Television and Serial Adaptation 9781138696358, 9781315524535

Citation preview

Television and Serial Adaptation

As American television continues to garner considerable esteem, rivaling the seventh art in its “cinematic” aesthetics and the complexity of its narratives, one aspect of its development has been relatively unexamined. While film has long acknowledged its tendency to adapt, an ability that contributed to its status as narrative art (capable of translating canonical texts onto the screen), television adaptations have seemingly been relegated to the miniseries or classic serial. From remakes and reboots to transmedia storytelling, loose adaptations or adaptations which last but a single episode, the recycling of pre-existing narrative is a practice that is just as common in television as in film, and this text seeks to rectify that oversight, examining series from M*A*S*H to Game of Thrones, Pride and Prejudice to Castle. Shannon Wells-Lassagne is Senior Lecturer at the University of Burgundy-Franche Comté in Dijon, France.

Routledge Advances in Television Studies

1

Parody and Taste in Postwar American Television Culture Ethan Thompson

2

Television and Postfeminist Housekeeping: No Time for Mother Elizabeth Nathanson

3

The Antihero in American Television Margrethe Bruun Vaage

4

American Militarism on the Small Screen Edited by Anna Froula and Stacy Takacs

5

Appreciating the Art of Television A Philosophical Perspective Ted Nannicelli

6

Politics and Politicians in Contemporary US Television Washington as Fiction Betty Kaklamanidou and Margaret J. Tally

7

Contemporary British Television Crime Drama Cops on the Box Edited by Ruth McElroy

8

Television and Serial Adaptation Shannon Wells-Lassagne

Television and Serial Adaptation

Shannon Wells-Lassagne

First published 2017 by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2017 Taylor & Francis The right of Shannon Wells-Lassagne to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data CIP data has been applied for. ISBN: 978-1-138-69635-8 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-52453-5 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by codeMantra

Contents

Acknowledgments

vii

PART I

Building Blocks 1

Television and Adaptation: Defining Terms

3

2

Beginning, Middle, and End: Structure and Seriality in Television Adaptation

31

PART II

Home Entertainment 3

Familiarity and Novelty: Television Microadaptations

63

4

Crossing Over: Television Adaptation, between Universality and Specificity

88

5

Origin and Intention: Authorship in Television Adaptation 123

PART III

Broadcasting … 6

Here and There and Back Again: TV’s Influence on Popular Fiction

155

Conclusion

187

Works Cited

191

TV Shows Cited 191 Films Cited 194

vi

Contents Books Cited

196

Primary Sources and Literature 196 Secondary Sources: Adaptation 198 Secondary Sources: Television and Film 200 Secondary Sources: Literary Criticism and Theory 203

Articles Cited 205 Webliography 205 Artwork Cited 213

Index

215

Acknowledgments

To my colleagues and friends without whose support and enthusiasm I would not have entered the study of adaptation or television series, and this book would certainly never have been completed: Ariane Hudelet, Sarah Hatchuel, Sylvaine Bataille, Monica Michlin, Laurent Mellet, David Roche, Georges-Claude Guilbert, Claire Cornillon, Donna Andréolle, Florence Cabaret, Delphine Letort—and others. It is a privilege to work with people who are so full of energy and ideas (and who might also occasionally know how to blow off some steam). Special thanks to Sarah Hatchuel, whose careful and ultra-efficient reading of this manuscript was the source of many new ideas and improvements, as well as a lifeline in moments of doubt. Thanks to my parents, whose unfailing support allowed me the time and energy to write this book, but beyond that, whose faith in me has been a mainstay through life’s many twists and turns. And to Tom, who makes everything worth it.

This page intentionally left blank

Part I

Building Blocks

This page intentionally left blank

Television and Adaptation Defining Terms

Given the current popularity of adaptation studies, and the public acclaim for a new “golden age” in television, it seems odd that there should not be a more extended analysis of where the two might meet. Indeed, both adaptation and television are taxed with similar grievous faults, being more commercial than their “purer” brethren1—the cinema in general for television, and the art film in particular for film adaptations—or being too tightly tethered to their texts (whether it be the adaptation’s source text or the reign of the writer/producer in television) to take full advantage of their visual media. The hybrid nature of adaptation, the difficulty adaptation scholars have had in defining what constitutes an adaptation, an allusion, or a simple use of intertextuality, is similar to the heterogeneous nature of television, which was always the repository for film, news, variety shows, or talk shows in addition to the panorama of different types of television fiction we’ll be discussing here. The intersection of these two areas of study, then, center around some of the same issues, which may be either compounded or transformed when television broadcasts adaptations, providing new challenges and surprising innovations for those whose interests lie in either of these disciplines. The relative lack of academic focus on the topic is perhaps all the more surprising given that television’s early dependence on previous forms of narrative is well-known. Like the birth of film, which poached stories, writers, and directors from literature and theater, early television was characterized by its adaptation of radio dramas in particular. In this, television followed in the footsteps of all young media, which tend to smooth the transition of the new technology by using previous narrative forms to showcase their innovations without ruffling the feathers of novice users: The introduction of a mass communication medium normally occurs when an economically viable commercial application is found for a new technology. A third element necessary to the launch, content (i.e., something to communicate), is often treated as something of an afterthought in the process. As a result, adaptations of popular works and of entire genres from previous media tend to dominate

4

Building Blocks the introductory period of a new medium, even as they mutate under the developing conditions. Such was the case in the rise of the television sitcom from the ashes of network radio. 2

It seems clear, then, that adaptation has always been an issue in the television landscape, but perhaps never more so than now. The new golden age of television3 has an unprecedented voracity for content, given the multiplication of sources for television fiction, be it broadcast networks, cable channels, satellite television, or non-broadcast sources like Netflix, Amazon, or web series on YouTube or elsewhere. As a result, the number of adaptations from various media onto the small screen has multiplied, with TV studios seeking tried and true formulas from other media, be it film, literature, graphic novels, websites, etc. In her 2003 work Storytelling in Film and Television, Kristin Thompson lists adaptations from film to TV between the years 1980 and 1998, and names 71 series overall,4 which sounds impressive in and of itself. However, at the time of writing, the Internet Movie Data Base lists 81 television series based on a play, 5 177 series based on a film,6 347 based on a comic,7 and a whopping 1044 series based on a novel;8 of these 439 have appeared since 2000, when Thompson’s statistics end.9 Clearly, a phenomenon that was already significant when Thompson wrote has now reached epic proportions. Though we’ve argued that this is nothing new to television, what is novel about recent adaptations is not just their omnipresence, but also their reception. There has arguably never been such an emphasis placed on the process of adaptation in television. The improved availability of foreign television in the United States has increased familiarity with the original inspiration for American adaptations like The Office (NBC, 2005–2013), The Killing (AMC, 2011–2013, Netflix, 2014), or The Bridge (FX, 2013–2014), making the relationship between source text and adaptation more visible (and more easily subject to criticism). Indeed, one could argue that this is but one aspect of a more general phenomenon, the “forensic fandom” that Jason Mittell studied in relation to the series Lost 10 (ABC, 2004–2010), which delights in digging into the hidden meanings of text.11 Finding similarities and differences between source text and television adaptation and teasing out underlying meanings in the choices showrunners make to keep or discard elements of the original narrative thus becomes another way to interact with the fiction. Indeed, the lure of this adaptation-based “forensic fandom” is so strong that the website The AV Club has two different types of episode reviews for Game of Thrones (HBO, 2011–), one for fans who have read the novels on which the series is based, and one for those who prefer to watch only the series: the show has contributed largely to the debate on the prevalence of spoilers, as book readers argue about sharing their knowledge of plot points from long-published novels.12 Likewise,

Television and Adaptation

5

the new emphasis on “quality television” inaugurated by Robert J. Thompson,13 and the creation of the showrunner as the auteur of new quality shows, has heightened the attention paid to the complexity of narrative as never before. Adaptations, therefore, become the locus of all kinds of debates on new television: the question of the author/auteur, the complexity of serial storytelling and narrative, the specificity of the serial form as compared to its source material, for example. Each of the following chapters will explore one of these issues raised by small-screen adaptation, taking its cue from adaptation critics like Thomas Leitch,14 Christine Geraghty,15 or Deborah Cartmell and Imelda Whelehan,16 all of whom use case studies judiciously to illustrate the multifaceted nature of adaptation. Adaptation studies have come into their own since Bluestone’s first book-length study on the subject.17 Though early studies largely focused on film’s inability to be faithful to its source, given the innate limitations of the medium that many dated back to Lessing’s distinctions between poetry and painting, more recent works have sought to define and study adaptations as such, trying to pinpoint what constitutes the nature and the value of an adaptation without placing it in a hierarchical (and necessarily subordinate) relationship with its source material. This desire to question the established cultural value of the source text smacks of postmodernism, of course, with its tendency to eschew the strict distinctions between high and low culture, though Kamilla Elliot notes in her seminal work The Novel/Film Debate, adaptation is fundamentally a delicate balance of theoretical stances: Adaptation lies between the rock of a post-Saussurian insistence that form does not and cannot separate from content and the hard place of poststructuralism’s debunking of content, of original and local signifieds alike. If words and images do not and cannot translate, and if form does not and cannot separate from content (whether because of their mandated insoluble bond or because content is simply an illusion), then what remains to pass between a novel and film in adaptation?18 With some rare exceptions, where scholars have returned to the fidelity argument,19 adaptation studies have recently tended toward definition (and redefinition) of its ambiguous central term, and reconsideration of adaptations in relation to not only its source material, but the various elements influencing its creation, as per Philippe Marion and André Gaudreault’s theory of transécriture. 20 Though many of these studies offer valuable insight, the application of adaptation studies to television has been fairly rare, an oversight that this work hopes to help correct. To do so, however, it seems crucial to note the specificity of the television adaptation, especially as

6

Building Blocks

compared to its more widely studied cinematic kin. To do so, I’d like to examine two somewhat problematic adaptations to television, 12 Monkeys (SyFy, 2015–) and Caprica (Syfy, 2010). These two series have much in common; not only did they air on the same channel and come from the same science-fiction genre, they adapted well-known and beloved source texts21 (Terry Gilliam’s film 12 Monkeys (1995), and Ron Moore and David Eick’s television series Battlestar Galactica (Syfy, 2003–2009), respectively) making them among the most anticipated new series upon their débuts. They are both in fact re-adaptations, as those source texts were in fact adaptations of earlier works—Chris Marker’s La Jetée (1962)22 and Glen A. Larson’s Battlestar Galactica series (ABC, 1978–1979), respectively. But ultimately, I chose these two series to begin this study of television adaptation because they challenge the very definition of what adaptation is, and thus force us to redefine the term for the television. Indeed, what interests me most about these two series is that they became associated with their wellknown sources only after the fact—thus calling into question their status as adaptations at all. Series creators Terry Matalas and Travis Fickett wrote a script called Splinter about time travel that came to the attention of producer Richard Suckle, who was eager to remake the Terry Gilliam film; 23 Remi Aubuchon intended to make a television series about artificial intelligence before being put into contact with Ron Moore and David Eick, who were interested in expanding the Battlestar universe. Because these shows were retooled to become adaptations—and this reinvention was made public knowledge—it seems that they are a particularly apt example to illustrate some of the particularities of adaptation applied to the art form of television. Unlike most adaptations, where adaptors almost systematically accentuate their desire to reinvent a beloved text, and their respect for the author and source text, here equal weight has been given to both the original idea and its relation to an older text; these became adaptations not because they were originally inspired by their source texts, but because they shared similar themes, similar concerns. Though of course upon broadcast their status as adaptations was predominant, given that the audience does not have access to the original screenplays, but can study the source texts at will, nonetheless the fact that their showrunners were open about this almost coincidental adaptation seems revealing; the admission thus precludes the hierarchisation of the original as the source text, at least in theory. In his article “Adaptation, the genre”, Thomas Leitch suggests that some films are perceived as adaptations even without knowledge of the source text, that markers are signaling its adaptation status independent of its origins. 24 By examining these two series, we will see how this idea can apply to television: what constitutes a television adaptation? How does it identify itself as such, with or without knowledge of its source?

Television and Adaptation

7

Beyond their unusual genesis, of course, readers might also question the choice of these series as adaptations rather than as remakes, reboots, or spin-offs. Addressing this issue demands that we take into account the specificity of the ongoing storytelling of television fiction; the implications of serial storytelling cannot be overstated in understanding the unique nature of the television adaptation. Long-running series in particular tend to fairly quickly outstrip their source material, leading them to almost systematically add in plotlines and characters; the division of story into seasons and episodes (and in shows on non-premium cable channels, into fairly stringently determined acts to leave room for commercial breaks) demands different structures, different beats than those commonly practiced in other media. The model for television adaptation is without a doubt an expansive one, incorporating new ideas, new models alongside the old. In keeping with this, there are forms of adaptation that have been popularized by the small screen, notably the spin-off (as is the case for Caprica), which maintains certain elements (most often characters) from a previous television fiction and places them in a new context (but with a few notable exceptions, 25 in the same genre). The reboot, which begins a well-known story anew (often bringing it into a more contemporary setting) and the prequel, which precedes the original story, have also become very popular in the contemporary television landscape. 26 Caprica is all three of these and was one of the first television prequels to hit the air, 27 while 12 Monkeys is a reboot, transposing the action that in Gilliam’s film took place in the mid-1990s into the year 2015 (and 2043 post-apocalypse). The proliferation of terms intended to categorize these different forms of adaptation seem in keeping with contemporary adaptation theory and what Imelda Whelehan and Deborah Cartmell terms its “will to taxonomize.”28 Though these terms may allow for a more specific analysis of certain elements in these different forms of adaptation (the relationship between television prequels and their link to comic book origin stories, for example), as a first book-length study of television adaptation as a whole, 29 I seek to demonstrate what all these forms have in common, what makes them adaptations, and what forms the adaptation can take in the television format. Indeed, as Thomas Leitch makes clear in his article on the topic, “adaptation” is a term that is perhaps impossible to define. 30 Rather than relegate each of these forms to its own chapter, I seek instead to show how television adaptation interrogates fundamental aspects of both adaptation and serial audiovisual storytelling. “Adaptation”, as I use the term here, will be as expansive as the television format I’m examining. It could perhaps be associated with what Richard Saint-Gelais has termed “transfiction”, where “fictional elements are used in more than one text”;31 though Saint-Gelais himself has ruled out adaptation as a form of transfiction, his definition of

8

Building Blocks

adaptation seems particularly restrictive (and perhaps contrary to the very idea of adaptation): Is it judicious to consider adaptation as a transmedia form of transfiction? Given that an adaptation is based on a common diegetic foundation, we could be tempted to say yes. I hesitate to do so, however, precisely because of this goal of diegetic equivalence, which is incompatible with the profoundly transfictional actions of extrapolation and expansion: adaptations do not intend to continue the story, much less suggest new adventures for the protagonists. […] One might recognize transfictional elements in these transformations; adaptation studies might find fruitful avenues of investigation. But one should keep in mind the somewhat particular nature of these transfictional operations that few readers or viewers will see as diegetic developments of the original, [but rather as … ] (fortunate or unfortunate) deviations from this principle [of equivalence] than as a contribution to the original fiction.32 It seems that adaptation does not necessarily demand diegetic equivalence, particularly in the case of television adaptations. On the contrary, television adaptation also seems a unique opportunity to rethink one of the bêtes noires of adaptation theory, the fidelity debate. 33 As the television media, with its extended duration and serial storylines, makes equivalence more or less impossible, thus it offers new opportunities for a broader understanding of what adaptation can be. In the case of Caprica and 12 Monkeys, approaching them as adaptations allows us to discern better how the exploration of their original themes (artificial intelligence and time travel) are deepened by associating them with preexisting fictional universes. By making the artificial intelligence of Caprica the Cylons, who are both the destroyers and the progenitors of humanity, the show profits from an accrued sense of the dangers and possibilities of technological innovation, and the religious themes underlying the Battlestar universe underscore the notions of identity and reality it explores (do Cylons have a soul? What is religion without the need for faith?).34 By making Splinter into an adaptation of 12 Monkeys, the bleak post-apocalyptic world of Gilliam’s film gives added weight to the urgency of time travel, while fundamental changes to the mythology of the film (notably, that time can indeed be changed) says much about television, which must remain open-ended, rather than closing down all possibilities as in the inevitability (and self-contained nature) of the feature-length film. The definition of the term “adaptation” must be expanded to accommodate the different forms of transfiction present in television, in the same way that television itself is constantly expanding to accommodate new storylines, new characters, new settings, etc. Of course beyond its challenge to the definition of adaptation itself, one of the first aspects of the television adaptation made explicit in the

Television and Adaptation

9

case of Caprica and 12 Monkeys is its commercial nature. These series were clearly greenlit because they became adaptations rather than original series. Their broadcasting channel, Syfy, played a particular part in this: as Battlestar Galactica’s critical acclaim had essentially put the young channel on the map, it was eager to reclaim that status with various expansions of the Battlestar universe. However, unlike the other popular television version of SF, Star Trek (NBC, 1966–1969), the choice was made not to expand the universe as a whole, describing different ships or colonies from the original series, as the many spin-offs of Star Trek did, but instead to focus on origin stories: both Caprica and later web series Battlestar Galactica: Blood and Chrome (Web series, 2012) feature a character named William Adama, one of the principal characters in Battlestar Galactica as the commander of the titular ship, played by Edward James Olmos. Blood and Chrome recounts Adama’s early days as a pilot for the Colonial Fleet, while Caprica recounts the story of his family (the character given the name William Adama ultimately turns out to be the Battlestar Galactica character’s elder half-brother, whose name he shares). Caprica, ultimately, is the origin story of the Cylons, the artificial intelligence that takes on accrued importance in the contemporary reboot as compared to the 70s original series,35 rather than the direct link to Battlestar Galactica that the same Adama character would have implied. 12 Monkey’s series creators have openly admitted that they originally said no when asked to helm a 12 Monkeys reboot, citing the Terry Gilliam motion picture as “a perfect film,”36 but were encouraged by Atlas Entertainment, which had long been seeking to adapt the film property.37 In both cases, it becomes obvious that television adaptation is a commercial effort, a move made to get the series produced—though, as the short-lived nature and extensive mid-season retooling of Caprica proves, not necessarily to allow it to survive. Their status as adaptations definitely ensured publicity and popular interest in the new series that would not have otherwise been afforded unknown pilots; thus for example The Gates, a television series with a similar fan base (it was a supernatural drama, with a proliferation of vampires, werewolves and witches no doubt influenced by the ongoing popularity of the Twilight franchise), 38 opened to little fanfare in the summer, and was often only discovered by fans online, though it, too, appeared in 2010, and was broadcast on major network ABC rather than Syfy’s cable channel. 39 Caprica, however, had its own panel at the 2009 editions of both San Diego’s Comic Con and Paley Fest and premiered its pilot episode there, creating considerable hype for the series, named by many as one of the most anticipated series of 2010.40 Television adaptations are also clearly organic forms, changing as the series continues, with obvious ramifications for any attempts at fidelity to the source text. The genesis of these two series highlights the collaborative and constantly evolving nature of the television series from its very inception as a series, modulating from one central idea to another

10

Building Blocks

according to input from various collaborators (producers, studios, broadcasters, cast, and crew). While Caprica and 12 Monkeys are a particularly obvious example, they only serve to emphasize an aspect of television adaptation that is widespread, if not ubiquitous. In True Blood (HBO, 2008–2014), for example, the first and second seasons remained relatively faithful to the original Sookie Stackhouse novels (Dead Until Dark and Living Dead in Dallas, respectively)41 upon which they were based, but they sharply diverged when it came to killing off the character of Lafayette. Though his death was the impetus for one of the second novel’s major storylines, the character as portrayed onscreen by Nelsan Ellis was such a success with both the showrunners and with the public that they decided to keep him alive, and he was one of the few remaining original characters in the series finale. The popularity of actors, the availability of shooting locations, the audience reaction to certain storylines (and the creative team’s response to that reaction) will inevitably impact the television series, perhaps as much as does the source text. Though neither this nor the commercial considerations just discussed is a real particularity of television—film is also subject to commercial concerns and the whims of circumstance when filming—the duration of television exaggerates these considerations beyond those of feature-length film. George R.R. Martin, the author of the source text for one of the most faithful long-running television adaptations to date, Game of Thrones, has spoken of “the butterfly effect” in relation to adaptations: as in Ray Bradbury’s short story, where a time traveler steps on a butterfly while hunting dinosaurs, only to return to a dystopic future effected by his misstep, the smallest change at the outset of a story can have ever-increasing implications as the story continues.42 Though he has mostly discussed the issue in relation to character deaths, this is even more true of the structural changes inherent to television adaptations, which tend to prefer ensemble casts to the smaller character list of novels, for example, so as not to privilege a single actor who may or may not continue to be available throughout the series (as was the case with the previously discussed True Blood).43 Likewise, while only rarely do films have more than one director (or directing team)—if there is a change of directors, this generally means reshooting the film under new direction—the opposite holds true in television, where it is rare for the either the directors or the creator and/or showrunner to remain unchanged for the duration of the series.44 Both Caprica and 12 Monkeys have changed showrunners—12 Monkeys lost one of its initial showrunners in its second season,45 while Caprica was retooled mid-season with new showrunners to try and reinforce the emotional aspects of the show.46 The change in showrunners was particularly flagrant in Caprica, where a new hand at the helm ultimately led to significant changes in character and plotline. We will be examining the problem of authorship in more detail in Chapter 4, but whether or not one ascribes to the possibility of

Television and Adaptation

11

an “auteur” vision of television, the impact of changing directors, producers, writing teams is visible to the audience in a way that film simply cannot be, because the serial format allows us to view these changes as aired, incrementally. Whether the creators intend to simply remake the source text for television or not, the very nature of the media makes this attempt significantly more difficult than in feature films. The fact that Caprica and 12 Monkeys are ostensibly works of science fiction also highlights another particularity of television adaptation: the complex nature of television genre. Jason Mittell has suggested that television genre is unique, and cannot be seen simply in terms of its content, but also in relation to broadcasting context (channel, hour of broadcast, duration of the individual episode, etc.).47 We have already seen the importance of the broadcasting network, Syfy, in simply getting these shows greenlit, but their generic affinity can also be associated with Syfy, which originally specialized in science fiction, before choosing to diversify with reality shows, wrestling matches, and horror films. In keeping with Mittell’s assessment of the impossibility of generic purity for television programming, these adaptations emphasize the generic hybridity of most television fiction: 12 Monkeys’ showrunners have spoken of their desire to make the show a conspiracy thriller,48 something that was explicitly rejected in the feature film, when the titular shadowy organization ended up being fairly innocuous, and the perpetrator was found to be working alone. Likewise, Caprica’s showrunners were outspoken about wanting to break with the gritty naturalistic style of Battlestar Galactica and its space battles, which set a new genre standard at the time, and chose instead to use a slicker aesthetic and an emphasis on family politics in the style of primetime soaps like Dallas (CBS, 1978–1991) or Dynasty (ABC, 1981–1989). Mittell ultimately argues that this generic hybridity can be more effective at pinpointing the particularities of the genre,49 an opinion that certainly seems to have been shared by their broadcasting channel. The very nature of television as a domestic format, one which largely continues to be enjoyed at home rather than in a public forum like a movie theater (though no longer necessarily on a television screen) suggests yet another particularity of the television adaptation, and a possible justification for the popularity of the reboot, i.e. the proximity of television. Both because of the setting in which it is enjoyed (whether it be at home in front of the television set, or watching an individual tablet, phone, or computer) and the ritual nature of its consumption (either punctuating the weekly schedule of the viewer watching live, or the complete immersion of the new tendency to binge-watch several episodes at a stretch), television is a medium of proximity, creating familiarity in the viewer as they spend hours with the show’s characters, as the seasonal episodes (Christmas episodes, etc.) mirror the passage of time the viewer is experiencing, as shows reference current events in their dialogue and storylines (à la Law and Order’s (NBC, 1990–2010) “ripped

12

Building Blocks

from the headlines” plots, or the sitcom’s tendency to reference current events in its humor), 50 television has become associated with a certain immediacy. André Bazin has defended the remake by saying that the realism one sought in film demanded that these fictions be remade with the latest technological advances to make them newly believable to the audience;51 for television, as a medium not just for fiction but also for news, with its increased proximity to its audience, this need is even more important. The updates made to their source texts (from 1995 to 2015 in 12 Monkeys, from the special effects of the 1970s Battlestar Galactica and even the green screen elements of its reboot to the entire virtual worlds of Caprica) are but one aspect of the contemporary nature of these adaptations, which must update the original premise both in terms of setting and effects, and in terms of contemporary concerns: thus Caprica, like its predecessor, examines contemporary fears about religious fanaticism and its link to terrorism, but also explores the ramifications of the then-recent innovations in streaming media and mobile access to the internet52 through its explorations of “V-World”, a synaesthetic version of the internet available through “holobands”, the Caprica version of Google glasses, 53 and the danger and potential of virtual reality; likewise 12 Monkeys discusses bioterrorism, a topic even more pertinent in the wake of 9/11 and the recent avian flu and Ebola epidemics, and features an Edward Snowden character whose determination to reveal the government’s secrets leads to the release of the deadly virus—and is seen as its equivalent: “I have exposed the truth to the world, and for that I have been labeled a traitor. […] Maybe I should expose this plague to the world.” (1.07) And most importantly, perhaps, television adaptations are concerned with their own nature, both as television shows and as adaptations. In the case of both 12 Monkeys and Caprica, the central conceit becomes a means of examining the nature of what constitutes originality and identity, allowing the shows to further their examination of themselves as they advance their respective plots. Caprica’s central conceit creates clear parallels between the show’s premise and the work of adaptation. As was mentioned earlier, the only character that carries over from Battlestar Galactica to Caprica is ultimately the Cylon robot, and the nature of identity for this robot, downloaded with a perfect replica of the personality of a young woman, Zoe Graystone, now dead in an attack by a religious extremist, is at the heart of the series’ concerns. Is avatar Zoe simply an inferior copy of her creator, a thing, or can she have a life, a soul, an identity of her own? Clearly, the series’ interest in virtual reality and artificial intelligence becomes a metafictional commentary on the responsibilities an adaptation has to its source text and the possibilities that source text offers for a new lease on life of its own. The religious language here becomes a recurrent plotline, as the struggle between monotheistic beliefs and a polytheistic society is at the center of

