptations

Summary

Practices, perceptions, and prejudices: film versus television adaptations

Since the birth of cinema, filmmakers have adapted an eclectic range of sources, including many and varied sub-genres of literature - from classic eighteenth and nineteenth-century novels to “pulp” fiction, from thrillers to romances, from melodramas to ghost stories. The breadth and variety of film adaptations is clearly visible to most cinema-goers. When one speaks of television adaptations, in comparison, one tends to refer more particularly to prolific “classic serials”: relatively faithful adaptations of classic, mostly nineteenth-century, works of literature. So-called classic serials have formed a flourishing and prominent genre on television since the earliest days of broadcasting, and have constituted a significant portion of television's dramatic output.

Television adaptations of classic novels are comparatively more prominent than adaptations of other kinds of sources, not necessarily because they outnumber them, but for two powerful reasons. First, they are more frequently advertised as adaptations, rather than being subsumed into other generic categories - compare The Mayor of Casterbridge (1978), Middlemarch (1994), and Pride and Prejudice (1995) which are clearly marked as classic-novel adaptations, with series such as Miss Marple (1985-1992), Inspector Morse (1987-2000), and The Ruth Rendell Mysteries (1987-2000), which are regarded primarily as detective serials, and only secondarily (if at all) as adaptations. Second, classic-novel adaptations share a generic identity: they “look” similar to one another (or so it is claimed), so that their visibility is heightened, along with their tendency to be categorized straightforwardly as adaptations.