The common wisdom is that Hulu’s “The Handmaid’s Tale” burned through all the plot from Margaret Atwood’s 1985 source novel by the end of its first season. But that’s not so.
“To be honest, I think we ran out of most of the plot from the book in the pilot,” says executive producer Eric Tuchman. “There were still some elements and incidents that appeared later in the season, and certainly the end of season one is from the book. But [series creator] Bruce [Miller] really used most of the significant set pieces in the first episode.”
As “The Handmaid’s Tale” was renewed again and again through this year’s sixth and final season, the writers had to keep inventing, all the while trying to stay true to the tone, spirit and themes of the book. These are uptown problems, to be sure — as are the 15 Emmys the show has picked up (so far) — but the basic challenge of adapting a novel for the small screen is both daunting and rather common. The current TV landscape is populated with numerous literary adaptations, including “Bridgerton,” “The Perfect Couple,” “Forever” and “Long Bright River” — and there are more to come (e.g., “We Were Liars,” debuting in July).
The challenge is compounded when adapting a work that has already been successfully brought to the screen: How does one refresh the property, updating it for contemporary audiences, while adding elements that will engage and surprise fans of previous iterations without betraying their fandom or the original work?
In the case of creator David E. Kelley’s Apple TV+ series adaptation of Scott Turow’s 1986 legal thriller “Presumed Innocent,” which got the movie treatment in 1990 with Harrison Ford and Bonnie Bedelia as the leads, the tweaks included making the protagonist and his wife an interracial couple (Jake Gyllenhaal and Ruth Negga) and changing the climactic plot reveal.
Frederick Forsyth’s 1971 political assassination thriller “The Day of the Jackal,” which received a successful and (mostly) faithful big screen interpretation by director Fred Zinnemann in 1973, gets a more wholesale reimagining in Peacock’s new series, created by Ronan Bennett.
“Obviously, a 10-episode weekly series is a very different dramatic form, so that allowed us to sort of keep the top line from the original, while doing something radically different and more contemporary and make it more relevant to us,” says “Jackal” executive producer Gareth Neame.
“Jackal” jettisons the novel’s early ’60s period setting and, along with it, the Jackal’s borrowed-from-real-life target, French President Charles de Gaulle, instead having the assassin put his sights on fictional tech billionaire Ulle Dag Charles (Khalid Abdalla).
“He isn’t purely black and white,” says “Jackal” executive producer Nigel Marchant of the targeted billionaire. “This man is trying to do a good thing but ultimately has a kind of God complex.”
The series contains many small nods to the film version, as well as one big one: an almost shot-for-shot re-creation of the Jackal’s long-distance target practice session with a watermelon. More significantly, there was a conscious effort to establish a kinship between the actor playing the Jackal in the series, Eddie Redmayne, and the one who played him in the film, Edward Fox.
“We wanted somebody quintessentially English,” notes Neame. “They’re [both] privately educated, upper-middle class, very suave, sophisticated and well-dressed with Savile Row clothes.”
Even after six seasons and numerous plot inventions, “The Handmaid’s Tale” managed to reassert its kinship with Atwood’s original work, such as in June’s (Elisabeth Moss) Episode 8 opening voiceover, in which she describes how the captive female breeders in the show’s fictional totalitarian theocracy Gilead look in their uniforms, featuring language lifted directly from the novel (“some fairytale figure in a red cloak … dipped in blood”).
“It starts with the two lines,” says executive producer Yahlin Chang. “And that sort of opened up the rest of the voiceover, which I wrote.”
variety.com
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