Television and Adaptation

13

the chain of events that will lead to the birth of the Cylons. In Battlestar Galactica, this was of course also one of the major themes, but in the context of an adaptation, the condemnation of monotheism, the idea of a single god, who has all the answers (“a monotheistic religious philosophy, advocating the worship of a single, all-knowing, all-powerful God”, 1.01, or “a moral dictator called God”, 1.05), becomes reminiscent of a purist interpretation of the source text, to which the adaptation must pledge its fidelity to a superior original form. Likewise, the virtual reality created by Zoe’s father Daniel Graystone, one of the elements that was initially present in Remi Aubuchon’s pitch for a series, and that is new to the Battlestar universe, has the potential to be both “a moral vacuum” (1.05), an accusation familiar to all those blaming television violence for various social ills, as well as a possible expression of true artistry, as avatar Zoe uses this world at will to express feelings, and create new possibilities for herself and her fellow avatar Tamara. This, of course, can be seen as an enactment of debates on the responsibilities of television fictions (and the video games to which the series owes much of its virtual reality aesthetic). If we associate this virtual reality with the process of adaptation, the debate becomes one of imitation versus artistry: the series can indeed be reduced to a simple imitation of the original world of Battlestar Galactica (just as in the series, one of the most popular games in the virtual reality is New Cap City, where Caprica City is reproduced perfectly, but with a film noir aesthetic), 54 but ultimately Caprica allies itself with Zoe, and her new creation rising from the foundations of the previous world of New Cap City. Towards the end of the series, Zoe comes to recognize her potential for individuality and expression when she is faced with a figure that looks like her:55 “You’re not her. You’re not the same. You keep walking in her footprints even after her footprints have stopped. But you didn’t have to. Even she knew that. Now are you going to lie down and pay for her sins or are you going to own yourself?” (1.12) The representation of this virtual reality also seems an attempt to address concerns about the evils of television and its addictiveness. Character Heracles might help Tamara Adama’s avatar brave the difficulties of New Cap City, but ultimately seems lost in the real world. Josef Adama, in his efforts to find his daughter’s avatar, loses himself to the game and virtual stimulants, neglecting his real-world responsibilities to his son William Adama in his quest to find what remains of his daughter who was killed in the pilot’s terrorist attack. Those who have ever spent hours watching a marathon of a television series will, of course, recognize themselves. By the same token, Caprica’s actual inclusion of Caprican television programs, notably the comic news show Backtalk with Baxter Sarno and its inflammatory and divisive effect on the public, seems to point to the possible evils perpetrated by the small screen in this world (and by extension in ours). The fact that characters from the series

14 Building Blocks appear on the show, and manage to find a middle ground, despite the talk show host’s provocations, points to the possible cathartic advantage of narrative fiction, which allows viewers to explore the ramifications of some of the extremes proposed by the media, without actually inflicting harm. Amanda Graystone insists on honesty in her dealings with the media, both when she first realizes her daughter was involved with the STO (Soldiers of the One), who perpetrated the terrorist attack, and later on Backtalk when she defends her daughter from criticism, and this honesty is ultimately her saving grace. The series eventually focuses on the coming together of the Graystone family, monotheist avatar Zoe and her polytheist parents, and this idea of bridging the divide between generations and different forms of belief can easily be associated with a desire to bridge the aesthetic and thematic gap between the 2003 series Battlestar Galactica and its prequel. Likewise, the monotheistic plans for “Apotheosis”, an illusion of paradise to those who martyr themselves in terrorist attacks, can also be associated with the nature of television narrative. While “true believer” Clarice Willow offers this solution as a sure means to guarantee the popularity of the new young religion, as it offers “a religion that removes the need for faith, a religion of certainty that reflects the wonder of all we have created.” (1.10), this certainty of a happy ending is proved false not only within the narrative, where avatar Zoe ultimately destroys what is essentially a recruitment tool for possible terrorists, but also within a television narrative, where happy endings are never guaranteed (a fact that Caprica learned the hard way, as it was forced to abruptly conclude its storylines upon learning that it had been cancelled). Even its status as prequel, where the outcome is seemingly just as certain as the diegetic “apotheosis” for the believers, the fixed ending for the series significantly included some surprises, most symbolically through the true identity of the William Adama character we’ve been following, who is in fact the half-brother of the William Adama character of Battlestar Galactica, thus making the link with its predecessor even looser, a thematic adaptation of similar concerns rather than an adaptation of specific characters to a new environment, as is traditional with the television spinoff (transporting character Frasier Crane from Boston to Seattle as he moves from Cheers (NBC, 1982–1993) to Frasier (NBC, 1993–2004), for example, something I’ll be examining further in Chapter 2). It is no coincidence that though Caprica recounts the height of Colonial civilization, there is no mention of the sacred texts of polytheism, no mention of the Pythian Scrolls that set the last remaining humans of Battlestar Galactica on their quest to find Earth. Instead, we have a religion that permeates the society depicted here, but that can be reinterpreted by different societies, different cultures in many different ways, from the Taurons’ shrines to the departed and their sense of honor and community to the Capricans’ looser sense

Television and Adaptation

15

of morality, in yet another transposition of Caprica’s approach to adaptation. 12 Monkeys, of course, insists on the duality inherent to an adaptation in its very premise: the relationship between present and future, and the central character of Cole, who can travel between them, becomes an avatar for the ideal viewer, who experiences their own form of déjà vu when watching the series refer to elements from the film, who travels back and forth between knowledge of the original and involvement in the new narrative. This impression is emphasized visually in the credit sequence, which reinvents the original very memorable imagery, but adds depth to the original, allowing us to go through a tunnel of these clockwork monkeys rather than leaving them as flat images forming a circle, and giving us a new central figure who gradually appears—an enraged monkey.56 The double vision implied by the concept (and its status as adaptation) becomes clear in episode 4, where Cole is drugged for information and sees past and present overlap, sees his 2015 partner Cassandra in the features of his 2043 former lover Max. The series differs from its cinematic predecessor in a crucial element of its mythology: while in the Gilliam film, it was impossible to change the past, meaning that the

Figure 1.1 Film credits are flat images.

Figure 1.2 Television credits pay homage to the original, but imply depth, and emphasize the gradual understanding of what it is the viewer is seeing.

16

Building Blocks

protagonist Cole was simply attempting to find the source of the virus to save the future rather than helping the past, in the television version, time can be changed. Thus TV’s Cole has a different mission: he wants to stop the virus before it is ever released. In episode 6, the character returns to a future he doesn’t recognize (his partner Cassandra has been killed in the past, which changes the future), and he spends the rest of the episode trying to save both her and the status quo for the future. This fundamental change to the mythology of the 12 Monkey universe has considerable meaning for the TV adaptation—there is the possibility for more than one future from a common present—just as there is the possibility of more than one fiction from a common inspiration. The series continues to concentrate on this idea of duality, as it later posits that there are two possible solutions to the epidemic that sweeps the globe—one can either find a cure, or go back in time and prevent the outbreak altogether, again representing two possible solutions for a single problem, paralleling the two renditions of the source material. The treatment of these two solutions is particularly interesting, because the series seemingly refuses to take sides: we learn that a rival to the Splinter time travel project has actually hit on a cure (thus evoking the implied conclusion of the film), but Jones, the scientist in charge of the time travel project, rejects that solution, preferring to have a clean slate, a new beginning, rather than to continue in a post-apocalyptic future. This idea of erasure of the past (through time travel) is, of course, interesting because it is one of the motivations that Linda Hutcheon suggests for adaptation itself.57 Jones’s selfish motives (she wants her deceased daughter back) and her ruthless actions in rejecting this second solution (killing her rival to avoid leaking the news of the breakthrough in treating the virus) make it difficult for the audience to identify with her completely, while at the same time, of course, the show itself depends on the continuation of her project. The search for a solution, therefore, becomes an allegory for television writing, where the viewer continues to hope for successful closure to the quest narrative—but at the same time wants that closure endlessly deferred, so as to prolong the series itself. If Cole succeeds in his quest to stop the outbreak, the events of the series we enjoyed will be lost, as everything will “reset” according to this new timeline, while if the cure is put into practice for the 2043 survivors of the original outbreak, success will be obtained, but the adventures will cease. The entire show is therefore based on the relationship between the original film and its television sibling, as well as on this fundamental paradox of television writing, the desire for and necessary deferral of closure. The metaphors for adaptation are therefore biological—the story itself is a virus as well, mutating into different forms to survive—and religious, as Cole is subject to various messiah sermons, being told that his

Television and Adaptation

17

mission is “preordained” (1.09). The publicity still for the series makes this religious undercurrent manifest, as the time machine creates a halo around Cole’s head, making him a science fiction Jesus, and transform the titular army of the twelve monkeys into a cult-like group, whose violence is motivated by mystical (and mysterious) beliefs. Cole’s close friendship with brother figure José Ramse, and its decay into a rivalry when each chooses a different solution to the plague, cannot fail to make the viewer think of another religious leader who endured plague and led his people to salvation—though the Biblical Moses’s adopted pharaoh brother is unnamed in the Bible, DeMille’s epic 10 Commandments (Cecil B. DeMille, 1956) names him “Ramses.” This character, who is but a voice in the film (named only José), here becomes a reference to Biblical prophecy as well as to contemporary television: Ramses was of course called “Ozymandias” by the Greeks, therefore referring not just to Percy Bysshe Shelley’s sonnet, 58 but also to its recent use in one of the best-known television series of recent years, Breaking Bad (AMC, 2008–2013). The Shelley reference is perhaps even more fraught in the Syfy show—whereas Vince Gilligan’s series showed a Walter White who was clearly witnessing the destruction of his empire, Ramse seems to literalize the ironic message of the poem. In the original text, “Look on my works ye Mighty, and despair!” is a statement originally made sincerely, where Ozymandias’s works are so impressive that those who see them cannot help their feelings of awe, only to be made ironic by the destruction of those works by nature and time; the statement and the character’s scowling face and metaphorical “feet of clay” are all that remain. In 12 Monkeys, it is ultimately Ramse’s actions that cause the destruction Shelley’s character could not predict: Ramse willingly allows the events leading up to the outbreak to happen (he is thrown back in time himself, and voluntarily avoids changing anything that might keep the epidemic from being released so as to maintain the timeline and to make certain that his son will be born). In so doing, Shelley’s irony is overturned, given its ironic reinterpretation, where destruction represents the character’s hope rather than its disappointment. The final moments of the season finale, where Cole saves Ramses and suggests he will try to find a third possible solution, imply that even this reinterpretation may be overturned, and something new built from this destruction—just as Shelley’s poem was built from both Ozymandias’s initial arrogance and its annihilation. In this sense, the TV series becomes the third option, between the two solutions of cure or prevention, destruction or reset, allowing the narrative to continue. The heavy allegorical importance of Ramse’s name, of course, points to the importance of language in the series: the original film, as we’ve said, simply names Cole’s cellmate José—and the implications in that name from the film are fully realized when in the television series Ramse

18

Building Blocks

is revealed unexpectedly to be a father, like the Biblical Joseph, and becomes willing to sacrifice everything for his son, who can metaphorically wash away the sins of the past for a new future. By adding the name Ramse, once again, the two possibilities—of a Joseph figure, who will accept a new hope for humanity into his family, and of a Ramses figure, who will refuse possible salvation and bring about destruction to once great hopes—are implicit in the very name of the character. As such, language (and here specifically onomastics) becomes a way of suggesting the different paths the series might take from its source. The emphasis on language might also be seen as a reference to the traditions of television. While Gilliam’s film emphasized the many film influences on the narrative, 59 and the theme of surveillance predominates, the series has multiplied references to texts and myths: Gilliam’s Jeff Goines becomes Jennifer Goines in the series, and she becomes an Ophelia character, whose madness, while perhaps not caused by her love for Cole, becomes more acute upon realizing that Cole killed her father; her comment on the subject (“I was a daughter. Daddy’s feeding the worms.” 1.2) and the flower petals that are strewn through the murder scenes she witnesses, seem to make the Hamlet reference fairly clear—given her actions in the final episodes of the first season, one might suspect that she becomes Laertes as well, making the outbreak of the virus inevitable in her need for revenge. Similarly, Cassandra owns a bookstore, which becomes the characters’ refuge from any prying eyes, where the investigation can take place. When Cassandra and her love interest Aaron believe that Cole has succeeded in his quest and are clearing out their notes, Aaron saves Mansfield Park from the trash heap; given that the season ends with Cassandra travelling into the future, and a pre-established family in which she has no place, while Cole stays in 2015, the story of Fanny Price and her arrival at the Bertram family home seems like foreshadowing. As it emphasizes its literary inspirations rather than its filmic ones, the multiplication of literary and mythological allusions may also point to a source text other than the film made by Gilliam: the original screenplay. It is after all the screenplay that is cited in the credits to the series (“Based on the motion picture ‘12 Monkeys’ screenplay by David Peoples and Janet Peoples”), and this emphasis on text is in keeping with the emphasis on writing particular to the TV media, which keeps a fairly consistent writing team—whose ultimate authority tends to be the writers and showrunners rather than the directors, who change every week, as well as on one of the most obvious remnants of the original screenplay written by Terry Matalas and Travis Fickett—the term “splinter”, used to describe time travel, was both the name of the original proposed show—and the name of the pilot. By emphasizing its relation to the text, the show asserts its own status within the traditions of television series and insists that its references are not limited to Gilliam’s film.

Television and Adaptation

19

Ultimately, time travel is not limited to 12 Monkeys; Daniel Graystone cites his desire to go back, to be ready to make any effort to get back his daughter, something that is later made explicit when the company commercializes the avatar program to “eliminate grief” (1.13); in this sense, then, virtual reality and artificial intelligence are also a sort of time machine, allowing users access to an otherwise inaccessible past. This is interesting of course because of Jean-Louis Baudry’s Freudian interpretation of film itself as a vehicle for nostalgia; these technology-based premises would therefore be a sort of reworking of apparatus theory, wherein the necessarily ideological bent of film is hidden behind the seemingly realist images, literally forcing the passive viewer to share the point of view of the filmmakers.60 However, contrary to Baudry’s theories, here the images are explicitly non-realist, and their status as science fiction and as adaptations allow us to take a step back from the story, and examine the implications of said stories more closely. In so doing, they echo Leitch’s conclusions about the adaptation genre, where he remarks that the simple assumption of the texts as adaptations forces the viewer to take a step back, to create critical distance to better appreciate it: Watching or reading an adaptation as an adaptation invites audience members to test their assumptions, not only about familiar texts, but about the ideas of themselves, others, and the world those texts project against the new ideas fostered by the adaptation and the new reading strategies it encourages.61 The push and pull between familiarity and novelty we find in these and all the other adaptations allow us understand the intricacies of television narrative better, and the choices made to permit that narrative stand on its own two feet. Indeed, the final element characteristic of television adaptation is a desire to find its own identity, separate and possibly independent of its source: more than any other form, as a rule television adaptations are unique in their structure and their storylines; the two series I’ve chosen as introductory examples of the form insist both within and without the narrative on being taken on their own terms. Thus, for example, Ron Moore immediately declared that he was going to resist the temptation to follow directly in Battlestar Galactica’s footsteps, and instead create something new: The intention of ‘Caprica’ is to make it really its own show. It was really important to us as we created the show to create something […where] you had to be a fan of ‘Battlestar Galactica.’ Here is a series that stands on its own, that is part of this larger universe but is not predicated on knowledge of—or love of—the original. That was very important to us.62

20

Building Blocks

Similarly, Travis Fickett cites another recent loose adaptation as an example of a show that stands on its own without simply imitating the original: I think Fargo is a really good example of how you take a perfect movie where you’re like, “Why would you ever make that a show?,” and make it a spiritual successor. You take the core elements and the essence of what that is, and you play with that episodically. I think Fargo worked beautifully. It did it so well. It felt like Fargo, but they weren’t telling the same story, at all. What would be the point? You’d just be watching them hit those benchmarks, and that’s not fun or interesting.63 Within the story, of course, the characters do refuse to simply follow well-trodden paths—Cole refuses the cure that ends the film, while Zoe refuses to simply accept that she is her human inspiration, instead choosing her own identity. In this, once again, we have an explicit foregrounding of adaptation—and an explicit rejection of simple mimicry, of the crutch of fidelity. Instead, these new series inject their versions of the fictional environments with new themes, and new (and ever-evolving) meanings—most notably, an analysis of its nature. As the fidelity debate continues to rage on despite dismissals from theorists, television adaptations, therefore, seem a particularly interesting subject of study. As this first introductory chapter has dealt with the nature of television adaptation, and how it differs from other forms of adaptation into other media, so chapter two will deal more specifically with the structural ramifications of adaptation into an episodic form; I refer to these first two chapters as “building blocks”, which seek to identify the unique nature of television adaptation. Television fictions can be divided very generally into two categories according to their duration: long-form series have no fixed end point and hope to continue the basic premise of their story indefinitely, while short-form series are conceived with a given number of episodes in mind.64 Adaptations tend to vary quite a bit according to their duration (and the corresponding format): traditionally, long-form television adaptations have been sitcoms, which systematically reboot after each half-hour, coming back to their original premise for the next episode, while short-form adaptations are generally hour-long episodes that advance the plot toward a pre-determined ending. Chapter two will, therefore, examine how these two forms of television deal with adaptation, and its ramifications on television structure: the sitcom, with its eternal beginnings, and the miniseries, with its fixed ending. In so doing, I will demonstrate how the study of these sitcoms allow us to better understand their distinctiveness from other forms of adaptation, calling into question some of our preconceived notions of how adaptation works; conversely, the study of the short-form television

Television and Adaptation

21

adaptation will allow us to better understand television fiction, as I argue that it has had more of an impact than has been generally realized on serialization, one of the central tenets for determining “quality television.” In the next section of the book, “Home entertainment”, I will be examining familiar paradoxes of adaptation and their unique manifestations in serial television, given that small screen fictions have long been characterized by their proximity to the viewer. Chapter 3 will deal with another form of adaptation endemic to television that I have called the “microadaptation”, where an adaptation occurs not over the course of an entire series, but only for one episode. It is a thematic episode adapting a specific text. In so doing, I will also be examining the fundamentally paradoxical nature of both adaptation and television’s attractions for the viewer, caught between familiarity and novelty. Adaptation exists only because of some sort of awareness of its source (whether it is the general premise or a thorough knowledge of the text); likewise, though the viewer is never free from the prospect of sudden change, overall television fiction depends on consistency—be it in the characters (whose extended presence on screen allows for discovery of foibles no doubt lost to a feature-length film), setting (either geographical or narrative, with familiar locations or plotlines), and (if the series is to be successful) a dependable time and date to find your favorite show. However, this familiarity must be offset by novelty if viewer familiarity is not to breed contempt. I suggest that one means of treating this necessary tension between familiarity and novelty is through the recurrent use of microadaptations in television. Though “Microadaptation” is a new term, the phenomenon itself is very familiar, as in the innumerable versions of  A Christmas Carol  adapted to different series for the Christmas season, Moonlighting’s (ABC, 1985–1989) adaptation of The Taming of the Shrew (“Atomic Shakespeare”), or more recently  Castle’s (ABC, 2009–2016) rendition of Rearview Window (“The Lives of Others”). As these examples indicate, these microadaptations largely take place in comic series, be it the sitcom or the more recent hybrid drama-comedies, or “dramedies”, using more “high culture” sources. In so doing, the microadaptations of course foreground novelty, exchanging the expected plotline, the familiar setting for another. The comic bent of this trope is understandable in this context: the looser seriality typical of the comic mode allows for the change of tone and plot necessary to make these adaptations work, while the distance from the original characters and setting can heighten the comic effect (creating the distance Henri Bergson tells us is so crucial to comedy). The pleasure of surprise is heightened by the cultural cachet of well-known stories, imbuing the series with enhanced stature. However, the microadaptation does not forgo the familiarity necessary to television fiction: the story is of course chosen for its applicability to the characters and the concerns of the host series, and chooses a canonical text that will itself be familiar

22 Building Blocks to the viewer. Moreover, these thematic episodes may, in fact, advance character concerns or reinforce characterization, making the momentary novelty a means of ultimately enhancing viewer familiarity. These microadaptations, therefore, become a sort of crystallization of the delicate tension between novelty and familiarity necessary for successful TV. Indeed, the series Community (NBC, 2009–2014, Yahoo, 2015–) has made the microadaptation its very premise, making it a sort of anthology of adaptations: its small but rabid fanbase is a testament to the power of these thematic episodes (while the relatively feeble audience share demonstrates the dangers of repeatedly adapting different genres and texts, where novelty may sometimes impede the proximity of coherent narrative). Adaptation has long been a favored means of reappropriating a story from one form, from one culture, or from one period to another. Its use in television tells us much of the paradoxical nature of reappropriation, as a means of insisting on the universality of a given story, while also emphasizing the specificity, the uniqueness, of each iteration iteration, something I will be examining in depth in chapter four. One of the more interesting phenomena in contemporary US television is that of transnational adaptation: be it comedies like The Office or dramas like Homeland (Showtime, 2011–) or The Bridge, American television has discovered television abroad—and decided that it must be adapted to a purely American idiom and context. This is particularly interesting in the case of British originals, like The Office or House of Cards (Netflix, 2013–), which have no apparent language barriers to be crossed, and no obvious need for “adaptation”, but which studios clearly thought needed their own American counterparts, to be adapted to American television genres (the sitcom) or American culture (be it office or national politics). At the same time, the study of one of the remaining “big three” networks, whose target audience is as broad as possible in the contemporary television landscape, causes adaptation to take on an entirely different significance. Indeed, ABC’s continued efforts at transmedia storytelling suggests on the contrary that TV is a vector for bringing adapted properties into increased proximity with the viewer, beginning with Lost and its well-known use of transmedia (cf. Henry Jenkins’s Convergence Culture), and continuing today, be it with series that reimagine worlds explored in film, like Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (ABC, 2013–) (which recounts tales of the non-superpowered agents of Marvel’s Cinematic Universe), or Once Upon a Time (ABC, 2011–) (which appeals to parents by adapting and subverting recent and classic Disney films to more adult themes); or with series that continue on in literature, as in (ABC, 2009–2016) (whose titular character writes novels that then appear at viewer’s local booksellers—novels that are reportedly being adapted into a TV series in turn). Here, television is both the springboard for multi-platform storytelling and the echo of the multinational

Television and Adaptation

23

industry of the mass media (ABC belongs to Disney, as does Marvel, explaining the cross-promotion of one media by another). In fact, this seemingly contradictory reception of television as both culturally specific and universally multi-platform ultimately suggests the omnipresence of both adaptation and television as systems of proximity, even immersion, for the viewer: whatever the appearance, TV functions on a model of proximity to its audience, be it by bringing the foreign product closer to our own experience, or making the narrative proliferate onto different platforms, allowing us to immerse ourselves in these fictional worlds. Adaptation and television share the common problem of authorship, and an analysis of this quandary for academic study will be central to chapter five. While television, particularly in the American system, tends to have entire writing teams, which change as the series continue, adaptations must necessarily share authorship with the originators of the source text, not to mention the various iterations of the screenplay, which may have passed through many hands before the final draft, and is then subject to the input of the director, the producers, and the studio. Given that Romantic thought has impacted Western society’s conception of the author as a locus of art and its originality, the problematic status of the author for both adaptation and television may partially explain the tendency to downplay their status as art forms. Chapter five examines this problem of authorship and art through a case study of Hannibal (NBC, 2013–2015) and Bates Motel (A&E, 2013–), which interrogate the problematic nature of the author (and the auteur) for both form and practice. Though the horror genre has been more rare on American television than on the silver screen, it has often been linked to adaptation, from The Twilight Zone (CBS, 1959–1964) or The Munsters (CBS, 1964–1966) to Dexter (Showtime, 2006–2013), and has of course been one of the more popular genres for examination by film theorists. 2013’s television season’s featured serial killers were adapted from iconic sources: Hannibal is inspired by Hannibal Lecter and his film incarnations, and Bates Motel is a prequel to Robert Bloch’s Psycho, as adapted to the screen by Hitchcock. In so doing, the showrunners go beyond the economic reasons for using a popular text to find a pre-sold audience, and instead seek to use adaptation, as film once did, to insist on the artistic possibilities of the small screen, to suggest paradoxically that television perhaps can don the mantle of auteur cinema, though the notion of an author is perhaps even more fraught than for the cinema. In so doing, the proximity that has characterized these televisual forms of adaptation creates its own form of paradox, where the showrunner-cum-auteur becomes a distancing mechanism necessary for artistic and aesthetic appreciation, all while reinforcing their proximity (notably through the press and social media) to entice viewers.

24 Building Blocks Finally, in chapter six, I would like to turn the tables. The third part of the book, “Broadcasting …” will look “beyond the screen”, examining the adaptation of television’s concepts and structures into other media. In her study The Anxiety of Obsolescence: The American Novel in the Age of Television,65 Kathleen Fitzpatrick used Harold Bloom’s The Anxiety of Influence 66 to suggest the hostility many contemporary novelists feel at the upstart popular form of television: just as Bloom argues that each generation of artists must reject the artistic assumptions of its predecessors, so novelists feel television has this same Oedipal urge. However, in this final chapter I would like to suggest that on the contrary, television can be a productive form of inspiration for creating new works (like Jennifer Egan’s Goon Squad, inspired by The Sopranos (HBO, 1999–2007)) or creating new readers (like the virtual reading clubs for series like Lost or Mad Men (AMC, 2007–), which attempt to read all the books mentioned on each of the series, or quite simply the impact of Oprah Winfrey’s televised “Book Club” on American book sales). To do so, I will examine two case studies where television, and specifically television adaptation, has reinvigorated the writing of literature. The hugely influential 1995 BBC adaptation of Pride and Prejudice, I argue, is as much a source text for the first popular “chick lit” novel, Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones’s Diary, as was the original novel by Jane Austen: the new genre spawned by Fielding’s success is characterized not only by a tendency to work in the media industry (thus foregrounding the metatextual nature of adaptation in each of the novels), but also an emphasis on material things (shopping, shoes, etc.) that ultimately parallel the “museum aesthetic” Andrew Higson describes as being typical of Heritage drama. His critiques of these period adaptations echo the critiques of the chick lit genre, taxed with a tendency to focus on form rather than content. The fact that many of these novels also feature a heroine swooning over different period television adaptations only cements this association. Popular comic author Jasper Fforde’s Thursday Next series may seem a less obvious choice for novels influenced by television: the titular character works in a fantastical world where books are cherished, where children swap baseball cards of famous eighteenth-century authors, where Richard III is a performance treated with the same interactive zeal as The Rocky Horror Picture Show in our own. Nonetheless, the author himself admits to being influenced by 1970s sitcoms and reality television; by applying these well-used tropes to canonical literature (Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, Great Expectations), I argue that he is essentially creating a farcical version of the classic television serial, where television tropes are just as crucial as the original work—and by mixing these different genres (the period adaptation, the reality television show, the sitcom), Fforde’s manic pace ultimately gives the sensation of frantically zapping through channels, giving the reader a comic version of

Television and Adaptation

25

television itself. In both cases, these novels are resolutely popular forms, that may not always be taken as seriously as those who lament “The Literature of Exhaustion” as does John Barth, but who instead deal with the possibly troubling aspects of mass media culture through humor and a fertile mixture of literary and audiovisual allusions and tropes. As such, television adaptations become a fundamentally different enterprise from film adaptation—and one deserving of closer analysis. In his examination of the sociological impact of adaptation in film noir, Barton Palmer suggests what adaptation offers to film: “‘How does adaptation serve the cinema?’ A short answer, I suggest, is that adaptation provides the cinema not only with new texts but with new norms and models (conceived, in the neoformalist sense, as systems of norms).”67 In this book, I will demonstrate how TV adaptation offers new norms, new models, to television as well as to adaptation.

Notes 1 This is of course a reference to André Bazin’s essay “Pour un cinéma impur. Défense de l’adaptation” in Qu’est-ce que le cinéma ? (1976), Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1986. See also Imelda Whelehan and Deborah Cartmell’s recent work on adaptation also inspired by Bazin’s essay, Screen Adaptation: Impure Cinema, London/New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. 2 David Marc, “In search of the radio sitcom,” The Sitcom Reader: America Viewed and Skewed, Mary Dalton, Laura R. Linder, Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005, 15. 3 According to different critics, this is the second or the third golden age of television; see for example Robert J. Thompson’s classic text Television’s Second Golden Age. Robert J. Thompson, Television’s Second Golden Age: From Hill Street Blues, NY, NY: Continuum Publishing, 1996. 4 Kristin Thompson, Storytelling in Film and Television, Boston, MA: Harvard UP, 2003, 84. 5 http://www.imdb.com/search/keyword?keywords=based-on-play&ref_=kw_ ref_typ&sort=moviemeter,asc&mode=advanced&page=1&title_type= tvSeries. Accessed February 2015. 6 http://www.imdb.com/search/keyword?keywords=based-on-film&sort=moviemeter,asc&mode=simple&page=1&title_type=tvSeries&ref_=kw_vw_smp. Accessed February 2015. 7 http://www.imdb.com/search/keyword?keywords=based-on-comic&ref_=kw_ ref_typ&sort=moviemeter,asc&mode=advanced&page=1&title_type= tvSeries. Accessed February 2015. 8 http://www.imdb.com/search/keyword?keywords=based-on-novel&ref_=kw_ ref_typ&sort=moviemeter,asc&mode=advanced&page=1&title_type= tvSeries. Accessed February 2015. 9 56 based on a film, 213 based on a novel, 155 based on a comic, and 15 based on a play. Of course, these statistics must be qualified, as they refer to international and not just American shows, and there may be some argument over the designations (the 2015 version of The Odd Couple, for example, is “based on a play,” but many would argue that it is the adaptation of either the film or the sitcom that followed it), but the phenomenon itself seems indisputable.

26

Building Blocks

10 Jason Mittell, “Sites of participation: Wiki fandom and the case of Lostpedia,” Transformative works and cultures, vol. 3, 2009. http://journal. transformativeworks.org/index.php/twc/article/view/118/117. Accessed July 2014. 11 Mittell has since gone on to distinguish between what he terms “drillable” texts and “spreadable” texts, those that encourage deeper analysis of the series itself, and those that encourage a proliferation of the created universe through diverse professional and fan productions, respectively, making the archeological metaphor all the more pertinent. Jason Mittell, “Forensic Fandom and the Drillable Text,” http://spreadablemedia.org/ essays/mittell/#.VO8X4EJhegM. Accessed January 2015. 12 The title of Neela Debnath’s article is very evocative: “Don’t moan about spoilers for Game of Thrones, the books were published years ago.” The Independent, April 6, 2014. http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/ dont-moan-about-spoilers-for-game-of-thrones-the-books-were-publishedyears-ago-9241767.html. Accessed June 2014. 13 Op. cit., Television’s Second Golden Age. 14 Thomas Leitch, Film Adaptation and Its Discontents: From Gone with the Wind to The Passion of the Christ, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins, 2007. 15 Christine Geraghty, Now A Major Motion Picture, Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2008. 16 Op. cit., Screen Adaptation. 17 George Bluestone, Novels into Films, Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins UP, 1957. 18 Kamilla Elliot, The Novel/Film Debate, Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003, 3–4. 19 See for example Colin McCabe, Kathleen Murray, eds., True to the Spirit: Film Adaptation and the Question of Fidelity, Oxford: OUP, 2011. 20 “Transécriture and Narrative Mediatics: The Stakes of Intermediality,” in Robert Stam, Alessandra Raengo, eds., A Companion to Literature and Film, Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005, 58–70. 21 I will be using the term “source text” regardless of the media in which the source was originally created (novel, short story, film, television series, etc.); for the purposes of this book, “text” is therefore to be taken very broadly, as any form of signs that holds meaning, rather than as a necessarily written work. 22 For an analysis of Gilliam’s film as a foreign remake of La Jetée, see Raphael Moine. Raphaëlle Moine, “Théories et pratiques du remake,” Remakes  : Les films français à Hollywood, Paris: CNRS Éditions, 2007, Open Edition 2013. http://books.openedition.org/editionscnrs/683. Accessed July 2015. 23 Heather M, “Aaron Stanford, Travis Fickett, and Terry Matalas Talk 12 Monkeys [Exclusive],” TV Goodness, April 10, 2015. Available online: http://www.tvgoodness.com/2015/04/10/aaron-stanford-travis-fickettand-terry-matalas-talk-12-monkeys-exclusive/. Accessed March 2015. 24 Thomas Leitch, “Adaptation, the genre,” Adaptation Vol. 1, No. 2, 2008, 106–120. 25 Trapper John M.D. (CBS, 1979–1986), a dramatic spin-off of the long-running sitcom M*A*S*H (CBS, 1972–1983), for example. 26 “Now prequel TV series are all the rage in Hollywood, another way of maintaining a brand with a built-in audience. I won’t say it’s part of the creative bankruptcy, though, because a number of the shows are well done and even sometimes quite clever.” Christopher Campbell, “What TV Show Should Get a Prequel Series While the Trend is Still Hot?,” Film School Rejects, http://filmschoolrejects.com/features/tv-series-prequels.php. Accessed February 2015.

Television and Adaptation  27 27 This was not uncommon in the area of children’s animated series, where shows like Muppet Babies (CBS, 1984–1991) or Iron Man: Armored Adventures (Nicktoons, 2009–2012) sought to make their protagonists younger so as to appeal to a younger demographic, but until Caprica, it was fairly rare in the prime-time slot. 28 “What fascinates us here is not so much the taxonomies themselves, which reflect disciplinary preferences and often the privileging of one medium over another, but this will to taxonomize, which is symptomatic of how the field has tried to mark out its own territory. These various and sometimes conflicting schemes of categorization show how many directions the field can take, as well as the multitudinous ways in which the field connects with the originary disciplines of literary and film studies, constantly widening its purview and possibly trampling on sacred ground.” Deborah Cartmell and Imelda Whelehan, The Cambridge Companion to Literature on Screen, Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007, 2. 29 Sarah Cardwell’s excellent book on television adaptations of canonical texts, Revisiting Adaptation, will be discussed at length in the second chapter. The quality and importance of her work is not in question, but her book dealt only with limited-run adaptations rather than with the variety of forms television adopts. Sarah Cardwell, Adaptation Revisited: Television and the Classic Novel, Manchester UP, 2002. 30 Thomas Leitch, “Adaptation and Intertextuality, or, What isn’t an Adaptation, and What Does it Matter?,” in A Companion to Literature, Film, and Adaptation, Deborah Cartmell, ed., Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012, 87–104. 31 “[…] il y a transfictionnalité lorsque des éléments fictifs sont repris dans plus d’un texte.” Richard Saint-Gelais, Fictions transfuges : La transfictionnalité et ses enjeux, Paris: Seuil, 2011, 19–20, author’s translation. 32 “Est-il judicieux de considérer l’adaptation comme une forme (transmédiatique) de la transfictionnalité  ? Sachant que c’est sur la base d’une communauté diégétique que s’établit une adaptation, on pourra être tenté de répondre par l’affirmative. J’hésite malgré tout à le faire, en raison précisément de cette visée d’une équivalence diégétique, incompatible en principe avec les opérations exemplairement transfictionnels que sont l’extrapolation et l’expansion  : les adaptations n’ont pas pour vocation de prolonger l’histoire et encore moins de proposer de nouvelles aventures des protagonistes. […] Rien n’interdit de reconnaître une portée transfictionnelle à ces transformations; les études de l’adaptation trouveraient là un ensemble de questions fructueuses. Il faut cependant garder à l’esprit le statut quelque peu particulier de ces opérations transfictionnelles que peu de lecteurs ou de spectateurs, me semblent-ils, verront comme des développements diégétiques de l’original, [mais …] seront davantage vues comme des déviations (heureuses ou malheureuses) à ce principe [d’équivalence] que comme une contribution à la fiction originale.” Ibid., 35. 33 This will be discussed in further detail in Chapters 3 and 4. 34 The adepts of monotheism propose using virtual reality to download an avatar of their martyrs into a digital paradise, thus guaranteeing salvation to its followers that ostensibly requires no “leap of faith.” 35 While the Cylons from the original series were simply evil aliens, without complex motivation or ambiguity, the 21st century Cylons were made by man, develop models that are indistinguishable from humans, and can actually crossbreed with their human creators. Clearly, the Cylons are a more complex entity in the more recent rendition.

28

Building Blocks

36 Christina Radish, “12 MONKEYS Interview: Creators Terry Matalas & Travis Fickett and Showrunner Natalie Chaidez,” Collider, January 23, 2015. http:// collider.com/12-monkeys-tv-show-terry-matalas-travis-fickett-interview/. Accessed March 2015. 37 Atlas Entertainment was the original producer of the Gilliam film. Heather M, “Aaron Stanford, Travis Fickett, and Terry Matalas Talk 12 Monkeys,” op. cit. 38 Though I by no means intend to insinuate that science fiction and fantasy are equivalent, and I realize that the debate defining the boundaries between the two genres is a long and heated one, for the needs of this study I will say that both genres share a devoted fanbase and a tendency to explore real-world problems through non-realist means. 39 John Consoli, “ABC’s Struggling ‘The Gates’ a Hit Online,” The Wrap, July 16, 2010. http://www.thewrap.com/abcs-gates-draws-most-online-uniqueviewers-june-19319/ Accessed April 2015. 40 Daniel Fienberg, “25 Anticipated TV Premieres, Returns and Finales for 2010: ‘Lost,’ ‘Dollhouse,’ ‘Caprica’ and more,” Hitfix, January 1, 2010. http://www.hitfix.com/galleries/25-anticipated-tv-premieres-returns-andfinales-for-2010-lost-dollhouse-caprica-and-more#11. Accessed January 2015; Lewis Wallace, “Review: Caprica Spins Religion, Race Into Worthy Galactica Prequel,” Wired, April 20, 2009. http://www.wired.com/2009/04/ review-caprica/. Accessed January 2015. 41 Charlaine Harris, Dead Until Dark, New York: Ace Books, 2001; Living Dead in Dallas, New York: Ace Books, 2002. 42 Adam Pasick, “George R.R. Martin on His Favorite Game of Thrones Actors, and the Butterfly Effect of TV Adaptations,” New York Magazine, October 20, 2011. http://www.vulture.com/2011/10/george_rr_martin_on_ his_favori.html. Accessed January 2012. 43 I have discussed this elsewhere: “High Fidelity: Adapting Fantasy Novels to the Small Screen,” TV Series n° 6, Florence Cabaret, Claire Cornillon, 2014, 109–122. Available online: http://media.wix.com/ugd/93a9a2_d89bc328f66b4db9bf65f807ecc6c70c.pdf. 44 Of course this is relative, as showrunners usually stay with a show several years, while directors can and do change from one episode to the next. This will be discussed at length in chapter 5. 45 Marc Berman, “Syfy Renews Drama ‘12 Monkeys’ for Season 2,” TV Media Insights, March 13, 2015. http://www.tvmediainsights.com/highlights/ syfy-renews-drama-12-monkeys-season-2/, Accessed May 2015. 46 Kevin Murphy, who had more of a background in soap operas (he was co-executive producer of Desperate Housewives, ABC, 2004–2012) than in science fiction, was asked to helm the series during the mid-season hiatus. Kevin Murphy commentary track, Caprica, 1.10. 47 “Television genre is best understood as a process of categorization that is not found within media texts, but operates across the cultural realms of media industries, audiences, policy, critics, and historical contexts.” Jason Mittell, Genre and Television: From Cop Shows to Cartoons in American Culture, New York, NY: Routledge, 2004, xii. See also François Jost, “La promesse des genres,” Réseaux, Vol. 15, No. 81, 1997, 11–31. 48 Joseph McCabe, “Exclusive: Producers Travis Fickett and Terry Matalas on Time Travel, Gender Swapping, and Syfy’s 12 Monkeys,” The Nerdist, January 17, 2015. http://nerdist.com/exclusive-producers-travis-fickett-andterry-matalas-on-time-travel-gender-swapping-and-syfys-12-monkeys/. Accessed March 2015.

Television and Adaptation

29

49 “[…] the practice of generic mixture has the potential to foreground and activate generic categories in vital ways that ‘pure’ generic texts rarely do.” Mittell, Genre and Television, op. cit., 155. 50 For a fascinating take on this aspect of the television sitcom, see Colin Irvine, “Why 30 Rock Rocks and The Office Needs Some Work: The role of Time/Space in Contemporary Sitcoms,” in Melissa Ames, ed., Time in Television Narrative: Exploring Temporality in Twenty-First-Century Programming, Jackson, MS: UP of Mississippi, 2012, 218–231. 51 André Bazin, “À propos des reprises,” Cahiers du cinéma, No. 5, September 1951, 52–56. Quoted in Jennifer Forrest and Leonard R. Koos, Dead Ringers: The Remake in Theory and Practice, Albany, NY: State University of New York, 2002, 20. 52 Hulu, the first provider of streaming content, was made public in 2007, the same year as the appearance of the iPhone, thus making internet access entirely mobile. Cameron Chapman, “The History of the Internet in a Nutshell,” Six Revisions, November 15, 2009. http://sixrevisions.com/ resources/the-history-of-the-internet-in-a-nutshell/. Accessed May 2015. 53 This is somewhat anachronistic, as Google glasses were actually introduced to the public in 2012, but it is but one example among many of the occasionally prescient nature of science fiction. 54 This is a clear reference to another adaptation that was less than faithful to its source, but ended up spawning an entire subgenre of science fiction; I am referring, of course, to Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982), and its resultant genre, Tech Noir. 55 This appears to be the Caprica version of the angel/messengers that already appeared in Battlestar Galactica both in the form of Starbuck and Number 6; Kevin Murphy confirmed that the showrunners sought various actors from the original Battlestar series to play the role (including Tricia Helfer and James Callas), but as they were unavailable, Alessandra Torresani played the part. Episode commentary, Caprica, 1.10. 56 Of course this also reflects current aesthetic styles, where three-dimensional and computer-generated imagery have become increasingly popular in both television and film credits, but the emphasis on this reworking of the credit sequence seems to suggest the series’ intention to delve further into the mythology of the film, and perhaps unearth something very different in the process. 57 “Of more interest to me is the fact that the morally loaded discourse of fidelity is based on the implied assumption that adapters aim simply to reproduce the adapted text. Adaptation is repetition, but repetition with replication. And there are manifestly many different possible intentions behind the act of adaptation: the urge to consume and erase the memory of the adapted text or to call it into question is as likely as the desire to pay tribute by copying.” Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Adaptation, New York/Oxon: Routledge, 2006, 7. 58 “I met a traveller from an antique land / Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone / Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand, / Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown, / And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command, / Tell that its sculptor well those passions read / Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things, / The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed: / And on the pedestal these words appear: / ‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: / Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’ / Nothing beside remains. Round the decay / Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare / The lone and level sands stretch far away.” Percy Bysshe

30

59

60

61 62

63 64

65 66 67

Building Blocks Shelley, Ode to the West Wind and Other Selected Poems, London: Dover, 1993, 5. Most notably through the Hitchcock marathon that Cole and Kathryn attend while hiding from the authorities, where Gilliam shows excerpts from both the famous sequence of Vertigo where X describes her supposed previous life by pointing at the rings of a tree trunk: “There I was born, and there I died.” and from The Birds, and where Cole chooses to go to the Florida Keys based only on advertisements he’s seen on various screens. See also Laura Rascoli, “Time travel and Film Spectatorship in 12 Monkeys and Strange Days,” in Gregg Rickman, ed., The Science Fiction Film Reader, New York, NY: Limelight Editions, 2004, 355–368. This thought is partially inspired by Laura Roscoli’s article on the Gilliam film, though the conclusions drawn are my own. Laura Roscoli, “Time Travel and Film Spectatorship,” op. cit. Jean-Louis Baudry, “Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus,” Film Quarterly, 28, no. 2 (Winter 1974–1975), 533–542. Thomas Leitch, “Adaptation, the Genre,” op. cit., 116. Brian Ford Sullivan, “Live at the Paley Festival: Sci Fi’s “Battlestar Galactica/ Caprica,” The Futon Critic, April 20, 2009. http://www.thefutoncritic.com/ interviews/2009/04/20/live-at-the-paley-festival-sci-fis-battlestar-galacticacaprica-31105/20090420_battlestargalactica/. Accessed January 2015. Christina Radish, “12 MONKEYS Interview,” op. cit. These are referred to as miniseries in the United States and serials in Great Britain; since the British term can all too easily be confused with the serial nature of storytelling in television, I will be avoiding this term, and using either “short-form” or “miniseries.” Kathleen Fitzpatrick, The Anxiety of Obsolescence: The American Novel in the Age of Television, Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt UP, 2006. Available online: http://www.anxietyofobsolescence.com/. Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (1973), Oxford: OUP, 1997. R. Barton Palmer, “The Sociological Turn of Adaptation Studies: The Example of Film Noir,” in Robert Stam, Allessandra Raengo, eds., A Companion to Literature and Film, Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005, 258–277, 259.

2

Beginning, Middle, and End Structure and Seriality in Television Adaptation

This second chapter will further delineate the different forms of television adaptation, and examine the ramifications of television structures on our understanding of the process of adaptation, as well as adaptation’s influence on television storytelling. Though we have largely discussed television adaptations as if they were homogenous forms, the fact is that television, like its predecessor, radio, has always been characterized by its variety. As such, the study of television adaptation must be prefaced by examining two radically different approaches to storytelling: the short- or long-form fiction. Both have been fertile terrain for adaptation from the very beginnings of television, but only short-form fiction (television miniseries, often of canonical literary works) have been examined as adaptations. As such, this chapter will begin by analyzing a genre that has only rarely been examined as adaptation, the television sitcom, so as to examine the changing implications of just what is adaptable when moving from a finite to an infinite model. Using sitcom adaptations of three successful films, The Odd Couple (ABC, 1970–1975), Alice (CBS, 1976–1985), and M*A*S*H, we will see how these series position themselves as adaptations; Brian McFarlane’s structural and narratological analysis of the process of adaptation will allow us to see the unique nature of the form, which ultimately adapts the beginning and the middle of the narrative, always deferring the possibility of an ending. The ending, I argue, is to be found in studying the more commonly accepted form of the television adaptation, the short-form fiction, or miniseries. Indeed, this form of adaptation has in fact been crucial in creating the seriality that has now come to be associated with quality television. Seriality has been a central aspect of the narrative complexity that has long been attributed to the influence of prime-time soaps; while this chapter does not seek to contradict the logic of that link, the influence of miniseries adaptations seems equally prevalent. This approach to the genealogy of television seriality as being indebted to the miniseries ultimately is as important for our understanding of the art form’s past as for the possibilities for its future: the seriality of a short-form adaptation exists in service to a pre-determined ending, a completed story, unlike the soap opera, which specializes in a constantly deferred resolution of

32

Building Blocks

the central conflict, thus foregrounding narrative coherency. Using a case study of Game of Thrones, I will demonstrate that the innovation that I see in this series, and in the increasing influence of television adaptation, is this effect of narrative coherency, the desire to fill in the gaps that have always characterized television: between its separate episodes, its different seasons, between the miniseries and the long-form series, between this new art form and those arts with longer and more well-respected, like literature or film. As the title of this book suggests, what ultimately characterizes smallscreen adaptation is its serial form. Many have noted the similarities between the episodic storytelling of the 19th-century realist novel and the television series,1 which is no doubt one of the reasons that these novels have been a privileged trove of content for limited-run series, or miniseries. The serialized form of publication, popularized by the success of Charles Dickens’s Pickwick Papers in 1836, allowed Victorian authors to publish chapter by chapter, making the individual installment more affordable, and so creating wider audiences for the work. The periodic nature of the publication, the habitual nature of monthly or even weekly publication, was arguably a selling point for these novels, reinforcing the identification with the characters as they became familiar figures with which the public could identify, and in the gap between chapters, or episodes, the lapse of time without new content created time to engage imaginatively and communally with the characters, as readers could discuss their situations and wonder about possible outcomes before the following week or month’s installment. The new serial format was profitable for author and editor as well, allowing for money to come in as the book was written, and for larger public interest when the novel was completed and could be sold in a bound volume. Edgar Rosenberg argues for example that Charles Dickens was largely inspired by the public desire for a happy ending for the protagonist Pip and his unrequited love for Estella in his latest novel Great Expectations to rewrite his last chapter, 2 preceding shows like Cheers or Moonlighting in caving to public expectation and allowing their mismatched couple to consummate their relationship. Today, “water cooler” discussions in person or online are the contemporary equivalent of this investment in the serial narrative, with season passes and DVD box sets becoming the echo of the monthly installments and bound volumes. Of course, as was mentioned in the previous chapter, though the serial form of publication has also been cited as a contributing cause of the length of the traditional Victorian novel, 3 ultimately none of these novels use the sheer amount of content needed for the average TV series. Shows like The Vampire Diaries (CW, 2009–) or Buffy the Vampire Slayer (WB, 1997–2001, UPN, 2001–2003) exhausted the subject matter of their source texts (novel and film, respectively) within the first episode, and invented a narrative and a mythology of their own from

Beginning, Middle, and End

33

that point on. Even if the shows are adapting other television shows, the need for new content is often felt, as the American tradition of the 20–24 episode season of television contributed to making shows like The Office very different from their inspirations abroad.4 As a result, television adaptation can be categorized (very schematically) into two different categories, largely dependent on its length and its approach to the source text. The first and best-known of these is the short-form adaptation, which generally adapts over a limited run of episodes, and which has been characterized by their relative fidelity to their sources: miniseries events like Pride and Prejudice or Brideshead Revisited (ITV, 1981), The Thorn Birds (ABC, 1983) or Lonesome Dove (CBS, 1989), insist on their status as adaptations and their ability to translate to the screen the intricacies of the novels that would inevitably be compressed in a feature-length film. These serial forms are the subject of Sarah Cardwell’s excellent work Adaptation Revisited, and Cardwell suggests the importance of the canonical nature of the source text in transferring prestige onto the television adaptation—and the prestige that these adaptations, in turn, confer on their source texts: The authors who are most favoured by the makers of these adaptations—Austen, the Brontës, Dickens, Eliot, Hardy, and so on—tend also to dominate academic construction and study of English literature (particularly at secondary-school level), and likewise predominate in the catalogue lists of publishers of classic novels. […] There are no simple chains of cause and effect here; the reasons for this convergence are multiple and complex. Books that are adapted for television will sell more copies; books that are on school syllabuses and those that are most widely read are more likely to be adapted; and so on. 5 These “classic novel adaptations” or “classic serials,” as Cardwell terms them,6 demand a more complex form of storytelling given its separation into episodes, and might differ somewhat from the aesthetics of their film counterparts, but to a large extent, their emphasis on text, both the screenplay and the source text, is similar to many studies done on film adaptation.7 The second form of television adaptation is perhaps less visible as adaptation; the long-form television adaptations take their inspiration (and oftentimes their titles) from their source texts, but the episodic storytelling8 typical of television until the 1990s made the evolution inherent in the source text impossible, and the shows soon adapted the premise rather than the storyline of the original. Ironically, this is the more popular form of television adaptation, dating back to the very beginnings of the medium, and its source texts are often less prestigious.9 Sitcoms, in particular, have been successful in adapting their sources to the small screen. Some of the most iconic television sitcoms are essentially

34

Building Blocks

adaptations of radio serials, from Father Knows Best to I Love Lucy and The Burns and Allen Show.10 The differences between these two forms of television adaptation are significant: while short-form adaptations, true to their name, tend to have shorter runs, their episodes are generally longer (at least an hour, and in the case of series “events,” often more than that11, and they depend on viewers’ memories (often of the source text, as they proudly display their status as the adaptation of a popular of well-known text, but also of preceding episodes and their events). Long-form adaptations have longer runs (if successful), and longer seasons, but shorter episodes; viewers’ memories can often be short, as there is little or no evolution of character or premise from one episode to the next, and ultimately, the source text is not foregrounded as a source of status for the resulting series. Thus, as Jason Mittell has clearly shown in his work on television genre, structure and content have long been linked, resulting in sharply delineated formats.12 Though as we will see, these formats are slowly evolving, their differences have unique structural implications, the longform for our conception of adaptation, the short-form for our conception of television.

Where to Begin? Long-Form Series and Their Impact on Adaptation Though thus far I have mentioned essentially the early adaptations from radio, the 1970s in particular saw a spate of sitcoms adapting films whose shows have lived on in popular memory (and television history): Alice, for example, is, in fact, an adaptation of Martin Scorsese’s film Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (1974), while The Odd Couple adapts Neil Simon’s 1965 play (and the ensuing film adaptation by Gene Saks with Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau in 1968); M*A*S*H, while being one of the most popular sitcoms of all time, was an adaptation of Richard Hooker’s novel (1968) and Robert Altman’s film (1970). Within the same timeframe, Sanford and Son (NBC, 1972–1977) and All in the Family (CBS, 1971–1979) adapted British sitcoms (Steptoe and Son (BBC1, 1962–1965, 1970–1974) and Till Death Us Do Part (BBC1, 1965, 1966–1968, 1970, 1972–1975), respectively) to an American context. These shows have been less studied as adaptations, as their relationship to their source is often tenuous. Indeed, it may be that one of the reasons that adaptation has remained a largely unexplored territory in television studies is that they have been the victims of their success. Adaptation theory has largely considered that an adaptation should not be judged in relation to its source text, but instead as a work complete unto itself. Thus the source text becomes a means by which to examine its genesis, to understand how the adaptation makes the most of its media, both old and new. It may be that this form of television adaptation has been successful

Beginning, Middle, and End

35

to the point of obliterating its source material. Some might know that the series M*A*S*H was based on Robert Altman’s feature-length film (though fewer would know that the film itself was based on a novel by Richard Hooker), but few know that Ozzie and Harriet (ABC, 1952– 1966) was based on a radio show, or that All in the Family is an adaptation of the British series Till Death Us Do Part. In her chapter on adaptations, Kristin Thompson makes a point of comparing the film and television versions of Buffy the Vampire Slayer (film 1992; series The WB, 1997–2001; UPN, 2001–2003) showing how the series “opens up” narrative threads that the feature film must close down in order to achieve some sort of satisfying conclusion;13 essentially, long-form adaptations must undo what the original has done, and find some narrative loophole in order for its plot to begin (and continue). As such, the television series must strike a delicate balance between evoking enough familiar tropes, characters, situations and plot points to remind viewers of the original, while reworking the plot to gainsay any definite closure the original may have created, and often creating new sources of conflict or suspense to mine in future episodes. In many ways, then, these long-form adaptations face problems similar to those of the remake, a form of adaptation similarly taxed with aims that are less artistic than commercial,14 particularly in relation to their introductory sequences. Thomas Leitch reminds us how important these opening moments are in establishing not only the story but the relationship with the previous iteration of that story: Most remakes try to be readily intelligible to an audience that has never even heard of their originals, but ideally they provide additional enjoyment to audiences who recognize their borrowings from their sources; at the very least, they try not to make knowledge of the earlier film a liability by allowing that knowledge to spoil the audience’s suspense.15 The problem of making its story intelligible to a new audience without making it boring to an audience familiar with the original film is therefore closely linked to the second, more general rhetorical problem characteristic of the remake: the problem of intertextuality, of establishing a normative relation to its original film. The exposition of a remake determines the way its audience defines their initial attitude toward the film; its intertextual stance, the general attitude it adopts toward its original, helps define the way the audience makes sense of their experience of the film as a whole.16 This adaptation of the source material can mostly be found in the pilot episode, and I’d like to examine a few examples to see just how the television adaptation recreates the original; in so doing, I will demonstrate the unique nature of this version of television adaptation as compared to finite forms of adaptation like the feature-length film.

36  Building Blocks The Odd Couple was a popular Broadway play by Neil Simon before it was adapted to the silver screen by its author, and in all its iterations it recounts the adventures of Oscar and Felix, two friends who have each recently gotten divorced and have decided to live together in the aftermath. Their unusual living conditions are compounded by the stark contrast of their attitudes and interests: Oscar Madison is thrilled to be rid of his wife and eager to date, while Felix Unger begins the narrative by attempting suicide, unable to reconcile himself to the failure of his marriage and the loss of his beloved Frances (who becomes Gloria in the television series); Oscar is a slob, only interested in sports, poker, and take-out, while Felix is a neat freak, whose taste in décor and fine cuisine is easily mocked. The 1968 film cashed in on the success of the original play (its tagline was “Even More Funny On The Screen… Than It Was As A Broadway And City-To-City Stage Smash!,”17 and was a relative success, taking in about 44 million dollars domestically.18 When Gary M ­ arshall, who would later become famous as the creator of series like Happy Days (ABC, 1974–1984), Laverne and Shirley (ABC, 1976–1983), and Mork and Mindy (ABC, 1978–1982), decided to adapt it to the small screen a few years later (1970–1974), his efforts at fidelity (or at least familiarity) to the film adaptation were obvious: he retained the theme music and the initial setting of the film (both the city of New York and the specific high-rise that the characters inhabited), the names of the characters (with the notable exception of Felix’s off-screen spouse), and even some of the film dialogue in the pilot episode. One could argue that he also made an effort to satisfy fans of the play, as both main characters, Oscar Madison (Jack Klugman) and Felix Unger (Tony Randall), were played by seasoned theater actors who had taken these roles on stage before acting in front of the television cameras. Significant changes were made, however, in terms of plot: the series opens without the famous theme music, without the title (officially “Neil Simon’s The Odd Couple” in this pilot episode), but with a teaser sequence that would come to be characteristic of the show. The show begins with Oscar outside a familiar apartment building (the first explicit reference to the film), talking to a young woman, who he will reveal to be one of the Pigeon sisters, before the camera then cuts to a domestic scene where Felix is preparing snacks for the evening poker game. The series then reemphasizes the contrast between the two characters, as Oscar insists he wants to talk about girls, while Felix focuses his attention on his roommate’s slovenly ways (leaving his coat on top of the icebox, hopping up to sit on one of the kitchen countertops) and his own culinary efforts. In so doing, the show seems not only to be summing up the personalities of the two characters, but in fact seems to be personifying the official poster of the film, an image of which even those who may not have seen the film would be familiar.

Beginning, Middle, and End

37

Figure 2.1 The film’s iconic image.

The poster shows Felix with a feather duster in one hand and a ladle in another, clearly the one who cooks and cleans (made all the more traditionally feminine pursuits by the apparent apron he has donned), while Oscar is seen through his excess—food, drink, and cigars, two of which are actually overflowing (the beer is dripping out of the can, and the cigar is shedding ash). In contrast to the stereotypically feminine associations with Felix,19 Oscar is resolutely male, complete with obviously phallic sausage and a cigar that even Freud would admit is not just a cigar (making the curved and concave feminine shape of the ladle all the more obvious). One is upright and stressed, while the other is at ease and laughing. It is significant that the opening images of Oscar in the television series show him similarly hunched over, his knees constantly bent as he essentially walks sideways to speak eagerly to his potential date, with seemingly scuffed knees and shoes, looking particularly dull next to the bright colors of his partner. The stooped pose is one that will repeatedly be adopted by the character in the rest of the pilot, insisting on its significance to the personality of the character. The male virility

38

Building Blocks

Figures 2.2, 2.3, and 2.4 Crooked Lothario Oscar, Straight arrow homemaker Felix.

of the flirt, the drab clothes, both pick up on elements of the film’s iconic depiction of Oscar in the ad. Immediately afterward, we’re confronted with the other main character, Felix, who is shown upright—though looking down at the meal he’s preparing. Though his clothes differ from the poster image, the vertical lines echo the clear-cut lines of the doorframes and the refrigerator and its handle, reinforcing the idea of the character as an upright, uptight persona; the yellow of the refrigerator, the pan, and the teakettle are not only stylish (it was 1970), but they harken back to the particularly bright yellow color of said poster, while serving a similar purpose to the film imagery in their depiction of the character’s interests. Felix is literally surrounded by domestic comforts, the omnipresence of which is emphasized by the recurrent use of color, an impression that is confirmed by the final elements in the composition of this first image of the character, the coffeepot, and bottle of soy sauce that partially obstruct our view. The fact that the link between the image of a hunched-over lothario Oscar and the upright homey Felix is a long tilt up the side of the building that houses the characters in the film adaptation reinforces the film imagery. As yet there has been no dialogue, only visual cues to point to the relationship with the original, and yet the dichotomies suggested in these few images paint a picture for novice and experienced viewers alike. Thus those who know the original play or film will recognize the references to the important aspects of the previous renditions of the story, while those who are only passingly familiar with the poster, or even those who can decipher the nature of the images, are already aware of the central juxtaposition: the character inside the home is contrasted with the character outside with women; a careful composition of the image is contrasted with a character who literally sidesteps all rules. Once Oscar arrives in the kitchen with the news that they now have dates with the Pigeon sisters, the dialogue between the two leads walks a careful line between referring to earlier iterations and filling in the blanks for the new viewer. In so doing, the pilot seems to reiterate Thomas Leitch’s thoughts about the importance of the introductory

Beginning, Middle, and End

39

moments of a remake in establishing its relation to the previous text and its audience: […] expository strategies help make different audiences with different expectations into a single, more unified audience, giving the new audience a crash course enabling them to have the same kind of informed expectations as the audience who has seen the original film, but implying at the same time that familiarity with the original film will provide an additional teasing intimacy with this one. In either case, the audience knows just enough to form definite expectations about what kinds of things will happen, but not enough to know exactly what will happen. 20 After carefully setting the scene establishing the lead characters for diverse audiences, here the scene itself is entirely new, written for the television series: it is the tropes that are familiar, not actual dialogue or events. Indeed, Felix asks if Oscar has gotten the napkins for the game, thus confirming his neatnik impression (and perhaps completing the image on the poster, where the napkin could fill in for Jack Lemmon’s apron), while the mention of the poker game evokes a recurrent plot point in the previous versions on stage and silver screen (and which will be central in this pilot episode as well, only to taper off after the first season of the series). The mention of the weekly game both refers to the inspiration for the series, and differentiates itself rather starkly from it: initially, this might seem to refer to the live version of the play, which opens on the friends playing poker and wondering just why Felix is absent: the second half of our misfit duo only appears after approximately 15 pages of dialogue, 21 creating considerable expectations of the character if not veritable suspense. The film relieves that suspense, showing Felix before anyone else, introducing the character as he walks down the busy New York City streets before showing his various attempts to deal with the failure of his marriage, all of which end catastrophically: first he rents a hotel room in an attempt to commit suicide (where he injures himself first attempting to take off his wedding ring, and then attempting to open the window only to put out his back). Felix then goes on to a strip club, where his attempt at vice is thwarted when he throws back a drink—and sprains his neck. Once the film focuses on the poker game, on which the play opens, the dialogue is repeated almost verbatim to the play, but it largely focuses on Felix’s absence, and once he arrives, their fear that he will attempt suicide in the apartment itself. Given the importance of the poker game in these versions of the story, we see that though the trope itself is the same, the significance of the weekly gathering in the series has been completely revamped: rather than being a useful expository device for establishing character, as well as viewer expectations of future events (Felix’s arrival), where the initial

40 Building Blocks conflict is the disruption of a weekly ritual (Felix is first absent and then suicidal), here the expectations are absent—in Felix’s speech, the ritual is what is foregrounded, and the possible disruption of said ritual is Oscar’s offer of two dates, a more suitable, less dramatic topic for a situation comedy. From a spatial perspective, the series actually suggests a middle ground between film and play—like the film, its outdoor shot opens out what was originally a limited theatrical space in the play, before focusing on the main set of the apartment that will constitute the crux of the setting (one that will become all the more theatrical in its second season, when the series began shooting before a live audience). From a thematic perspective, the immediate juxtaposition of Felix and Oscar, and the relatively minor nature of their disagreement (over napkins, messy habits, and the poker game or the girls), reassures the audience that this will be lighter fare than either of the previous renditions. The pathos of earlier versions is largely absent; when the buzzer suddenly rings in the middle of the poker game, it is the attractive young women, not the suicidal friend, that interrupt the action. The fact that the conflict of this pilot episode is between the poker game and the two sisters is also significant to the relationship between the source and its television adaptation, as the actresses are two of the only recurring figures from the film version; as in the series, they are a distraction that Oscar proposes to help Felix forget his wife (and slake his own desire for company). In the Neil Simon versions, this attempt at dating eventually backfires when Felix regales the two women with tales of his amazing spouse, leaving the three of them sobbing as they each bewail their lost loves. 22 In the play and the film, the failure of the dating attempt is such that it creates a rift between the two roommates, eventually leading to the sisters harboring Felix while Oscar fumes, and then is reconciled to his departure (as they’ll always have the poker game). In the series, the conflict between the roommates is minimized: they ultimately work together to try and convince their friends to leave the poker game before the women arrive, and when Felix convinces them to go do laundry while they’re waiting for the poker game to finish, the date goes swimmingly, with romantic tropes such as dancing cheek to cheek through clothes drying on the line, or gazing off into… the spin cycle. It is only once they return to their apartment that Felix’s need to clean up reasserts itself to the detriment of romance, and the argument that eventually causes the play and film couple to separate here is an opportunity for Felix to reassert both the premise of the show and the strength of their bond: OSCAR: Felix, maybe if we stay together, we can help each other’s problems. FELIX: Well, we’ve failed as husbands. I certainly don’t want to fail as a

friend. You’re absolutely right. Felix, we’re staying together! (1.01)

OSCAR:

Beginning, Middle, and End

41

This is the only real moment of pathos in the pilot, and it focuses on the importance of their relationship, which has now taken the place of their marriages as their identifying role. The argument, however, is not really resolved; after each yells about the other’s quirks, and Oscar gives an ultimatum (either he gets some female affection within the next five minutes, or Felix must leave), the characters each admit to their idiosyncrasies—but without any real attempt at change. Rather, this repetition of character flaws, from accusation to confession, seems a sort of mise-en-abyme of the nature of the sitcom itself: the resolution provided each week will be partial, and the fundamental nature of these characters and their conflict will be re-asserted endlessly, with multiple variations of context and tone. The fact that the characters are already living together when the show opens, thus essentially cutting to the midway point in the original plot, 23 is also significant in this context. This is an important narrative choice that will be repeated by other sitcom adaptations, as it allows those familiar with the original, be it play or film, to position themselves as knowledgeable viewers, part of an elite few knowledgeable of the premise and the characters. (As we’ve seen, the series in fact makes savvy use of expository setting and dialogue to quickly establish key plot points for new viewers.) But ultimately, this starting point indicates the adaptation technique used here—we begin, and will remain, at the mid-way point, where the conflict inherent in the premise has become clear, and will be endlessly resolved, only to reappear immediately afterward. The prevalence of the poker game and its status as ritual (“It’s not a poker game anymore; it’s a way of life!” says Felix, 1.01) thus becomes symbolic of the same ritual that the show hopes to create in its viewer, tuning in once a week for the same game, with a new hand being dealt. Other sitcom adaptations of the period use similar techniques to adapt a theater-length film to a long-form television fiction. Alice was an adaptation of Martin Scorsese’s Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, written by the same screenwriter, Robert Getchell, who sought to capitalize on his Academy-award-winning success by creating a sitcom with the same characters;24 Getchell stayed on as creator and head writer of the series during its nine seasons. 25 M*A*S*H came out only two years after Robert Altman’s film, adapting the Richard Hooker novel, opened to significant acclaim; 20th Century Fox Television President William Self apparently screened the feature film for a few friends and thought it would be a good fit for a television series. 26 M*A*S*H reuses many of the film sets (both the film and the series were made by 20 th Century Fox, and used their lots), and recreates an instrumental version of the haunting theme music of the Robert Altman film for its opening credits; both welcome some of the same actors who reprise their roles for the small screen. 27 In both cases, the adaptation picks up at approximately the half-way point in the narrative, resituating the premise for

42

Building Blocks

the audience, but leaving a certain number of conflicts unresolved. For example, getting M*A*S*H’s Frank Burns, who is constantly attempting to create some semblance of order eschewed by the fun-loving doctors Hawkeye and Trapper John, dismissed from the 4077th MASH unit is one of the major events of the film, while in the series he is temporarily disabled, but ultimately remains at his post so as to leave the possibility of future scraps intact; Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore’s David, whose relationship with Alice shapes the latter part of the film’s narrative, is significantly absent in the series. The other particularity of the TV series as compared to other forms of adaptation is, of course, the presence of the credit sequence which acts as a transitional space, allowing the spectator to pass from one fictional universe to another, while reminding the viewer of the fundamental premise of the narrative. Ariane Hudelet suggests that the credit sequence serves to create audience loyalty through its seductive familiarity, 28 and this loyalty in the case of television adaptations may be doubled: the credit sequences of both Alice and M*A*S*H, for example, maintain the link to their source text that could otherwise seem tenuous. Alice’s theme song, “There’s a New Girl in Town,” essentially summarizes the Scorsese film: Going through life with blinders on, it’s tough to see. I had to […] get out from under and look for me. […] She was just passing through, but if things work out she’s gonna stay awhile.…29 The accompanying images either highlight the novelty of Alice and her son’s life “out West” (they are now settled in Arizona) or illustrate their role as newcomers, in addition to introducing all the principal character of the series. Interestingly, it would seem that the credit sequence literally provides a link to the original film, as the image shown here was taken from Scorsese’s film.30 Likewise, though the series eschewed the nihilistic lyrics of the film version, M*A*S*H essentially recreated the credit sequence of its predecessor, with toned-down images taken directly from Altman’s opening sequence, showing the helicopters evacuating the wounded from a greater distance than the film does, attenuating the precarious nature of the rescue, and the corpse-like attitudes of the war victims. In both cases, the series ultimately use a specifically televisual element to reassert its status as adaptations of a previous text, all while insisting on the possibilities of its own medium: though network series may not have allowed for the same provocative content and imagery as New Hollywood films, the credit sequence, like the original to which it refers, is finite, and will soon be replaced by new and seemingly never-ending television narratives. The open-endedness typical

Beginning, Middle, and End

43

Figures 2.5 and 2.6 The small screen credit sequence evoking the film’s first shocking images.

of New Hollywood narratives31 like those of Altman and Scorsese are replaced by a different defiance of narrative imitations: these series may have reintroduced a three-act structure and episodic resolution, but they promise a new beginning every week, infinite repetition with variation. In so doing, these sitcoms question not just the nature of adaptation, but the nature of narrative: their choices seem to demand an examination of the very process of adaptation, and as such Brian McFarlane’s narratological and structuralist approach to adaptation theory seems particularly apt. McFarlane uses Roland Barthes’s “Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives”32 to divide narrative elements into those that require “adaptation proper” and those that can simply be “transferred”: the latter include elements from the source text that need no significant change to appear in a new medium, while “adaptation proper” is the attempt to find “quite different equivalences in the film medium.”33 He uses Barthes’s terms “functions proper” for “actions and events [… that are] strung linearly throughout the text [… and] have to do with […] the functionality of doing,” and “indices” for diffuse concepts like “psychological information relating to characters, data regarding their identity, notations of atmosphere and representations of place [… which] influenc[e] our reading of narrative in a pervasive rather than a linear way; they do not refer to operations but to a functionality of being.”34 McFarlane is speaking specifically about novels and films, and notes that “[t]he most important kinds of transfer possible from novel to fill are located in the category of functions proper.”35 In this, there is a fundamental and stark difference between television and film adaptation: as we have seen from the brief analysis of the longform sitcom adaptation, it is the indices that remain the primary element retained in these adaptations; through the five years of its run, and in all 114 episodes, The Odd Couple retained the crucial psychological information about each of its characters, kept its setting, its atmosphere (within the confines of the sitcom genre), but ultimately must “adapt”

44

Building Blocks

(in McFarlane’s terminology) most of its functions proper: the poker game and the potential date, we have seen, must be adapted to the new context of long-running fiction, becoming simultaneous rather than sequential, and the source of the conflict rather than a means to reveal that conflict (primarily Felix’s inability to accept his separation from his wife). In the episodes that follow, these two key plot points from the original play and film are slowly phased out; the sisters will not be seen after season one, while the poker game rarely reappears after that initial season. M*A*S*H’s credit sequence maintained the brutal and nostalgic atmosphere of the Altman film over its ten seasons, though it changed major plot points of both film and novel. From this perspective, one might argue that this type of adaptation ultimately has more in common with the spinoff than the film adaptation: though the spinoff often changes locations and tends to follow the original series chronologically (something that is pointedly opposite to these sitcom adaptations and their position in the center of the narrative progression of their sources), the spinoff, too, retains these “indices” about the characters and their background, without necessarily retaining much—or anything—of their original narrative, their “functions proper.” In so doing, the long-form adaptation insists on the specificity of adapting to the serial form, suggesting that even the basic assumptions about the process must be reconsidered, as adaptation to the sitcom genre completely reverses previous assumptions as to what is adaptable and what is not, thus reinforcing the myriad possibilities for adaptation.

Roots: Tracing Television Seriality through the Short-Form Adaptation As television has gained in both popularity and critical esteem, one of the crucial characteristics of what has been problematically called “quality television” is that of seriality. Robert J. Thompson was the first to coin the term “quality television,” which has been both widely used and widely disputed ever since.36 Thompson proposed twelve characteristics for quality television, two of which are particularly pertinent to this study of short-form adaptations and their impact: 6) Quality TV has a memory. Though it may or may not be serialized in continuing story lines, these shows tend to refer back to previous episodes. Characters develop and change as the series goes on. […] 8) Quality TV tends to be literary and writer-based. The writing is usually more complex than in other types of programming. 37 Of course, Thompson was writing in 1996, and he went back on his assertions in a later essay, 38 saying that these qualifications were not sufficient to guarantee the quality of a show, but his list of qualifications

Beginning, Middle, and End

45

remains a powerful influence on television studies, and a useful tool for exploring how these fictions are constructed.39 In this particular case, it is the juxtaposition of these two characteristics that is particularly interesting, the insistence on both seriality and textuality, because I suggest that there is an increasingly strong link between the two. Seriality has indeed been a central aspect of the narrative complexity that Jason Mittell has analyzed in contemporary television, and that is the subject of much of his work. Mittell himself traces television seriality back to soaps, particularly prime-time soaps: Historically, this move toward complexity dates to the late 1970s and early 1980s, as prime-time soap operas like Dallas and Dynasty (as well as parodic predecessors Soap and Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman) were popular innovations, and more critically hailed (though initially ratings-challenged) shows like Hill St. Blues, St. Elsewhere, and Cheers imported serial storytelling into the generic forms of cop shows, medical dramas, and sitcoms, respectively.40 As Mittell asserts, these dramas did contain multiple ongoing plots, where the resolution of one crisis allowed for a new plot to take center stage: one would be hard pressed not to consider these qualities as reminiscent of the seriality that has become so popular on the small screen. However, I maintain that the short-form adaptation is also a precursor—and that this earlier form might tell us much about the current television landscape and its possible future. Miniseries are, after all, another form of television fiction that has used ongoing and often complex plotlines from one episode to the next from the very beginning of the history of television. Mittell himself speaks of the importance and the popularity of miniseries on American television, particularly landmark television miniseries Roots (ABC, 1977), the 12-part adaptation of Alex Haley’s novel which was one of the most widely watched television events to date 41 and which profoundly impacted the discussion on race relations and America’s slave-owning past.42 Even if miniseries have not had the omnipresence of soap operas, the popularity of the form is undeniable; many of these miniseries have been very influential in American culture, like The Thorn Birds, Salem’s Lot (CBS, 1979), Roots, V (NBC, 1983),43 and of course the many miniseries appearing on PBS’s Masterpiece Theater, the longestrunning show on American television (since 1971), which has specialized in broadcasting the BBC’s literary adaptations like Pride and Prejudice (1980, 1995), Vanity Fair (1967, 1998), The Good Soldier (1981), or more popular literary fare like The Irish R.M. (1983–1984) or Jewel in the Crown (1984–1985).44 Given the popularity of the format, and the obvious seriality it contains, it seems odd that this link to seriality has thus far remained

46

Building Blocks

unexplored. This is no doubt due to the lack of consideration accorded to this type of fiction. As Sarah Cardwell reminds us, these short television fictions were often dismissed by theorists: While film adaptations exhibit variety in their choice of sources, and directorial individuality and flair in their particular reinterpretations, television adaptations are often regarded as dull, formulaic products, further subsumed into categories with vaguely derogatory labels (heritage television, or costume drama, for example), rather than being regarded as potentially good, ‘serious’ drama.45 However, if we begin by looking at the forms of television adaptation that existed during this crucial period of the 1970s and 80s, when most television critics agree a second golden age of television began and brought about quality television, we can already see how adaptation may have had a hand in producing this quality, and the impact it may have had on seriality, then, now, and in years to come. This is, of course, central to the question of the short-form as a predecessor to today’s serialized storytelling: if the miniseries were simply another influence, without effecting the nature of the seriality differently than the soap, the distinction remains purely academic. The difference between these two models of seriality seems to suggest an evolution in television fiction, as well as suggesting future tendencies for the series. If Thompson informs us that “quality television has a memory,” this memory is not solely diegetic, but also structural: it informs the writing and the production of these series according to the influence of this older form of television fiction. I argue that the distinction to be made between the seriality of the soap opera and that of the short-form television adaptation is the idea that this seriality exists in service to a pre-determined ending, a completed story, unlike the soap opera, which specializes in constantly postponing any ending.46 The idea that seriality is used not just to defer closure, but to advance plot, suggests that this version of seriality gives increased meaning to narrative events and character development, among other things—it is because the producers, screenwriters, directors and actors of these adaptations know how the story is going to end that they can give increased meaning to a glance, an object, a setting that will ultimately prove significant. This interpretation of the ending’s structural importance is, of course, inspired by Peter Brooks’s ideas about the nature of plot; Brooks asserts that reading comes from a deep-seated desire to find a pre-defined order, a meaning that does not exist in the chaos of reality. The desire for narrative, therefore, is the desire for the order of closure, a closure that becomes all the more satisfying if it comes about after overcoming a few obstacles, the detours and meanderings that characterize plot. As such, the narrative drive becomes

Beginning, Middle, and End

47

a desire for closure, where all action exists within the shadow of the expectation of closure: The sense of a beginning, then, must in some important way be determined by the sense of an ending. We might say that we are able to read present moments—in literature and, by extension, in life—as endowed with narrative meaning only because we read them in anticipation of the structuring power of those endings that will retrospectively give them the order and significance of plot.47 Brooks is speaking of literature, of course, but his point is about narrative more generally, and as such, might be revealing for television’s own cultural cachet. Might this lack of a foreseeable ending, in fact, be one of the reasons that television series have largely been relegated to the status of a popular pastime rather than an art? This interpretation might explain the relative lack of attention expended on the sitcom, for example, which still functions on the model of the infinite present.48 The critical and academic attention afforded to television series in this new “Golden Age,” then, could more or less be associated with the increased efforts being made to create closed structures for the television series, allowing a satisfying end (or at least, the promise of such) to television fictions. In this case, the idea of a predetermined ending allows the viewer to be able to rely on a satisfying ending to the plots the series offered, thus going beyond the operational aesthetics that Mittell sees as one of the primary techniques for maintaining viewer interest in television series. […] an “operational aesthetic” [is an aesthetic] in which the pleasure was less about “what will happen?” and more concerning “how did he do that?” In watching Seinfeld we expect that each character’s petty goals will be thwarted in a farcical unraveling, but we watch to see how the writers will pull off the narrative mechanics required to bring together the four plotlines into a calibrated comedic Rube Goldberg narrative machine.49 If we extrapolate from Mittell’s definition, the operational aesthetic can very well be the traditional certainties that keep the viewer from experiencing true suspense about key issues involved in resolving a story, to the extent that the ending can lose all meaning: in general, the audience trusts that the main character will not die in a battle, for example; depending on the genre of the show, the public can expect that some subjects will never be mentioned; we know that each episode must end in such a way in order so as to allow the series to continue in the next episode. But more recently series creators have shown themselves ready and willing to confront these seemingly immutable elements and to give

48 Building Blocks new meaning to the end of the series and the resolution of its enigmas: important characters can die in shows that feature larger casts;50 the mixture of different genres and the rise of provocative premium cable fare make taboos less and less taboo, and we can no longer necessarily say with certainty what characterizes an episode of television, neither by its form (as we can see with the new hour-long comedies like Girls (HBO, 2012–) or Orange is the New Black (Netflix, 2013–)), nor by its content. The weakening of this version of the operational aesthetic is to the benefit of narrative coherence and complexity, which suggests a planned ending. Without the given constraints that have dominated television writing for episodic shows, details take on new importance as keys to understanding the series and perhaps predict—or at least better appreciate—the ending. Of course, as Jason Mittell so accurately reminds us of in his work on TV endings, “Every television series begins, but not all of them end—or at least not all series conclude.”51 As the fans of Battlestar Galactica or Lost can attest, the idea of a long-running series where the storyline, including its ending, is as entirely planned out as the short-form adaptation’s remains theoretical, and given the constantly evolving nature of television series, as discussed in the previous chapter, may ultimately be impossible, or at least counterproductive. Rather than suggesting that this is feasible (or necessarily desirable) for the long-running serialized fiction to simply mimic this aspect of its short-form predecessor, I will insist that the influence of the miniseries adaptation can be less absolute (and therefore more effective). Recent serialized television fictions feature long planned out but limited narrative arcs, evolving plotlines, as well as innovations and conflicts dealt with over the course of several episodes, and resolved in a satisfying manner. Though these aspects are not necessarily foreign to soap operas, this increasing narrative complexity is accompanied by a planned ending that allows showrunners to better structure the entirety of the fiction, though the intermediate structure may be found along the way. Indeed, in so doing, it seems that these fictions are simply living up to the expectations they have created in their audience. In speaking of Battlestar Galactica and Lost, Jordan Lavender-Smith makes clear the change in viewer expectations: All the existential dilemmas these characters face concerning fate, faith, design, etc. resonate deeply for me, but not (for better or worse) because I spend a great deal of time thinking about such things in my daily life; rather, these are the questions I ask when I watch these shows: Is there a plan? Should I believe? What does it all mean?52 As television fictions become increasingly serialized, as they are repeatedly treated as the twenty-first-century equivalents of the Victorian novel’s own serialized narratives, 53 so audiences expect narrative coherency

Beginning, Middle, and End

49

that is on par with this literary predecessor. As such, we can take our cue from Philippe Lejeune, and suggest that there is a viewer’s pact established by these fictions, 54 where a serialized fiction establishes certain expectations of coherent meaning throughout the duration of the series, and a satisfying (if not necessarily pre-planned) ending to the story being told. Given these expectations, more and more showrunners are coming forward proclaiming that they have a blueprint to follow and that this blueprint will allow them to tell their story, something that was essentially unthinkable before a series like Lost if the show was not an adaptation. Likewise, those who are unable to finish their shows due to an unexpected and premature cancellation of their series seek to continue their shows in another medium, something that we see in the graphic novel continuations of Joss Whedon’s cult series like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel (The WB, 1999–2004), Firefly (Fox, 2002), or Dollhouse (Fox, 2009–2010), 55 while the anthology form, where each season of a show concludes the story begun by the first episode of the season, only to begin the following season with only some familiar landmarks of actors, has become increasingly popular in the American television landscape, with examples like Fargo (FX, 2014–), American Horror Story (FX, 2011–), or True Detective (HBO, 2014–). This format, in particular, seems a direct descendant of the miniseries format, in that it uses several episodes to tell its story (unlike earlier versions of anthology shows like The Twilight Zone), where an ending is planned and structured into the very nature of the television show in such a way as to limit the necessarily hazardous nature of television production (actors and directors know they are committing for a limited period of time, allowing more famous names to appear in small screen productions, be it Woody Harrelson, Matthew McConaughey, Martin Freeman, or Cary Fukanaga and David Fincher), the structure of the plot is established well in advance, with no need to expand it artificially or even to link it to preceding or succeeding seasons explicitly, and the creators know that the entire show will normally be broadcast from beginning to end, without the fear of channels actually cancelling the series prematurely. We can perhaps associate the influence of the miniseries on serialized television fiction with another one of the short-form adaptation’s particularities. Sarah Cardwell suggests that the specificity of television adaptation is time, making this central to the understanding of the miniseries: This is a form with which commercial cinema cannot compete. […] television adaptations are able not only to retain more of the source’s narrative, but also open out the details of the novel—its intricacies of plot, mood, and atmosphere, to build characters and our relationships with them more incrementally and carefully, and to sustain a sense of atmosphere.56

50

Building Blocks

She’s speaking in particular of very long miniseries, like The Pallisers (BBC, 1974) or The Forsyte Saga, but this is an idea that is very familiar: television has the luxury of time, be it seasons or years, to tell its story, to allow us access to the inner workings of its characters, and it is that conception of time that makes it possible to suggest similarities between the novel and the television fiction. This is logical because the miniseries is more expansive than film, telling a story over five or six or twenty-six hours rather than over 90 minutes. In the traditional miniseries, this is, of course, a unique and unrepeated event. However, we can link this to the idea of the format’s narrative coherency and pre-planned ending, where shows can use their implicit viewer’s pact of narrative coherency and a satisfying ending to reinforce serialized fiction’s new relationship to time, and therefore to meaning. While miniseries insist on meaning from one episode to the next, the long-form serialized narrative can insist on meaning from one season to the next, showing that episodes must be transcended in order to understand the bigger picture better. Indeed, Jason Mittell tells us that Understanding narrative time is vital to serial storytelling, because seriality itself is defined by its use of time. The essential structure of serial form is a temporal system with story installments parceled out over time with gaps between entries through a strictly regimented use of screen time.57 The idea that the very form of serial fiction is determined by its division into different episodes is an assumption that the series makes the viewer recognize, and eventually, I posit, question, or even overcome. As such, to talk about what serial television might have in store, I would like to propose a case study, an analysis of Game of Thrones. This series is, of course, an example of the evolving landscape of television and TV adaptation, straddling the short and long-form adaptation. 58 Unlike Caprica and 12 Monkeys, this hybrid was initially as faithful as any miniseries to its source text, adapting approximately one book per season, though later seasons have shown increasing divergence from the text both in terms of narrative content and structure, as the changes made accumulate and arguably, as the series asserts an identity of its own, separate from the novels. For the purposes of this study, Game of Thrones is important because its ending is officially pre-defined. 59 Studying this specific example will allow me to elucidate the attractions and the advantages that seriality offers when following the model of miniseries seriality rather than soaps. Game of Thrones is an HBO series, adapted for the screen by Dan Weiss and David Benioff from the series of novels written by George R.R. Martin and entitled A Song of Ice and Fire. It is a fiction that is constantly questioning notions of time, and thus reinforcing repeatedly

Beginning, Middle, and End

51

the link to television fiction’s own problematic relationship with time, as both an expansive format and one strictly divided into (in this case) hour-long fragments: the story takes place in a fantastical world with long seasons of indeterminate length, where we know that winter will last several years, but we don’t know when it will arrive (to the extent that one of the family mottos is “Winter is Coming”). Indeed, in a sort of incarnation of the possibilities of audiovisual fiction, itself a hybrid between the temporal art of literature and the spatial art of the image (to caricature the ideas of Lessing),60 here, time is associated with space, where in some places it is eternally winter (the Frozen North, the Wall), while in others, it will always be summer (Yunkai, Astapor, beyond the Narrow Sea, or the very evocatively named “Summer Isles”). Westeros is a world dominated by more or less reliable memories of the past, of the Targaryen king who was deposed before the story began and whose sins doomed him to death, of the legends of a distant past that no one believes any longer—but whose mythical figures continue to populate the screen—and where what is said and what is written are often at odds.61 It is a series whose famous slogan, “Winter is coming,” is used to describe a series broadcast every year in the springtime. The very premise of the series (and the novels from which it is adapted) highlights the problematic nature of time and temporality implicit in this new version of seriality and of the narrative coherency of a pre-determined ending. This seems all the more interesting given that despite the importance of the past, the series has used analepses or flashbacks only once until season six (5.01), where the flashbacks could then be motivated diegetically through the character of Bran, who acquires the ability to experience the past for himself. Though these flashback techniques are common in television, becoming the central structural technique in series like Cold Case (CBS, 2003–2010) or Lost, Game of Thrones seems to have pointedly avoided these techniques until their usefulness as exposition is more or less lost, an irony that seems particularly flagrant in a story so dependent on the historical background of the show’s conflicts. In so doing, Game of Thrones accentuates the effect of seriality, the continuity of events. The number of different characters and plotlines in a given episode causes time itself to dilate, as can be seen particularly clearly in the first episode of the second season, where characters in different settings notice the presence of a red comet in the sky: though the comet is a fleeting phenomenon, it is repeatedly noticed throughout the episode, giving an impression of seriality even for a diegetically simultaneous phenomenon. This is a series that constantly plays with notions of seriality, of the fraught relationship between the past, the present, and the future of the narration, and in so doing, it ultimately foregrounds and questions its status as television fiction (at least, in the traditional sense of what constitutes television fiction) and as adaptation.

52 Building Blocks To give an example of the series’ use of seriality, I would like to examine the closing sequence of season three, entitled “Mhysa” (3.10, 58:29– 1:04:26), which has been criticized for its racist overtones.62 Daenerys Targaryen, whose royal blood makes her the rightful queen of Westeros, has built herself a loyal army by freeing slave-soldiers, called “The Unsullied,” from their chains and asking them to follow her—here, she seeks to do the same for another city run by slaves labor, Yunkai, and gives the enslaved the tools to rise up against their oppressors. The slaves do so and then leave the city walls. After Daenerys tells them that she cannot give them their freedom, that they must take it for themselves, the slaves acclaim her, shouting “Mhysa,” a term, she is told, that means “Mother.” Daenerys, who has already tamed the only living dragons of the world, and who refers to herself as “Mother of Dragons,” tells her charges to fly, and as the dragons circle above, she goes out into the crowd, where her pale skin, snow-white hair, and blue and white clothing are a striking contrast to the darker skinned slaves, dirty and clothed in dull tones. She is lifted aloft in the crowd as the camera moves back into a very long shot while the music swells, showing the new “Mother” at the center of the crowd as a dragons scream triumphantly overhead. The image of this young white woman, surrounded by darker-skinned slaves acclaiming the foreigner as a mother and savior, her bright clothes contrasting with their dull rags, does create a sort of discomfort, as it seems to epitomize stereotypes about the civilizing power of the white man for his savage brethren, the “White Man’s Burden” that Kipling first mentioned in his poem about US occupation of the Philippines, and had previously made popular in his fiction.63 The idea of the slaves being freed, the camera movements (a slow zoom out to an extreme wide shot) and the music that are easily associated with the epic film, and most importantly, the placement of this sequence at the end of an episode and of a season, allows us little context as to the significance of this moment, and the viewer is of course tempted to see this as a moment of victory (viewer traditions of the epic, or even of the season closer, lead to that conclusion). However, the events that follow in season four and five

Figure 2.7 Daenerys as Great White Savior (3.10).

Beginning, Middle, and End

53

(where Daenerys’s attempts at liberating all of Slaver’s Bay and ruling over the former slave city of Meereen are met with utter failure, ending with slaves asking to be sold back into slavery (4.10), or crowds of freed slaves actually hissing at her decision to execute a former master (5.02)) show that our reading has been biased by our film- or television-viewing habits, and that this discomfort is voluntary. It does not reveal the implicit racism of the author or the showrunners, but instead figures as a subjective sequence, uncovering Daenerys’s colonial paternalism (maternalism?), who will be unable to deal with either her slave or her dragon children in coming seasons, and who believes she knows how to rule without the necessary experience to succeed. Retrospectively, this is a very ironic sequence for Daenerys, who naïvely believes in what she’s done, as well as for the viewers, who naïvely believe what they have seen, who have been duped by their own experience as a consumer of film and television fictions.64 More generally, this scene brings to the fore the very nature of the television episode, and its tradition of guaranteeing that the end of the season is not the end of the series: Game of Thrones differs from many of its fellows in refusing cliffhangers at the end of each season, the extreme moments of suspense that series traditionally employ to guarantee that viewers will tune in at the beginning of the new season to find out who shot J.R., if Rachel has ruined Ross’s wedding, etc. On the contrary, Benioff and Weiss have followed in the footsteps of Joss Whedon, with his famous season four episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, “Restless,” that follows the epic battle of the season, and shows the dreamscapes of each of the major characters. Like Whedon, Game of Thrones also reserves its great moments of conflict or revelation for the penultimate episode, here again insisting on the coherency of the entire series as part of a greater whole, where this final episode allows the show to begin exploring new narrative paths. In so doing, the show demonstrates how it is impossible to judge the nature of events from one or two episodes, and that in order to understand the weight of the plot, the series must be evaluated as an ensemble, a single entity rather than distinct episodes—and while the viewer is waiting for the ending to give events a more nuanced meaning, there will be surprises to momentarily trick the viewer. The idea of a coherent whole is recurrent both for the showrunners and the author of the novels; the latter insists that he is not in fact writing a series of novels, but one long saga: I really regard it as one long story. Just as Tolkien—Tolkien didn’t think he was writing a trilogy […] You can say—and fans have said—that my favorite book is The Two Towers, but that’s sort of like saying that my favorite chapters were the 6 in the middle. And that’s what I’m doing here, I’m writing a story with a beginning, a middle, and an end—a epic story, an gigantic story […] with many different characters and plot threads intertwined, and it looks like

54

Building Blocks it’s going to take 7 books to get that story out, beginning, middle and end, and when it’s done, hopefully it will be evaluated as a whole. Because these books are not meant to stand alone.65

The showrunners have a similar approach: “We’ve always said that we see the show as an adaptation of George’s series, not this book or that book,” Weiss explained. “[…] we’re taking the long view of the series of the whole, and trying to do as much justice as possible to George’s overall epic story and be as true to the spirit as we can, while keeping it an exciting and viable and vivid as a television show that stands on its own two legs. […] A season of television needs to feel like a season of television. We have so many storylines to juggle, and they all need to ideally have a sense of a beginning, middle and end over the course of a season. Each character needs to feel like they’re traveling a specific road in the course of a season, and coming out as a different person than they went in. It’s never going to be about taking a book and ripping it in half – ‘At page 673, this is the place where [the season] ends.’ It comes down to case-by-case [decisions] with each story and how best to serve each character’s story going forward.”66 If the showrunners intend to maintain the idea of evolution across a season of the show, the season cannot be understood in a vacuum. The predetermined ending allows authors to dare to create fictions that question the traditions of television, like the cliffhanger, or that do not delay the resolution of the action or the crisis for its own sake, but rather might delay the ultimate meaning of that resolution for the whole of the work. The viewers must analyze the series according to what is currently an unknown ending, using the past episodes of the show, as well as the future we’ll discover later. We could say that this new way of functioning allows creators and viewers to appreciate the weight of each detail fully, but forces viewers to reserve judgment about how to analyze those details.67 Thus the innovation that I see in this series in particular, and in the increasing influence of television adaptation more generally, is this desire to transcend the many gaps that have always characterized television. This innovation becomes all the more obvious when we remember that at the time of writing, it is now the show, and not the text, that will give us the ending to this game of thrones, as the television show outstripped Martin’s published material at the end of season five. As the series continues to expand, to advance in both time and space, in the cultural zeitgeist, I posit that these shows are expanding the narrative and artistic possibilities of television fiction.

Beginning, Middle, and End

55

By examining these two structural forms, then, we see how adaptation must be reinterpreted to accommodate the unique nature of television, but also that this relationship is reciprocal, where television uses the possibilities of the short-form adaptation to expand its horizons. In this respect Paul Ricoeur, the great theoretician of time, might have been speaking of television when he said: Perhaps after all we should trust in the expectations of a coherent structure that motivate readers and believe that new narrative forms, that we do not yet have names for, are already appearing, and that will confirm that the narrative function can metamorphose instead of dying.68 Paul Ricoeur, I believe, would have been reassured if he had just turned on his television.

Notes 1 See for example Glen Creeber, “Introduction,” Serial Television, London: BFI, 2005; Iris Kleinecke-Bates, Victorians on Screen: The Nineteenth Century on British Television, 1994–2005, New York: Palgrave McMillan, 2014; or Christine Gledhill, “Speculations on the Relationship between Soap Opera and Melodrama,” Nick Brown, ed., American Television: New Directions in History and Theory. 2 Cf. Edgar Rosenberg, “Putting an End to Great Expectations,” in Charles Dickens, Great Expectations (1861), Edgar Rosenberg, ed, New York: W.W. Norton, 1999, 491–527. 3 See for example Shawn Crawford, “No time to be idle: the serial novel and popular imagination,” The World and I, Vol. 13, No. 11, November 1998. Available online: http://web.archive.org/web/20080125055941/http://www. worldandi.com/public/1998/november/crawford.cfm. Accessed March 2015. 4 The phenomenon of transnational adaptation will be discussed in more detail in Chapter 3. 5 Sarah Cardwell, Adaptation Revisited: Television and the Classic Novel, Manchester: Manchester UP, 2002, 2. 6 Ibid., 34 and 33, respectively. 7 The reader will of course have noted the less highbrow nature of the American miniseries’ source texts. John De Vito and Frank Tropea note that American broadcasters, seeking to reproduce the success of the BBC’s literary adaptations at home, chose more popular fare for their sources: “Rather than looking to the off-putting literary and historical texts of the British model, the primary inspiration for the epic miniseries made for American television would come from the rather bulky, most popular best-selling novels of the time.” Though one could argue that the American tendency toward the epic sweep of historical melodrama might diminish the prestige Cardwell mentions, given the popularity of the chosen texts, their ability to garner industry awards, their broad scope and their innumerable plot twists, I would suggest that both the link with the text and the complexity of the narrative remain more or less intact, though American schools will probably

56

8

9

10 11 12 13 14

15 16 17 18 19

20 21 22 23 24

Building Blocks never assign The Thorn Birds as a set text. John De Vito and Frank Tropea, Epic Television Miniseries: A Critical History, Jefferson, NC/London: McFarland, 2010, location 180 of 3226, Kindle edition. I will be using the term “episodic” to describe TV fictions that conclude with each episode, and essentially “reboot” every week, allowing the episodes to be viewed in any order. “Episodic” television is to be contrasted with “serialized” shows, which have an ongoing narrative and are dependent on the chronology of the episodes to be understood. Robert J. Thompson saw this serialization as one of the fundamental characteristics of “quality television,” which he dated from the appearance of Hill Street Blues on American screens (NBC, 1981–1987). Robert J. Thompson, op. cit., 14. Dennis Tredy has given an excellent summary of the transition from radio to small screen for early American sitcoms in his presentation “The Origins of the TV Sitcom: Transgressional Comedy in the Early 1950’s” (presented in Rouen, France, January 30, 2015), to appear in his forthcoming book on television sitcoms. Tredy, Ibid. QB VII (ABC, 1974), one of the first major miniseries in the United States, aired 390 minutes over two consecutive nights, for example. Television and Genre, op. cit. Op. cit., 87–93. See for example Constantine Verevis: “For film producers, remakes are consistently thought to provide suitable models, and something of a financial guarantee, for the development of studio-based projects. In a commercial context, remakes are ‘pre-sold’ to their audience because viewers are assumed to have some prior experience, or at least possess a ‘narrative image,’ of the original story.” Constantine Verevis, Film Remakes, Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2006, 3. The relationship between the television adaptation and the remake will be presented in more detail in Chapter 5, when discussing the issue of authorship; here it is solely the nature of the incipit in the remake and the long-form adaptation that interests us. Thomas Leitch, “Twice-Told Tales: Disavowal and the Rhetoric of the Remake,” in Jennifer Forrest and Leonard R. Koos, Dead Ringers: The Remake in Theory and Practice, Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2002, 40–41. Ibid., 43. Cf. IMDB database, http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0063374/?ref_=fn_al_ tt_3. Accessed January 2015. http://boxofficemojo.com/movies/?id=oddcouple.htm. Accessed January 2015. In the film, Jack Lemmon played Felix, and the actor’s previous work (notably Some Like It Hot (1959) and its cross-dressing themes) contribute to this impression of femininity, especially since Lemmon’s character Jerry was the more traditionally feminine “woman” (capable of snaring himself a male suitor) as compared to Tony Curtis’s womanizer. My thanks to Sarah Hatchuel for this suggestion. Thomas Leitch, “Twice Told Tales,” op. cit., 42. Neil Simon, The Odd Couple (1966), New York, NY: Samuel French, 1994. This is a plotline re-used in the pilot episode of the latest version of The Odd Couple (CBS, 2015–). The arrival of the Pigeon sisters in the play and the film also takes place in the latter half of the plot, confirming the positioning of the sitcom midway through the finite narrative of the play and film. Todd Fuller, “Alice Season 1 DVD Review,” Sitcoms Online, http://www. sitcomsonline.com/aliceseason1dvdreview.html. Accessed July 2015.

Beginning, Middle, and End

57

25 http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0073955/fullcredits?ref_=tt_ov_st_sm. Accessed July 2015. 26 Ed Solomonson and Mark O’Neill, TV’s M*A*S*H: The Ultimate Guidebook, Albany, GA: BearManor Media, 2009, 21. 27 Two, to be exact, Gary Burghoff (Walter “Radar” O’Reilly) and G. Wood (General Hammond); actors Tom Skerritt and Rene Auberjonois were approached about reprising their roles, but declined. Alice has two veterans of the Scorsese film: Mel (Vic Tayback), owner of the diner where Alice works, and her son Tommy (Alfred Lutter), though the latter only played the role for the pilot. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0068098/trivia?ref_=tt_trv_trv. Accessed July 2015. 28 Ariane Hudelet, “Un cadavre ambulant, un petit-déjeuner sanglant et le quartier Ouest de Baltimore : le générique, moment-clé des séries télévisées,” GRAAT Online, n° 6, December 2009, 1. http://www.graat.fr/tv01hudelet. pdf/ Accessed March 2012. 29 “New Girl in Town,” lyrics by Alan and Marilyn Bergman & David Shires. http://www.lyricsondemand.com/tvthemes/alicelyrics.html. Accessed January 2015. 30 http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0073955/ Accessed July 2015. 31 See for example Noel King, “The Last Good Time We ever Had’: Remembering the New Hollywood Cinema,” in Alexander Horwath, Thomas Elsaesser, Noel King, The Last Great American Picture Show: New Hollywood Cinema in the 1970s, Amsterdam: Amsterdam UP, 2004, 19–36. 32 Roland Barthes, “Introduction à l’analyse structurale des récits” (1966), L’aventure sémiologique, Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1985, 167–206. 33 Brian McFarlane, Novel to Film: An Introduction to the Theory of Adaptation, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996, 13. 34 Ibid. 35 Ibid. 36 The list is largely tongue in cheek (it begins with “Quality TV is best defined by what it is not. It is not ‘regular’ TV.”), but it has been taken as a checklist for quality television rather than a series of defining characteristics; all of course have at least one or two counterexamples, without even delving into the underlying issue of an evaluative analysis of television for all those who believe in the power of popular culture. Robert J. Thompson, Television’s Second Golden Age: From Hill Street Blues to ER, NY, NY: Continuum Publishing, 1996, 13. 37 Robert J. Thompson, ibid., 13–15. 38 “Preface,” in Janet McCabe and Kim Akass, eds. Quality TV: Contemporary American Television and Beyond, London/New York, NY: I.B. Tauris, 2007, xvii–xx. 39 Television aesthetics is a burgeoning field in its own right, as evidenced by the recent work by Jason Jacobs and Steven Peacock, the preceding entry by Janet McCabe and Kim Akass, or Steven Peacock and Sarah Cardwell’s “Good Television” issue of the Journal of British Cinema and Television. Jason Jacobs, Steven Peacock, Television Aesthetics and Style, London: Bloomsbury, 2013; Sarah Cardwell, Steven Peacock, “Good Television?,” Journal of British Cinema and Television, 3:1 (2006). 40 Jason Mittell, “Narrative Complexity in Contemporary American Television,” Velvet Light Trap, n° 58, Fall 2006, 32. 41 Epic Television Miniseries, op. cit., Location 646 of 3226. 42 Jason Mittell, Television and American Culture, New York/Oxford, Oxford UP, 2010, 324–325.

58

Building Blocks

43 V is a particularly interesting example; a science fiction adaptation of Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here, the original miniseries (1983) was then reprised with a miniseries meant to wrap up the story (V: The Final Battle, NBC, 1984), only then to be adapted as a long-form series (1984–1985). It was recently rebooted as a series in 2009 (V, ABC, 2009–2011). 44 Indeed, the show was inspired by the popularity of a very long miniseries, 1967’s The Forsyte Saga, which adapted John Galsworthy’s novels in a 26-episode rendition. Rebecca Eaton, Making Masterpiece: 25 Years Behind the Scenes at Masterpiece and Mystery! On PBS, New York, NY: Viking Penguin, 2013, location 208 of 4752, Kindle edition. 45 Sarah Cardwell, “Literature on the small screen: television adaptations,” in The Cambridge Companion to Literature on Screen, Cambridge/London: Cambridge UP, 2007, 182. 46 Indeed, Florent Favard suggests that many series, like Battlestar Galactica or Lost, essentially are structured around this promise of an ending. Florent Favard, “La promesse d’un dénouement: énigmes, quêtes et voyages dans le temps dans les séries télévisées de science-fiction contemporaines,” PhD thesis, Université de Bordeaux, forthcoming. 47 Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative, New York, NY: Vintage, 1984, 94. 48 How I Met Your Mother (CBS, 2005–2014) is an obvious counterexample that testifies to the increased seriality in most TV genres in recent years. See Florent Favard’s article on the subject, “The Yellow Umbrella Syndrome: Pledging and Delaying Narrative Closure in How I Met Your Mother,” GRAAT Online, n° 15, April 2014. http://www.graat.fr/2favard.pdf. Accessed April 2014. 49 Jason Mittell, “Narrative Complexity,” op. cit., 35. 50 Indeed, Joss Whedon reportedly informed the cast of his show Firefly that after his experience on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, he had voluntarily chosen to name his show after the ship rather than a cast member, warning them that they were all expendable. Charlie Jane Anders, “The Real Reason Why Joss Whedon Named His Space Western Show Firefly,” io9, July 31, 2014. http://io9.com/the-real-reason-why-joss-whedon-named-hisspace-western-1614273050. Accessed August 2014. 51 Jason Mittell, “Ends,” Complex TV: The Poetics of Contemporary Television Storytelling, New York, NY/London: New York UP, 2015, location 5929 of 8751, Kindle edition. 52 Jordan Lavender-Smith, “‘It’s not Unknown’: The Loose- and Dead-End Afterlives of Battlestar Galactica and Lost,” Melissa Ames, ed., Time in Television Narrative: Exploring Temporality in Twenty-First-Century Programming, Jackson, MS: UP of Mississippi, 2012, p. 59. 53 Greg Metcalfe’s assertions are but one example of a general association of the television series with the novel: “The true state of a television series is, paradoxically, no longer on television. It is a set of DVDs that sits on your shelf in a box that looks like a book. And increasingly that’s how people watch them. Watching these shows has become like reading a novel. The people who make television shows know the end of their work is a DVD set. Writing a story for individual episodes that air once, a week apart, and are gone forever is a different sort of storytelling than telling a 12-hour story that can be watched in extended sittings and rewatched as often as someone likes. It’s the difference between a collection of 12 short stories and a novel that is 12 chapters long.” Greg Metcalfe, DVD Novel: How the Way We Watch Television Changed the Television We Watch, Santa Barbara, CA: ABC–CLIO, 2012, x.

Beginning, Middle, and End

59

54 This idea of a viewer’s pact is one that I have spoken of elsewhere in relation to adaptation specifically. I draw on Philippe Lejeune’s idea of the “pacte autobiographique,” that the writer of an autobiography has a pact with the reader established by the identical name of the writer, the name on the cover, and the narrator telling the story; in relation to adaptation, Delphine Letort, Christine Geraghty, and I have suggested an adaptation pact, where the opening moments of an adaptation establish the relationship that that adaptation is going to maintain with its source. In all cases, these opening moments (of an autobiography, of an adaptation, of a pilot episode) seem crucial in establishing audience expectations. Philippe Lejeune, Le Pacte autobiographique, Paris: Seuil, 1975; Delphine Letort, Shannon Wells-Lassagne, “Avant-propos,” L’adaptation cinématographique: Premières pages, premiers plans, Paris: Mare et Martin, 2014, 13–24; Shannon Wells-Lassagne, Christine Geraghty, “Introduction,” dossier “Opening pages, opening shots,” Screen (Summer 2015), 56 (2): 234–237. 55 Dollhouse is a particularly interesting example, given that the graphic novel that came out sought to resolve the mystery that the first season analyzed and that they feared Fox would cancel; when the series was renewed at the last minute, the show had to work within this extremely restrictive version of Mittell’s operational aesthetic. See Casey J. McCormick, “Making Sense of the Future: Narrative Destabilization in Joss Whedon’s Dollhouse,” Time in Television Narrative, op. cit., 205–217. 56 Sarah Cardwell, “Literature on the small screen: television adaptations,” op. cit., 187. 57 Jason Mittell, “Complexity in Context,” Complex TV, op. cit., Location 579 of 8751. 58 As such, the series in fact harkens back to an intermediary form of television adaptation that has not been widely discussed, a format I will refer to as the serial anthology, where the series adapts several books, and each episode contains a completed plotline (generally adapting one book per episode), while maintaining a close tie to what comes beforehand and afterwards. Examples from the 1970s and 1980s include series like I, Claudius (BBC 1976), Agatha Christie’s Poirot (ITV, 1989–2013), or the television adaptations of Sherlock Holmes (The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, ITV, 1984–1994), or later, in the 1990s, series like Cadfael (ITV, 1994–1996). This is of course a format that continues to have significant success, and seems particularly common in Britain, as shown by the success of series like Wallander (BBC, 2008–2010) and the new Sherlock (BBC, 2010–). Its popularity, however, is transatlantic, particularly through their broadcasts on PBS’s Masterpiece Theater (1971–), which was essentially created to showcase these imports. 59 Though George R.R. Martin has yet to complete the Song of Ice and Fire saga, both he and the showrunners have assured fans that the ending has been chosen, and whether the ending be first revealed in text or on the television, all three creators are aware of how the story will end. Debra Birnbaum, “‘Game of Thrones’ creators: We Know How It’s Going to End,” Variety, April 15, 2015. http://variety.com/2015/tv/news/game-of-thrones-endingseason-5-producers-interview-1201469516/. Accessed April 2015. 60 Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Laocoon: An Essay upon the Limits of Painting and Poetry (1898), Ellen Frothingham, trans., Mineola, NY: Dover, 2005. 61 For example the number of leaders of the Night’s Watch, the group that stands guard over the massive Wall that separates Westeros from the Frozen North, populated with hostile forces (Wildlings, Giants, etc.), is said to be 998 with the election of Jon Snow to the post, but Samwell Tarly, one of the

60

62

63 64

65

66

67

68

Building Blocks rare avid readers in the story, suggests that the record implies this number has been exaggerated (5.02). To choose but a few articles with evocative titles, Disgruntled Critic’s review was entitled “Mhysa and racism: The Great White Savior of Game of Thrones,” while Salon illustrated their article “Whitewashed TV isn’t just racist. It’s boring!” with an image from the episode. Artthreat’s article on the episode was even more provocative: “Game of Thrones and Racist Fantasy.” Disgruntled Critic, 24 June 2013, http://disgruntledcritic.blogspot. fr/2013/06/mhysa-and-racism-great-white.html. Accessed January 2015; Salon, December 9, 2013, http://www.salon.com/2013/12/09/whitewashed_ tv_isnt_just_racist_its_boring/. Accessed January 2015; Aamer Rahman, Artthreat, June 15, 2013, http://artthreat.net/2013/06/game-of-thronesand-racist-fantasy/. Accessed January 2015. The text of the poem is available online: http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_ Five_Nations/The_White_Man%27s_Burden. Accessed May 2015. This irony is confirmed in the finale of season five of the series, “Mother’s Mercy,” where Daenerys is forced to flee Meereen with the help of her dragon, only to find herself surrounded by yet another native people she had once claimed to rule, the Dothraki. The visuals are remarkably similar: Daenerys is wearing a faded blue gown, while the Dothraki are in earth tones, riding brown horses and circling around her. While the coloring and movement are evocative, here Daenerys’s status has clearly sunk, as the horse riders tower over her, a startling contrast with the zoom out to an extreme wide-angle shot, complete with dragons triumphantly streaming overhead, that ended season three. (5.10) Daniel Fienberg, “‘Game of Thrones’ mastermind George R.R. Martin talks Blackwater, TV changes and playing favorites,” Hitfix, March 20, 2013. http://www.hitfix.com/the-fien-print/game-of-thrones-mastermind-georger-r-martin-talks-blackwater-tv-changes-and-playing-favorites#OWeq4Hc3t axWscgG.99. Accessed January 2014. Maureen Ryan, “‘Game of Thrones’ Third Season: How Many Episodes Will There Be?,” The Huffington Post, November 11, 2012. http://www. huffingtonpost.com/2012/04/11/game-of-thrones-third-season_n_1416386. html. Accessed January 2014. This aspect of the analysis is noted by Michael Poland with some frustration: “if completion entails a retrospective reading, whereby our sense of the whole reconfigures our sense of a constitutive element, then how do we navigate a narrative form wherein the designation of aesthetic wholes is so fluid?” His solution is to look at the individual entities that make up the series (episode, season, series) to look for coherence within each “whole.” Michael Poland, “Full of Wholes: Narrative Configuration, Completion, and the Televisual Episode / Season / Series,” GRAAT On-Line, n° 15, April 2014, 79. “Peut-être faut-il, malgré tout, faire confiance à la demande de concordance qui structure aujourd’hui encore l’attente des lecteurs et croire que de nouvelles formes narratives, que nous ne savons pas encore nommer, sont déjà en train de naître, qui attesteront que la fonction narrative peut se métamorphoser, mais non pas mourir.” My translation. Paul Ricoeur, Temps et récit Tome 2: La configuration dans le récit de fiction, Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1984, 48.

Part II

Home Entertainment

This page intentionally left blank

3

Familiarity and Novelty Television Microadaptations

In this second section of my analysis, I will be examining some familiar paradoxes of adaptation, and their manifestations in televisual form. I have chosen to entitle this section “Home Entertainment,” because the uniqueness of their expression is largely due to the proximity that characterizes television. Whether it is on your television or your iPad, your computer or your telephone, television fictions remain a genre of proximity: it is enjoyed in private, generally, and the duration of the seasons, the investment of time into the fictional characters over years, cause the viewer to feel attached to these fictions. This very familiarity may very well explain why television has long been relegated to simple “entertainment,” worthy of study as an economic or sociological phenomenon, but much less as a source of artistic expression.1 As such, the following three chapters will investigate how proximity impacts the nature of these television adaptations, allowing for new manifestations (and so hopefully, a new perception) of recurrent problems in adaptation theory. One of the major difficulties of adaptation theory is its differing status according to different audiences: if the audience is unaware that Vertigo (1958) is an adaptation of D’entre les morts by Boileau-Narcejac, is it still an adaptation? Though its process of transformation from text to screen is one of adaptation, the final product can be seen either in relation to its source text or on its own. To that extent, then, it is largely familiarity that makes these works adaptations: though the audience may not necessarily have read Jane Eyre before watching the film or the miniseries, or have watched the feature film Fargo before tuning in to its small screen namesake, their varying degrees of awareness of the show’s predecessors (be it simple name recognition, familiarity with the story, or thoughtful analysis of the source) defines that show as an adaptation, “allowing the [adaptation] to oscillate in our memories with what we are experiencing.”2 At the same time, of course, the very pleasure of adaptation is founded on the novelty of a new rendition: bringing literary figures to life through actors’ performances, depicting familiar textual locales on screen, provides a new means of ingress into the diegetic world. The debate on fidelity that has so dominated adaptation studies essentially rests on this delicate balance, between emphasizing

64

Home Entertainment

the familiarity of the source text, or expanding on the possibilities of the new medium to create novelty, what Linda Hutcheon refers to as “the comfort of ritual combined with the piquancy of surprise.”3 The fidelity debate is an issue that plagues any scholarly work on adaptation, a necessary response to the knee-jerk reaction that “it wasn’t like that in the original.” Once we acknowledge the adaptation as adaptation, its relationship with the source text becomes a point of interest, and all too often, this interest is evaluative. Robert Stam reminds us that The conventional language of adaptation criticism has often been profoundly moralistic, rich in terms that imply that the cinema has somehow done a disservice to literature. Terms like ‘infidelity’, ‘betrayal,’ ‘deformation,’ ‘violation,’ ‘bastardization,’ ‘vulgarisation,’ and ‘desecration’ proliferate in adaptation discourse, each word carrying its specific charge of opprobrium. ‘Infidelity’ carries overtones of Victorian prudishness; ‘betrayal’ evokes ethical perfidy; ‘bastardization’ connotes illegitimacy; ‘deformation’ implies aesthetic disgust and monstrosity; ‘violation’ calls to mind sexual violence; ‘vulgarization’ conjures up class degradation; and ‘desecration’ intimates religious sacrilege and blasphemy.4 Stam goes on to enumerate seven prejudices that contribute to this denigration of the adaptation (as compared to its source), including a valorization of anteriority and seniority, iconophobia, logophilia, the myth of facility (filmed fiction is too easily accessible), and parasitism.5 As a result, those interested in adaptation have long sought to distance themselves from a discussion of fidelity and its implicit judgment, while still considering the adaptation as such rather than as an independent aesthetic work. The juggling act that this entails has been handled in many ways, including Brian McFarlane’s structuralist approach discussed in the previous chapter; Stam’s own suggestion of approaching the adaptation from a narratological standpoint, as an example of what Gerard Genette refers to as “hypertextuality”;6 through the numerous metaphors seeking to decenter the source text as the privileged locus of narrative authority, as with Kamilla Elliot’s suggestion that we see source and adaptation as mirror images of one another;7 or through Christine Geraghty’s decision to focus on the films themselves and “the work of recall” implicit in associating the previously experienced work with its new adaptation.8 As we have already clarified in chapter one, television adaptations (and particularly long-form episodic or serial fictions) are simply too loosely related to their sources to really be subject to this debate: serial fiction differs enough from its source, be it theater, novel, short story, or film, for audiences to assume significant changes in the televised adaptation. Fidelity does remain a factor in comparable forms, like the adaptation of a novel to a short-form fiction (though here

Familiarity and Novelty

65

again, Andrew Davies has made a career of modernizing and adding to the classics in miniseries form with little to no protest) or the reboot of a television series in modernized form (much to the chagrin of the short-lived Bionic Woman (NBC, 2007), which lasted a total of eight episodes), but in general television audiences do not apply the same stringent rules to adaptations on television as they do on film.9 Instead, as we have seen, television, as a medium of proximity, seeks to induce familiarity in its viewers in hopes of eliciting fidelity from the audience, to make its fictions habit-forming. We are familiar with these series, with these characters; and at the same time, as in the case of the adaptation, even in the formulaic procedurals or sitcoms, the viewer wants to be surprised, to see an unusual variation on the themes that have become well-worn as they have become familiar. As such, television, like adaptation, is constantly walking a tightrope between familiarity and novelty, between keeping the things you love, and making them new and exciting once again. In this chapter, then, I will explore one of the ways television balances these conflicting desires for “the same” and “different” in its medium by invoking these same paradoxical impulses in adaptation, through a phenomenon I have called the microadaptation. Microadaptations, as their name suggests, are adaptations, most often of well-known texts, that last only a single episode of the series, and are not revisited in episodes following this one, thus balancing the familiarity of the show’s setting, characters, and storylines with its surprise adaptation. Microadaptation is a unique function of serial storytelling, where an entire episode (or the majority of that episode) can be devoted to retelling an older, well-known tale. This phenomenon is not specific to television—we could argue that the performance of Hamlet that occupies a chapter of Great Expectations, or its use in Mark Twain’s Huck Finn, both of which were published in increments, could be examples of microadaptations, not to mention the avatar of the genre, Scheherazade and her Thousand and One Nights.10 However, as television has become the foremost example of serial storytelling in the last 50 years, and arguably the most complex example of serial storytelling to date, so these microadaptations are most obvious there. Microadaptations allow series to briefly appropriate a text that is considered part of common culture, adapting the source to television—and to the premise of the television show doing the adapting. In this, they differ significantly from a simple allusion or citation, which might reference a text, but not necessarily use it as a premise for an episode, or as relevant to the characterization of its style or characters. Thus a microadaptation goes beyond the simple performance of a text, like “the Fonze” playing Hamlet in Happy Days, or Steve Urkel playing Romeo in Family Matters (3.03, ABC 1989–1997, CBS 1997–1998). In these examples, though within the diegesis there is a production of a play, ultimately the play doesn’t contribute to our understanding of the show or

66

Home Entertainment

the characters involved in it, and these references are played mostly for comic value.11 Conversely, I will argue that sustained allusions to canonical texts in shows like Sons of Anarchy (FX, 2008–2014), a loose adaptation of Hamlet, or House of Cards, which seems to contain elements of Macbeth and Richard III, are not microadaptations, because these allusions may wax or wane according to the needs of the show’s narrative, and they run through the show as a whole. Microadaptations, as I define them, are self-contained adaptations, lasting a single episode, and where the plot or characterization somehow echoes the source text being adapted. As such, they are adaptations unique to serial storytelling— in the current media landscape, they are a purely televisual version of adaptation, which foregrounds some of the paradoxes of adaptation’s fidelity debate. Indeed, as finite adaptations generally appearing in an infinite-model series, fidelity criteria could very well be brought to bear on these episodes, which complicate the relationship between familiarity and novelty so characteristic of the debate. There are two primary reasons for the microadaptation, and consequently, two major television genres in which they appear: the “entry-level microadaptation,”12 which involves an uninitiated audience, and appears mostly in children’s programs; and the “dual microadaptation,” for the knowledgeable viewer, which appears primarily in comic television shows. Though both concern well-known texts in Western culture, the “entry-level” micro-adaptation assumes that children will have little to no knowledge of the source, thus bringing to the fore this fundamental question about the very identity of the adaptation if its predecessor is unknown. In looking at work done recently on references to Shakespeare in contemporary television,13 it becomes obvious that the sustained engagements with the Bard’s plays are mostly to be found in either children’s television shows or in comedies. The microadaptation is to be found in children’s programs like Wishbone14 (PBS, 1995–2001), or the innumerable adaptations of classic tales in cartoons and educational programs like Sesame Street (PBS, 1969–), Jim Henson’s Muppet Babies (CBS, 1984–1992)15 and Super Why! (PBS, 2007–2012),16 a show where the main character Wyatt deals with his everyday problems by looking for the answers in a book, whose narrative is then re-enacted with the recurrent characters of the series. In his work on “entry-level” adaptations, Thomas Leitch makes the problematic nature of these adaptations clear: introductory adaptations derive their value in a large measure because they are parasitic on an established classic, but they assume a thorough knowledge of that classic at their peril.17 These microadaptations are clearly meant to introduce children to classic texts within a context that they recognize—they may not know the story

Familiarity and Novelty

67

of Sherlock Holmes, or Casablanca (1942), but they know Wishbone and Kermit, and trust them to spin a good yarn. Here again, I want to distinguish between microadaptations like Wishbone, Sesame Street, or Super Why!, and adaptations like The Animated Tales from Shakespeare (BBC2, 1992–1994), where Shakespeare’s plays are simply abridged and animated, but without the framework of a larger series within which the adaptation is inserted. Of course, in both cases, the adults watching with the children are assumed to be knowledgeable of the sources, but the primary audience is not. Thus these adaptations are part of the educational bent of children’s television, meant to justify children’s screen time despite vociferous debate on its effect on children’s well-being. The children’s shows are largely targeting a very young audience—as Màire Messenger Davies notes, the educational aspects of children’s television are primarily considered for shows aiming at children under six18 —and can be seen as a simple transposition of the time-honored tradition of abridgement of the classics for younger children. Anja Muller outlines the function of such adaptations: Adaptations of originally ‘adult’ texts for children are intended to initiate young readers to a literary canon that is deemed essential for sharing a common cultural heritage. As such, they follow an aesthetic as well as an educational agenda. Children’s classics, in turn, have also been adapted throughout the ages, either to meet changing tastes, shifts in the conceptualization of childhood, or take cognizance of the possibilities offered by new media, such as television, film, graphic novels, or, more recently, computer games.19 What is interesting about these entry-level microadaptations, of course, is that they fit both these criteria, where adult texts are adapted and modernized for the benefit of our common cultural heritage, while also taking advantage of the possibilities television (and specific television shows) offer to the young viewer. Likewise, as David Buckingham has noted, the ‘classic’ literary adaptation has been seen as a staple of the ‘Great Tradition’ in children’s television: such programmes have been advocated both as a way of introducing children to the literary heritage and (more instrumentally) as a means of encouraging them to read books. 20 This emphasis on a return to the source (or at least, to an abridged version of the source)21 and to literature more generally is, of course, a hallmark of educational programs22 —and in this, as we shall see, they differ significantly from the “dual microadaptations.”

68

Home Entertainment

Entry-level microadaptations first make these classic tales palatable by adapting them to the format of the familiar television show—its characters, themes, and setting—but also consistently make a concerted effort to apply these tales to children’s lives in some way, making literature a means of dealing with an everyday problem. Thus, in the Wishbone adaptation of Oliver Twist, “A Twisted Tale” (1.03), the Dickens plot 23 is intercut with stories of Wishbone’s owner Joe’s dealing with a new student, Max, who has lost his parents, and becomes influenced by another child at the group home who has been stealing from local households. Though this specific story might not be an everyday occurrence, the idea of being kind to a new student in class, or being careful not to consort with people who could be bad influences, is. In a later episode, “Muttketeer” (1.33), a rendition of Alexandre Dumas’s The Three Musketeers, the novel’s plot is related to the desire to accompany Joe and his friends to school, just as d’Artagnan attempts to aid the Three Musketeers. Once again, this is a story that is easily applicable to a younger child with an older sibling, for example, and the fact that Wishbone always imagines himself as a character in the story, with whom the young viewer necessarily sympathizes (the dog is the only familiar figure in these literary reenactments, and the viewer is privy to the dog’s thoughts in voiceover, all of which would tend to make the audience identify with him), reinforces the relevance of the classic story. These entry-level microadaptations are to be contrasted with the second source of microadaptations, the comic or dramedy series, the locus for what I have termed “dual microadaptations.” Comedies are, after all, particularly susceptible to the push and pull of familiarity and novelty: All of TV relies on predictability, but comedies rely on it more than anything else. A comedy relies on establishing certain rhythms, which the audience then anticipates. The laughs often come from the anticipation just as much as they do from the actual incidents, or the comedy disrupts those rhythms of anticipation and payoff to score an even bigger, more unexpected laugh. The biggest complaints leveled against sitcoms say that they’re too predictable, and after a while on any comedy, that’s usually true. 24 A […] problem for television comedy is that broadcasting is inherently about communicating with large, diverse, unconnected audiences, whereas comedy has inherently relied on close relationships between joke tellers and audiences. While individual jokes can be understood as communicative act which are told by a teller and received (and hopefully laughed at) by an audience, the success of humour is usually also attributed to the ‘joking relationship’ between those in a comic exchange. […] Such ‘in-jokes’ rely more on the workings of that group dynamic than the specifics of the joke that was uttered. 25

Familiarity and Novelty

69

Given the importance of familiar rhythms that have to be punctuated with surprises to create laughter, given the episodic storytelling that allows each episode to be considered separately from those before or after it, it is unsurprising that comedy is the other major locus of microadaptations. These microadaptations are made for a knowing audience, not to introduce them to the classics, but to introduce the classics to the show’s premise. As such, the works chosen are not just canon; they are considered part of everyday culture. This familiarity of the source is so crucial, in fact, that not even Shakespeare’s tragedies are necessarily fair game. Instead, the texts tend to be those with simpler narratives, plays that would have been studied in school; Hamlet, or Romeo and Juliet, are thus preferable to even well-known plays like The Tempest or Midsummer Night’s Dream. 26 The familiarity of the source text, as we have seen, is largely characteristic of adaptations that seek to establish themselves as such—though some adaptations attempt to usurp the place of their sources as original in their own right, to a large extent adaptations seek to capitalize on the familiarity of their predecessor, highlighting their relationship to the original. 27 If these microadaptations are an extreme example of using an “ultracanonical” source text, that very familiarity is made novel when juxtaposed with the familiar setting of one’s favorite show. In so doing, of course, these shows an attempt to make something new out of something old. The viewer is doubly knowledgeable (thus the term “dual microadaptation”), both of the source, and of the show to which it is being adapted. It is the concurrence of these two familiar elements, the adaptation of one to the other, which is novel—the content of both source and show should already be well-established in the mind of the viewer. Indeed, the importance of familiarity is such that when the sitcom Just Shoot Me (NBC, 1997–2003) chose to adapt King Lear, despite it being one of Shakespeare’s most famous plays, the show took pains to retelling the story so as to make the allusions clear. The owner of a fashion magazine (and father to one of the employees), John Gallo, has tickets to a performance of King Lear at the National Theater in London, and has hired a private plane to get there; he is unable to go and instead spends the episode playing with a malfunctioning door opener, which lets off sparks every time someone uses the microwave, while his employees Elliot and Nina vie for his favor to get the prized tickets, only to then argue over who gets them both (and his loving daughter Maya, the true Shakespeare fan, gets nothing): [FINCH enters a bar, where he finds MAYA drowning her sorrows.] MAYA: I can’t believe he gave Elliot and Nina those tickets! FINCH: All right, I’ll bite. What’s so great about King Lear? MAYA: Well, it’s just a brilliant play. It has everything: revenge, jealousy… betrayal.

70 Home Entertainment Hmm. I think I saw that movie at a bachelor party once, but they spelled Lear with two e’s. I think it was on a double bill with The Keyster Bunny. MAYA: Well in the version with clothes, King Lear decides to divide his kingdom among his three daughters. His two evil daughters, Regan and Goneril, suck up to him big time, even though they don’t really love him, but Cordelia, who does love him, refuses to join in the false flattery and gets zip! FINCH: So what’s the king’s problem? MAYA: Blinded by his own vanity. [Businessmen at a nearby table begin laughing loudly. Finch turns to them] FINCH: [exclaims] Hey! Middle management! Zip it! [laughter] So what are you saying? That the two suck-ups get everything? MAYA: Well, at first they do, but then they get real greedy and start scheming against each other. [cut to ELLIOT and NINA in the office, who almost run into one another and stop a few feet apart, each obviously wary of the other] NINA: Hello there, Elliot. ELLIOT: Nice to see you again, Nina. NINA: Yes, nice… You know, I really don’t say this as often as I should, but you really… [obviously searching for a compliment] own a lot… of very nice shirts. [laughter] ELLIOT: Thank you. Uh… [equally forced] you’re pretty. [laughter] NINA: So, it should be quite the flight later. ELLIOT: What do you mean? NINA: Well, I don’t want to alarm anyone, but my friend Benny used to date our pilot, and well… it’s not just the plane that gets fueled up before the flight. [laughter] ELLIOT: Ah, planes these days practically fly themselves. I feel bad that you’re going to miss the elderly millionaire bachelor’s convention. [he peers to see her reaction; laughter] NINA: [exclaims] You’re bluffing! ELLIOT: Am I, Nina? NINA: You’re not getting my ticket. ELLIOT: Well, you’re not getting mine! [… cut back to the bar, where people are now crowded around MAYA, who has taken a seat on the bar and towers over everyone else.] MAYA: With Lear’s two scheming daughters at each other’s throats, the kingdom is falling into ruin. […] And with the empire in ruins, guess who’s the only one who stands by King Lear? FINCH: Cordelia. MAYA: Yessss. Princess Cordelia. And as she takes her final breath, Lear realizes she’s the only one who truly loved him, and he cries out to the heavens, “Howl, howl, howl!” But of course, by then, it’s much FINCH:

Familiarity and Novelty

71

too late. Cordelia is dead. [cut to Finch, whose mouth is agape.] Finch? [cut to Finch, still silent] Dennis? FINCH: [holding back tears, averting his face] Don’t look at me! (“King Lear Jet,” 2.05, NBC, 1997–2003, 13:10–14:40, 16:00–16:04, 16:20–16:56) This episode is a particularly clear example of how crucial it is for the microadaptation’s source to be a well-known one. Here, the show uses the retelling of Shakespeare’s play to summarize what happened before the excerpt began (the daughter getting cut out of the prize), to see and interpret what is currently happening (the winners vying for sole control of the prize), and to later recognize what is to come (neither will be the victor and the father will recognize the folly of not appreciating his faithful daughter). Though there is a performance in this episode, it is the McGuffin which inspires the plot; ultimately, the microadaptation uses the novel situation and the familiar source to reinforce our understanding of the show’s own concerns, notably by deepening our understanding of the characters. The Lear adaptation tells us much about daughter/editor Maya, whose position might be seen as one of nepotism, but who proves herself worthy of her position, while those who supposedly got their job through merit are the real sycophants. Though using a Shakespearean plot, the show, in fact, retraces familiar ground, emphasizing the complex nature of work relations that is often its focus. This paradoxical association of familiarity and novelty is, of course, linked to a similar tension between distance and proximity: by using a known text in unexpected ways, the show creates distance both from itself and from the source. Here, for example, the moving tragedy of Lear and Cordelia (and its effect on the public) is played for laughs, distancing us from the emotion that the diegetic audience clearly feels—the distancing effect that Henri Bergson tells us is so necessary for humor. 28 Indeed, the distance from the source is almost systematic, especially in comic shows, because it is ultimately the show that is the primary source of inspiration, and not faithfulness to the source. As such, these microadaptations serve as an extreme example of Deborah Cartmell and Imelda Whelehan’s idea that film adaptations often adapt film genre as much or more than their ostensible source texts; 29 here, of course, the sitcom or dramedy genre is but an additional layer to what is essentially an adaptation both of source and of show. This is, of course, another reason to use canonical sources, which allow for this flexibility: popular and much-adapted texts have to work with similarity and difference in a movement that refers to but does not rely on knowledge of previous versions including the original. Their status as classic adaptations gives them a flexibility that allows them to remain recognizable even when subjected to considerable change.

72

Home Entertainment This flexibility does not mean free-floating intertextuality, however; adaptations that move furthest from the original are often sustained by other generic expectations that shape narrative organization, mise-en-scène, and costume.30

The “ultracanonical” sources are chosen then, not just for their familiarity, but for their adaptability; in choosing these source texts, the shows are referring not just to the text itself, but to its tradition of malleability to different media, and the traditions that allow for those different renditions. The other generic expectations that accompany such a protean vision of the source texts, likewise, are those of the series of which the microadaptation constitutes but a single episode of a larger whole. This often means that ultimately, microadaptations will distance themselves from any problematic notions in the source in order to stay faithful—to themselves. Thus, for example, the 100th episode of Castle, which adapted Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954), was one of the rare microadaptations actually to maintain suspense about its plot. The knowledgeable viewer might realize how the film ended, but given that here the Jimmy Stewart role is played by diegetic author Richard Castle, whose tendency to let his imagination get away from him is endemic to the show’s premise, it is difficult to believe what is apparently happening before our eyes. As his partner Kate Beckett reminds him: Come on Castle, you’re here with a broken leg, binoculars, seeing a Rear Window scenario play out across the way. I mean, what are the odds? (“The Lives of Others,” 5.19) The very theatrical nature of the crime, beginning with one man’s discovery of his lover’s adultery, reinforces this uncertainty about what is and is not real. Thus in the pivotal moment when Richard Castle actually witnesses what he thinks is the motive for the crime to come, the sequence focuses on both filming techniques and dramatic traditions to emphasize the artifice of performance-based art (5.19, 6:45–8:22), and therefore question the microadaptation’s faithfulness to its source—here the reality of a crime being planned and committed as it is in Hitchcock’s iconic film. The sequence begins with a close-up of the binoculars, held by what is at first an anonymous hand focusing them. It cuts to what is apparently being seen, a window where a man stands arguing with a woman typing on a computer. The camera cuts back to Castle, who comments “Must be writers,”31 before returning to the couple and panning up to another window, where a woman in a maid’s uniform dusts and then steals money out of a drawer. Again, we cut back for Castle’s comment—“That had better be for a sick child”—before returning to the building, where we have moved from a single window to four, showing an attractive young woman running across her apartment

Familiarity and Novelty

73

(and appearing at each of the windows as she does so) to greet a young man who awaits behind the door (and yet another window). They embrace and again move across the apartment from one window to another, where they quickly begin to remove clothing. There is no apparent dialogue between the lovers, just action, to the extent that Castle himself remarks: “All right, slow down. It’s not a race! Maybe close the blinds.” The camera is equally active, panning from one window to the next rather than zooming out to show the entire apartment, and then panning back to show another man outside the door, about to enter the apartment. The music changes from whimsical to tense, with increased rhythm and bass, as the lovers scramble to hide their actions. The erstwhile lover escapes, leaving his hat behind, and we see the husband/ boyfriend scoop it off the floor, look towards his wife/girlfriend, yet ultimately make no comment. The opening act setting the scene is just that, a sort of dumb show where much is expressed, but not a word is spoken (perfect, therefore, for the voyeuristic neighbor who has only access to visual cues). Though the action is meant to evoke Hitchcock’s Rear Window, ultimately it also pays homage to silent film, complete with an audio version of title cards in the form of Castle’s interspersed commentary. Indeed, we could associate the movement in the designated adulterous couple from one window to the next of course with the equally rectangular form of the television or film screen, while the moments where they are unseen, between windows (or behind closed blinds, when the crime is apparently being committed) suggests the nature of film, where the individual images are made into movement by means of the human eye and imagination.32 The microadaptation, it seems, is not just evocative of a single text, but of an entire medium and its traditions, from theater to silent film to classic Hollywood film to television, and its emphasis on these traditions of filmed fiction pay homage to its sources, while suggesting their distance from Castle’s diegetic world. Ultimately, the viewer discovers that this has all been staged to cheer Castle up for his birthday party, changing the outcome of the familiar source for a familiar Castle twist, and once again allowing the writers to emphasize the concerns of the show. As creator Andrew Marlowe remarks in his commentary about the episode (DVD Season 5), they wanted to reinforce the relationship between Castle and Beckett, letting us see them as more of a couple outside their relationship as partners solving crimes (something that is even more distant from the original relationship between Stewart and Kelley’s characters, one could argue). In this, as in many of these microadaptations, the show upends knowledgeable expectations of the source text, preferring to privilege the show’s concerns rather than any sort of fidelity to the original text. This distance is often heightened by a frame story, a transitional sequence that allows the viewer to adjust their expectations, and allows the show to justify its sudden lapse into adaptation diegetically, be it a

74

Home Entertainment

Figure 3.1 Moonlighting credits: a frame text being framed in turn.

dream sequence, a hallucination, or a re-imagining. In one of the most famous and most successful microadaptations, dramedy Moonlighting made an episode entitled “Atomic Shakespeare” that essentially took place in the mind of a frustrated young viewer who had to study for a Shakespeare test rather than watching his favorite program (3.07, 0–2:24). The weekly Moonlighting opening credits, images of Los Angeles interspersed with images of the characters in the show, play almost all the way through before the final images of the credits shrink and the camera zooms out to reveal the television on which the credits were being broadcast. The credits finish as a woman snaps the TV off and stands in front of it, hands on hips. She is only seen from the neck down, but her clothing, staid and traditional, with an apron over her skirt, mark her in contrast with the exotic and glamorous imagery of Los Angeles seen in the credits. Her domestic status is confirmed by the voice that responds to her actions: “Mom, what are you doing?” The son is also overdetermined as a typical Midwestern teenager, complete with cuffed jeans, sneakers, and an Ohio State Wrestling T-shirt, tossing a baseball into a glove as he speaks. Once again, the character’s face remains unseen, making him a sort of Everyteen.33 The mother figure insists that he has homework, and can’t watch the show where the two main characters “argue a lot, and all they really want to do is sleep together” because it “sounds like trash” and “watching television is not going to help [him] on [his] Shakespeare test tomorrow.” The boy is ushered upstairs, where he reluctantly opens a ridiculously ornate copy of Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew, which, when opened, instead shows the episode credits in Gothic typeface, including a page acknowledging that the storyline is “From an idea by William ‘Budd’ Shakespeare.” Finally, the credits give way to a watercolor image, onto which the camera zooms, dissolving into the live-action set. The Gothic typeface is now present as

Familiarity and Novelty

75

Figure 3.2 Episode credits: Upending expectations for both Shakespeare and adaptation.

a title card across the screen, informing us that we are in “Padua, Italy, 1593.” After a few seconds, two more lines appear on the screen: “Or just an incredible facsimile.” This sequence is a particularly complex example of the frame story: we go from the familiar credits to an actual TV screen showing them, creating expectations of familiarity only to explicitly distance them, to in fact shut them off altogether (as the television is shut off). Instead of being in the glamorous locations of LA, we are in a very domestic setting, with an anonymous boy negotiating television privileges with his mother. This is Middle America, as compared to the glamor of television, creating a new sense of familiarity in the viewer—we’re not watching the familiar show, we’re watching ourselves. When the boy is forced to read Shakespeare rather than watching his show, ostentation returns, but this time it is literary ostentation: Taming of the Shrew is in a completely unrealistic old-fashioned manuscript form, trading the luxury of one form of fiction for another—until he opens the book and the two run together. The fact that the episode credits appear on the pages of the illuminated manuscript also appeal to the viewer’s knowledge, this time not of the show, but of film adaptations of classic texts, which often use this device to insist that their filmed fiction is literally lifted directly from the pages of the book. Moonlighting, of course, mocks these conventions, confirming that Shakespeare is a familiar companion, a “Budd” rather than the Bard. Instead, the theme song for the series is played by lutes and string instruments in a mock-Renaissance style while the pages turn, suggesting it is Elizabethan Moonlighting as much as it is The Taming of the Shrew. Likewise, the setting also reenacts a cliché of the classic film adaptation, which transforms from text to painting to filmed action, and this tradition is again made comic when the title card with place and time admits to its illusory nature, made all the more

76 Home Entertainment ironic given that the facsimile is less than “incredible,” but instead a simple soundstage. This back and forth, between the familiar traditions of the television show, and those of the classic adaptation, emphasizes once again the double affiliation of the microadaptation, to the source text and to the show’s premise. Indeed, given that the play The Taming of the Shrew includes its own complex frame story, entitled “The Induction,” wherein the story of Petruchio and Katarina is a play being performed for Sly, a drunken peasant who is told that he is and has always been a lord, to the amusement of the aristocratic household that surrounds him, we could argue that this complex frame story is a transposition of the play that is but rarely included in many modern retellings. Likewise, the tension between source and show is also double, as ultimately this is equally commentary on the traditions of television and of adaptation. Thus, for example, the arrival of the male lead, David Addison, in the guise of Petruchio, makes clear that the Bard is better known as a series of quotes than in relation to a specific play: A problem no doubt, and one in need of solution bold. For love but of a sudden doth take such hold. The task alas to find a mate to weather Kate’s typhoon. But where? For such a man doth come along but once in a blue moon. [a flourish of trumpets and the sound of a horse neighing. PETRUCHIO enters on a white steed, and promptly rears up on its hind legs. Cut to LUCENTIO, mouth agape, before PETRUCHIO walks his horse to center stage, while music reminiscent of the “Green Acres” theme plays. The camera pans up the horse’s legs, showing a BMW logo on its horseblanket, to PETRUCHIO, wearing sunglasses.] PETRUCHIO: What’s shakin’, y’all? [He dismounts, and approaches the head of the horse, which we realize is also wearing sunglasses.] […] [LUCENTIO approaches from behind as PETRUCHIO dramatically expostulates] To be, or not to be—that is the question. LUCENTIO: [exasperated] Wrong play. PETRUCHIO: Now is the winter of our discontent made glorious summerLUCENTIO: Wrong play. PETRUCHIO: Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears! [All extras stop their activities] ENSEMBLE: Wrong play! [PETRUCHIO begrudgingly gets a scroll out of his vest and begins reading hesitantly] PETRUCHIO: Verona, for a while I take my leave? [The extras all grunt assent, nod, and go back to their activities, and PETRUCHIO speaks dramatically, gesturing broadly with every phrase] to see my friends in Padua! And what a fortuitous gale it is that blows me here. Such wind as scatters young men through the world to seek their fortunes farther than at home, where small experience grows. Thus it stands LUCENTIO:

Familiarity and Novelty

77

with me, that I thrust myself into this maze. Crowns in my purse I have, goods at home, and so am come to see the world! [PETRUCHIO stops, lowers his sunglasses, speaks directly to the camera] You didn’t think I could pull it off, did ya? (3.07, 7:52–9:07) You can notice that familiarity has become a relative term—we’re familiar with Shakespeare, but not with this particular play, though what we need to know is right there in the title Taming of the Shrew. Indeed, the episode mocks our knowledge of Shakespeare, as only one of the quotes actually opens a play (Richard III), while the quotes from Julius Caesar and Hamlet occur in the latter part of their respective stories. What seems authentic to our conception of Shakespeare (like the Elizabethan dress and setting, or the lines in verse) is largely undermined, first by the condensing of Petruchio’s dialogue in a long monologue, thus abridging the sole pure Shakespeare reference (I.2), as well as by the voluntary anachronisms like the sunglasses, the BMW logo, or the extras that slip in and out of character.34 Instead, there seems an equal desire to acknowledge television as a source, where the heroic arrival of Petruchio on a rearing white stallion owes more to The Lone Ranger (ABC, 1949–1957) than to Shakespeare, and the most ostentatiously poetic of the lines in the sequence, in fact, were created by the show writers to acknowledge Moonlighting itself: the name of the detective agency where the two leads work is “The Blue Moon Detective Agency,” making Lucentio’s comments that “such a man [as to woo Katerina] comes along but once in a Blue Moon” a direct reference to this show. The rest of the episode confirms these many references to the show itself, an insistence that we are still in the world of Moonlighting, regardless of the setting or storyline. Thus, for example, the adaptation is separated into acts by title cards, suggesting silent film traditions as well as the 5 acts so typical of Elizabethan theater—but each of these title cards appears after a commercial break, emphasizing the televisual nature of

Figure 3.3 Petruchio as a Shakespearean hero.

78

Home Entertainment

the episode. Indeed, though thus far I’ve spoken of the familiarity of the source text in sweeping cultural terms, ultimately the familiarity of the source must also entail familiar themes that make the source relevant to the concerns of the series itself—Moonlighting was a show about the problematic gender relations of the 1980s, where charming but slightly misogynistic David was constantly battling strident feminist Maddie, all while ostensibly running a detective agency and solving crimes. The fact that the show adapted this Shakespeare play is no coincidence, nor is it a coincidence that its other very famous microadaptation (“The Dream Sequence Always Rings Twice,” 2.04) is a reinterpretation of film noir in general and (despite its title) Double Indemnity (1944) in particular. In both cases, the show has chosen sources that are well-known, but that allow the series to examine its central preoccupations—that of gender relations on the one hand, and screwball comedy on the other—through the lens of older texts.35 Likewise, given the “ultracanonical” nature of the source text, microadaptations can be seen as extreme versions of adaptations; after all, the relationship of familiarity (of the source) and novelty (of the medium) is one that the audience expects when they are knowledgeable about an adaptation, and it is this position that the microadaptation essentially forces on an initially unsuspecting viewer (who was expecting the latest episode of their favorite show). Indeed, in grappling with the issue of fidelity that has plagued adaptation, in the careful balance to be struck between familiarity and novelty, the microadaptation upends the characteristic argument of familiar source and novel medium; here, as we have seen, it is the source text that is novel, and the medium (be it television in general or the specific television show in particular) that is familiar, allowing for a new perception of the assumptions of the fidelity debate—like the very identity of the source to which the adaptation should be faithful (source text, medium, genre …). In so doing, it is also giving new meaning not only to the characters in the series, whose stories are applicable to well-known tales but also to those tales themselves. Thus we can apply King Lear to our relationships with our work colleagues, and The Taming of the Shrew to current gender relations;36 our children can apply Oliver Twist to their everyday lives, showing kindness to those in need. Though the series make no bones about undercutting the realism of previous tales (playing its emotional impact for comic effect in Just Shoot Me, using Castle’s cynical remarks to comment on events across the street, or undermining the “incredible facsimile” of the Shakespearean scene with anachronisms in Moonlighting), instead emphasizing the fictional nature of these reappropriations, they nonetheless insist on the source texts’ relevance to both the show and its audience, creating a sort of realism of its own. 37 Microadaptations are therefore necessarily metatextual adaptations, commenting both on themselves as episodes of a given show, and on

Familiarity and Novelty

79

their source text as pertinent to that show (and thus to the contemporary viewer watching it). Though all adaptations, I would argue, have a metatextual aspect to them, here that metatextuality is foregrounded, reminding us that one of the principle reasons for the continued popularity of adaptation at all is its ability to reveal hidden facets of the source text and its applicability to our lives (in this case, through the show in which it appears). This strategy of microadaptations has proven so successful that it arguably motivates one of the more innovative examples of the sitcom in recent years, Community. Examining this sitcom, where microadaptations eventually became characteristic of the series (rather than a rare exception, as was the case with all the other examples analyzed thus far) allows us both to confirm the function microadaptations serve in this extreme example, and to better perceive the fragile balance between familiarity and novelty that define them. Though its creator Dan Harmon originally suggested that he wanted to make a classic sitcom, about a lawyer who loses his license when they discover his Bachelor’s degree is fake and has to go back to community college, only to encounter a study group full of misfits, Harmon insisted that he couldn’t just do a classic sitcom without reference humor: […] with every passing year, characters on television are more in danger of being further removed from an audience that lives in a completely different world then they do. I mean, there’s a long-standing rule on TV that we’re not going to watch characters poop and sleep, but we also don’t watch them watch TV, and we don’t listen to them talk about it, and we don’t know what movies they like, and if we find out what their favorite song is, it costs us $40,000 to say it. So reference humor sort of became a way to make a classic TV show feel relevant.38 The way that Harmon structured the presence of reference humor in the show was through the character of Abed, a character who was, as he says, raised by television (“Home Economics,” 1.08). I have written elsewhere about the way that Abed and his reference to television and film slowly take over the series as a whole, making the show into a sort of rivalry between Jeff Winger, the ostensible leading man, whose plight was the origin point for the classic sitcom, and Abed, whose constant metatextual references made for a very postmodern show. 39 As  the character becomes a favorite with both fans and writers, the show’s occasional references (to The Breakfast Club (1985) in the pilot (1.01), to M*A*S*H in “Investigative Journalism” (1.13), or to Ghost (1990) in the episode entitled “Beginning Pottery” (1.19)) become more and more prominent, to become full-blown homages. It is not until season one’s episode 20, “The Science of Illusion,” that Abed’s commentary

80

Home Entertainment

causes the episode to become a microadaptation; two of the women in the study group, uptight Annie and single working mother Shirley, have volunteered to work as campus security, and Abed’s input makes their interaction into a sitcom homage to the buddy cop movie, and Lethal Weapon (1987) in particular. When the women come up with the idea to help police the school, he immediately replies, “that is a buddy cop movie I would watch—but I wonder which of you would be the straightlaced cop, and which would be the bad ass?” (1.20). It is through Abed’s input that diegetic action becomes metatextual, a reference rather than a simple plot point. The character follows the women in their adventures to resolve a crime involving vandalism in the science lab, consistently eating movie snacks (Milk Duds, popcorn, etc.) to reinforce his role as moviegoer/observer for the film scenario he has created, all because, as he says, “[his] cable’s gone out.” After this pivotal episode, Community centered more and more often on thematic episodes, which adapted either specific texts or genres. Thus to mention but a few examples immediately after this episode, “Contemporary American Poultry” (1.21) used the monopoly on chicken fingers at the cafeteria as the springboard for an homage to Goodfellas, a spoof largely due to Abed’s voiceover characterizing the action as a version of a mafia takeover; “The Art of Discourse” (1.22) spoofs college films like Animal House (1978) once Abed reveals his “quintessential list of college exploits” inspired by what film has taught him about the undergraduate experience; and “Modern Warfare” (1.23), where Abed’s entrance in full battle gear and his Terminator-inspired opening line (“Come with me if you don’t want paint on your clothes” rather than “Come with me if you want to live”) transform a paintball game into an action film. However, what interests me here is the way in which Abed’s metatextual references, which foreground the many microadaptations which became the show’s specialty, initially remain foregrounded in realism, and are conceived as such by the show’s creator and showrunner: “It’s really hard to launch what you want to be like a classic sitcom,” says Harmon. “Where people just trust the characters, believe they’re real and stuff. Abed was an emergency sort of nitro tank for that. You know his ability to sort of caress the fourth wall, thereby shoring it up in my opinion.”40 […] in fact the whole reason for him being the guy that’s such a fan of TV and movies is that he’s not afraid to say the thing that TV characters usually aren’t allowed to say which is, “Isn’t this a lot like a TV show?” Because if somebody is not allowed to say that, I would get bored real fast writing a sitcom. But at the same time, the fourth wall cannot be broken in my mind. I have a real sensitivity to

Familiarity and Novelty

81

that. People feel like it’s the opposite, that it’s constantly caressing it and punching it, challenging it and stuff, but it really couldn’t be more the opposite. I really believe that you need some pop-culture referencing and some little bit of, “Wow this is really sort of coming together like TV shows do” in order for modern audiences to actually believe what’s happening is happening, because that’s how you and I would react if we were in those situations. We would not just go, “Oh good, I’m glad we all worked this out in 20 minutes through a succession of Joseph Campbell steps.” We’re somebody apt to go, “Yeah, exactly, because this is a TV show.” [Laughs.] So to represent the fact that it’s happening in reality.41 Initially, it’s because we see things from Abed’s perspective that we see things as a television show—which in fact makes his perspective more accurate than anyone else’s on the series, none of whom seem to be able to recognize that fact. This comes to a head in Season 2’s “Abed’s Uncontrollable Christmas” (2.11), where Abed essentially imagines everything as Claymation similar to the Rankin Bass Christmas specials, and the viewer is literally forced to see through his eyes. A later episode (“The Paradigms of Human Memory,” 2.21) flashes back to the same sequences as seen by the rest of the group, where they’re simply talking around a table and pretending to participate in Abed’s delusion. What some might see as “adorable and magical,” other characters see as “a total mental breakdown.” Like other microadaptations, ultimately, it uses these source texts to tell us something about character, adapting its own characters to the new premise: One of the things that works so well about Community’s “gimmick” episodes […] is the fact that the show is really dedicated to telling a straightforward version of whatever genre it’s engaging with but also creating an episode of Community that engages with the characters

Figure 3.4 Seeing the world through Abed’s eyes = seeing reality as television.

82

Home Entertainment on a personal level. “Modern Warfare” is an action movie, through and through, but it’s also a story about the relationships these people have built with each other over the course of the first season, particularly the one between Jeff and Britta. “Epidemiology” is a zombie movie to its core, but it’s also a story about how Troy’s evolving and changing. And “Abed’s Uncontrollable Christmas” could stand proudly alongside almost all Christmas specials out there, but it’s simultaneously a tremendously moving episode of Community, about the ways that these people have created a safe place where they can grow and change and the ways that they look out for each other when they need looking out for.42

Harmon himself insists on the fact that regardless of the situation in which they’re placed, and to which they must adapt, the characters remain the same and only the context changes: When you do something [different], you emphasize the fact that the characters are distinctive. […] your show has to be really, really good in a really distinct way to suffer that adaptation, to be able to live in different media. It means your characters are distinct and definable.43 If Abed is the impetus for the many forays into microadaptation, creator and reviewer suggest, this ultimately does not negate the coherency of the diegesis. Though the homage is enjoyable, the show will not sacrifice narrative unity and character development to perfect the adaptation. Instead, the microadaptation is initially seen as character development in and of itself, both a novelty and a means of better understanding the almost autistic character of Abed. This narrative justification of the microadaptation is put forward in an early episode of the series, “Introduction to Film” (1.03), where Abed’s father’s original refusal to let Abed take a film class (as it won’t help him run the family falafel business) changes radically when Abed’s documentary allows him to understand his son’s feelings towards his parents after his mother left and remarried: “My son is hard to understand. If making movies helps him to be understood, then I’ll pay for the class.” (1.03) However, as the series progressed, the show largely dispensed with the pretense that Abed was the justification and the instigator of this tendency towards microadaptation; instead, the show became a sort of “macroadaptation,” infinitely malleable to its different source texts. It is no doubt characteristic of its affiliation with the microadaptation that its credit sequence, which, as Ariane Hudelet reminds us,44 is a crucial identifying element for the television series, is itself adapted to each new source, becoming not just a thematic adaptation, but also an aesthetic one.

Familiarity and Novelty

83

Figure 3.5 Microadaptations become the show’s very identity, becoming Star Wars or A Fistful of Dollars for the length of an episode.

If Harmon insists on the familiarity of the characters whatever their context, the recurrent nature of the microadaptation, which becomes one of the identifying markers of the series, effects a significant change in the balance of familiarity and novelty that has been central to our understanding of the microadaptation. By making it a hallmark of the series, it is only the source text which allows for novelty, changing from one microadaptation to the next; the idea of an adaptation itself becomes yet another element of familiarity, unlike most microadaptations, where it is the juxtaposition that provides the novelty. In so doing, this profoundly postmodern version of the sitcom challenges our expectations yet again, foregrounding this tension between familiarity and novelty and its evolution, making Community a sort of anthology of adaptations; while the microadaptation once fleshed out Abed’s identity, it eventually came to be the identity of the show as a whole. As such, some viewers believe that ultimately realism is lost to the navigation of tradition and innovation: Many criticize “Community” as being one endless series of pop-culture references that signify nothing. While such references are endemic to the show in the form of Abed and episodes such as “Epidemiology 206,” it’s obviously far from the sum total of what the show is doing. But in shifting perspectives and storytelling techniques so often in order to tell a particular 22-minute tale, the focus on the micro hurts the focus on the macro, and makes the sum total of “Community” more about its structure than anything else.45 Despite the fact that the author has named his blog Boob Tube Dude, Ryan McGee’s point is aptly made. Ultimately, we come back to the idea of tension, of balance between these different aspects of the show and its episodic adaptation. As the show’s references grow increasingly obscure, and as the microadaptation format becomes increasingly familiar, the balance between novelty and familiarity is upset—and the

84

Home Entertainment

show’s fanbase, though rabid, remains small. In a sense, we can say that microadaptations are the ultimate form of televisuality, the idea that as the audience became accustomed to TV conventions, it started to appreciate novelty in those conventions, twist on traditional forms, both aesthetic and conceptual,46 while offering a new form of adaptation for study—and in so doing, redefining the many variables in adaptation’s fidelity debate.

Notes 1 There are obvious exceptions to this statement, especially in the last 15 years, with the work done on quality television, cult television, and recent narratological analyses of series. Rather than discount either the work of scholars more interested in the sociological or economic aspects of the discipline or these efforts to ascertain the aesthetic or structural aspects of the medium, I seek instead to identify the general scope of television studies previous to this work, which continues to play a large part in television studies today. 2 Hutcheon, op. cit., 121. 3 Ibid., 4. 4 Robert Stam, “The Theory and Practice of Adaptation,” in Robert Stam, Alessandra Raengo, eds., Literature and Film: A Guide to the Theory and Practice of Film Adaptation, Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005, 3. 5 Stam, ibid., 4–7. 6 Ibid., 24–31. 7 Kamilla Elliot, The Novel/Film Debate, op. cit., 209–214. 8 Christine Geraghty, Now a Major Motion Picture, op. cit., 4. 9 The reader will of course have noticed that the theorists cited in relation to the fidelity debate are all discussing film, rather than television, adaptations. 10 Of course Scheherazade arguably serves simply as the frame story for more famous pre-existing legends; the microadaptation aspect of the work may very well be heightened for the foreign reader, as some of the more famous Arabian folk tales, including those of Ali Baba, Aladdin, and Sinbad, were actually added to the text by European translators. 11 Thus Hamlet’s seeming apathy becomes the Fonze’s boredom with the Bard (the episode is entitled “A Star is Bored”), and Steve’s homely appearance is used to ironic effect as the iconic lover Romeo; these are gags rather than explorations of either text, or of the series’ characters and themes. 12 Here my terminology is indebted to Thomas Leitch, who speaks of “entry-level Dickens” in his analysis of different adaptations of A Christmas Carol. Adaptation and its Discontents, op. cit., Chapter 4. 13 See for example Fran Teague, “Shakespeare and America,” The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare, Arthur F. Kinney, ed., Oxford: OUP, 2012, 719–734; Douglas Lanier, Shakespeare and Popular Culture, Oxford: OUP, 2002; Kendra Ann Whitmire, “The Uses of Shakespeare on American TV 1990–2010,” MA Thesis from the University of Birmingham, 2011. Available online: http://etheses.bham.ac.uk/3324/1/Whitmire12MPhil.pdf. Accessed March 2015. 14 My thanks to Julie Grossman for this suggestion. 15 The Muppets (CBS, 1976–1981) was a variety show, and so for the most part  the adaptations were of popular songs and were very short sketches (though the recurrent Pigs in Space sketch could be seen as an ongoing reference to Lost in Space (CBS, 1965–1968). For the most part its extended

Familiarity and Novelty

16

17 18 19 20 21

22

23

24 25 26 27

85

adaptations took place in their specials, like The Muppets Go to the Movies (ABC, 1981). Neither would really be considered a microadaptation. However, the Muppets Babies cartoon made explicit the idea of imagination transforming reality into fiction from the credit sequence, whose theme song promised that “When your room looks kinda weird and you wish that you weren’t there, just close your eyes and make believe and you can be anywhere,” as images of the characters as Indiana Jones or the four friends skipping down the yellow brick road in The Wizard of Oz (1939) go by. Super Why! and Sesame Street differ perhaps from Wishbone or The Muppets, as the former examples tend to adapt classic children’s tales (“The Emperor’s New Clothes” or “Little Red Riding Hood,” for instance), while the latter often adapt adult texts (like The Hunchback of Notre Dame or Casablanca). In recent years, Sesame Street has begun adapting pop culture phenomena, making educational and edulcorated spoofs of series like House of Cards or Mad Men, in hopes of attracting parents to watch with their children. Jamie Frevele, “The People At ‘Sesame Street’ Behind Those Amazing Parodies Tell Us How They Do It,” Uproxx, June 8, 2015. http://uproxx.com/tv/2015/06/sesame-street-interview/. Accessed July 2015. Leitch, op. cit., 69. Màire Messenger Davies, Children, Media, and Culture, New York, NY: McGraw Hill, 2010, 162. Anja Muller, “Introduction: Adapting Canonical Texts in and for Children’s Literature,” in Anja Muller, ed., Adapting Canonical Texts in Children’s Literature, London: Bloomsbury, 2013, 1. David Buckingham, Children’s Television in Britain: History, Discourse and Policy, London: BFI, 1999, 107. Interestingly, Wishbone sends children back to two sources—the original story (or an abridged version of that story) and the Wishbone novelizations of the different episodes (and original tales) in several different collections: Wishbone Classics, Wishbone Mysteries, and The Adventures of Wishbone. A 1990 PhD thesis by Maythee Kantar on the topic, for example, suggests that adaptations “motivated students to read books in genres that they would not normally read, [… and] helped students respond to the story with a high percentage of interpretive, critical and evaluation responses.” Maythee Kantar, Children’s Responses to Televised Adaptations of Literature, University of Minnesota, 1990. It is important to specify that for the most part, what is adapted here is solely the plot, and not the language of the original tale (which seems voluntarily contemporary), once again seemingly in an effort to make this as accessible and relevant to the young viewer as possible. This becomes particularly obvious when studying the Shakespeare adaptations to children’s programming. Cf. Susanne Greenhalgh, “The Eye of Childhood: Shakespeare, Performance, and the Child Subject,” in Fiona M. Collins and Jeremy Ridgman, eds. Turning the Page: Children’s Literature in Performance and the Media, Bern: Peter Lang, 2006, 271. Todd VanDerWerff, “Community: ‘Debate 109’,” November 13 2009, The AV Club, http://www.avclub.com/tvclub/community-debate-109-35341. Accessed December 2009. Brett Mills, The Sitcom, Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2005, 15. Fran Teague, “Shakespeare and America,” op. cit., 733. We see this of course in the series of films incorporating the name of the source text’s author into its title (Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1994), Bram

86

28

29 30 31

32 33 34

35

36

37

Home Entertainment Stoker’s Dracula (1992)), as well as in the innumerable press releases lauding both the source text and the film’s faithfulness to that author’s vision. “It seems that comedy cannot create its upheaval unless it encounters a serene and untroubled soul. Indifference is its natural habitat. Laughter has no greater enemy than emotion.” “Il semble que le comique ne puisse produire son ébranlement qu’à la condition de tomber sur une surface d’âme bien calme, bien unie. L’indifférence est son milieu naturel. Le rire n’a pas de plus grand ennemi que l’émotion.” Henri Bergson, Le Rire: Essais sur la signification du comique (1900), Paris: Payot, 2011, 11. Author’s translation. Chapter 6, “Genre and Adaptation,” Screen Adaptation: Impure Cinema, New York, NY: Palgrave MacMillan, 2010. Christine Geraghty, Now a Major Motion Picture, op. cit., 43. This is in fact creator and showrunner Andrew Marlowe and his partner Terri Miller, the writer for this episode. For fans who recognize them, this is yet another clue suggesting that Castle, and not Hitchcock, will have final say as to the outcome of this mystery. We could also associate it with the images and gutters of the graphic novel, an association that will be discussed at greater length in the next chapter. My thanks to Sarah Hatchuel for this suggestion. The adolescent version of Everyman, of course. Again, these anachronisms, and particularly Petruchio’s overly colloquial comments, can also be seen as a clever transposition of The Taming of the Shrew’s “Induction,” where some of the humor is derived from tinker Sly’s inability to speak like the nobleman he is told he is. Indeed, Linda Mizejewsk suggests that “Moonlighting […] can be seen as television’s attempt to handle questions of female professionalism and equality through romantic comedy.” Linda Mizejewsk, Hardboiled and High Heeled: The Woman Detective in Popular Culture, London: Routledge, 2004, 80. We could also cite the sitcom Scrubs (NBC, 2001–2008; ABC, 2009–2010) in this context, where an episode entitled “My Way Home” transforms the everyday worries of various hospital workers (worries about whether or not to have children, a character’s competency at her job, and attempts to get a family to donate to donate a heart) into a short adaptation of The Wizard of Oz (5.07, 12:26–13:07). By framing these stories with the visual and musical cues of The Wizard of Oz, and ending the episode by explaining that the characters had the answers within them all along, the show allows us to rediscover the plot of the classic film without the flying monkeys and Technicolor marvels—ultimately, it is about facing your fears and overcoming them, something that is applicable both to the characters in the show and to the viewer. Ironically, by focusing on the lack of realism of the plot (clearly manipulated solely so that the creators could have a Wizard of Oz microadaptation), the loss of spectacle in the film, or of verisimilitude in the series, serves to highlight both source and adaptation’s pertinence to the viewer, its applicability to real life. Thus as Sarah Hatchuel reminds us, “meta-cinema always combines distancing effects with submersion into the narrative world. A play-within-aplay, a play-within-a-film or a film-within-a-film disclose the construction of illusion while making the primary level of dramatic fiction more ‘real’. In the audience’s subtle alternation between belief and disbelief, if the inset piece is an illusion the including film seems not to be so.” Sarah Hatchuel, “Play Within Film,” Cambridge Shakespeare Encyclopedia (forthcoming).

Familiarity and Novelty

87

38 Emma Rosenblum, “Community Creator Dan Harmon on Reference Humor, TV Love, and Whether Joel McHale’s Going to Grow a Beard,” Culture Vulture, February 4, 2010. Available online: http://nymag.com/ daily/entertainment/2010/02/community_creator_dan_harmon_o.html. Accessed January 2011. 39 Shannon Wells-Lassagne, “Transforming the traditional sitcom: Abed in Community,” TV Series, n°1, June 2012, pp. 455–466. Available online: http://revuetvseries.wix.com/tvseries#!numero1/c26q. 40 Jethro Nededog, “‘Community’: EP Dan Harmon explains Abed’s evolution,” Zap2it, November 04, 2010. Available online:http://blog.zap2it.com/ frominsidethebox/2010/11/community-ep-dan-harmon-explains-abedsevolution.html. Accessed January 2011. 41 Todd VanDerWerff, “Interview: Community creator Dan Harmon,” The A.V. Club, September 23 2010. Available online: http://www.avclub.com/ articles/community-creator-dan-harmon,45508/. Accessed January 2011. 42 Todd VanDerWerff, “Abed’s Uncontrollable Christmas,” The AV Club, December 9, 2010. Available online: http://www.avclub.com/articles/abedsuncontrollable-christmas,48743/. Accessed January 2011. 43 Josef Adalian, “Community Creator Dan Harmon on His Big Plans for Season Two,” Culture Vulture, August 13, 2010. Available online: http://nymag. com/daily/entertainment/2010/08/community_creator_dan_harmon_o_1. html. Accessed January 2011. 44 Hudelet, “Un cadavre ambulant,” op. cit. 45 Ryan McGee, “Checking in on… Community,” Boob Tube Dude, February 22, 2011. http://boobtubedude.com/index.php/2011/02/22/commentary/ checking-in-oncommunity/. Accessed March 2015. 46 John T. Caldwell, Televisuality, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1995.

4

Crossing Over Television Adaptation, between Universality and Specificity

Just as the study of microadaptations allows us not only to examine this unique form of televisual adaptation but also to see how it both demonstrates and challenges our understanding of the fidelity debate (the need for the adaptation to be simultaneously familiar and novel), so this chapter will analyze a similar binary tension in adaptation studies—the supposed “universality” of plot, which can transcend medium through adaptation, and the insistence on medium specificity going back to Gotthold Lessing’s Laocoon, where he maintains that painting is a spatial art, and literature a temporal one (and never the twain shall meet).1 Adaptation has long been a favored means of appropriating stories for use in different media, in different times, in different contexts. Those who bemoan the increasing number of reboots, remakes, and adaptations in the current media landscapes have no doubt forgotten the Victorian obsession with adaptation that caused Charles Dickens to speak out for stricter (and international) copyright laws;2 as Christine Geraghty reminds us, “Boz” was famous for his texts, but also for their various iterations (including his own adaptations of his stories into reading versions that he would then perform live).3 Likewise, this desire to continue favored stories, regardless of medium, has always been intertwined with commercial interests. Even the universally revered Bard was a great purveyor of adaptations from various sources, an issue that he explored in the performance of The Mousetrap by the players of Hamlet, and as Nick Hornby so forcefully reminds us, “Shakespeare wrote for money.”4 Adaptation does not necessarily signify success—Brian De Palma’s 1990 adaptation of Tom Wolfe’s bestselling novel Bonfire of the Vanities (1987) that became fodder for all too many jokes as to the pertinence of its title is but a single example of a more widespread phenomenon. However, it is commonly held as a means to shore up against the uncertainty that any expensive artistic endeavor (like film or television fictions) implies, attracting the reading public into the movie theater. Though the television landscape provides us with a recent and unique expression of adaptation and its commercial bent, we shouldn’t forget that Walt Disney did not invent merchandising, a diluted form of the transmedia adaptation addressed here—indeed, the eighteenth-century fans of Samuel Richardson’s Pamela who sipped their

Crossing Over 89 tea in cups adorned with their heroine’s face would attest to that5 —and that this is just the most recent version of a familiar tendency that has simply evolved over time. Thus, this chapter will examine recent revolutions in television and the way that they demonstrate the paradoxical nature of adaptation, as both a story idea that transcends the barriers of medium, time period, or culture—and at the same time, as a phenomenon that seeks to insist on the specificity of those cultures, time periods, and media, thus justifying the process of adaptation in seemingly opposing ways, as either continuing a previous story, or as meeting the need for a new version of a known tale, more applicable in some way to its perceived audience than was the original. To do so, we will be comparing two concurrent trends that, while not new (nor unique to television), have recently become increasingly visible in American television: transmedia adaptation,6 where television series are supplemented by (or are supplementary to) narratives in other media, and transnational adaptation, where a foreign original is remade for a national audience—in our case, a foreign television series remade in an American context, and for an American audience. Though both the transnational and the transmedia adaptations are equally popular in film, because of television’s unique nature, and notably because of the duration of these experiments, they provide a unique and uniquely complex understanding of the possibilities of adaptation. Some might argue that neither of these two phenomena constitutes a form of adaptation at all. Indeed, transmedia only rarely retraces the narrative of its original work; to take famous examples examined by media scholars like Henry Jenkins7 and Jason Mittell,8 neither Lost nor The Matrix (1999) ultimately had much overlap of characters between the source text (the ABC drama and the feature-film trilogy) and its associated transmedia texts. Instead, they told previously untold stories of the same universe, re-using setting, character, and occasionally plotlines, but with relatively little overlap. Colin Harvey sums up the debate rather succinctly: […] most transmedia commentators agree […] that retelling a story in a different medium [adapting] involves a distinct set of creative and consumptive processes that are different from telling a new story set in a consistent storyworld but utilising a different medium [transmedia].9 This definition is a familiar one, associating adaptation with a familiar retelling rather than with novelty; it is evocative of a similar dismissal of adaptation as a form of transfiction (which itself has much in common with transmedia).10 Here, again, the definition of adaptation as a simple “retelling” seems unnecessarily limiting, especially in regards to television adaptation; as we have discussed in the previous chapter, both

90

Home Entertainment

adaptation and television constantly seek to balance out these two elements, rather than privilege one over the other. Indeed, as Harvey goes on to demonstrate, this initial definition is too restrictive, caricaturing the act of adaptation: […] arguably the very process of adaptation necessitates the creation of new material, whether it’s constructing a film set that logically expands the world alluded to in the novel, or dressing characters in ways which might not necessarily have been described in the source material. In this sense, adaptation is axiomatically involved in transmedia extension, though theoretically speaking it might equally be involved in transmedially reducing the world in question by perhaps focusing on a specific element of the source material at the expense of other elements.11 Adaptation, however “literary” or “faithful” it might appear to be, is necessarily an expansive process, taking advantage of its new medium to implement fresh elements for the source’s plot, characterization, themes, or setting, what André Gaudreault and Philippe Marion refer to as mediativity (the specificity of a given medium).12 This development of the original text is particularly relevant in the case of television adaptation, which frequently adapts only the premise of its source, expanding it exponentially in the American television tradition of open-ended serial narratives. Transnational adaptation is a less controversial term, though many would tend to associate it more readily with the remake. There is nothing truly new about the transnational adaptations—from John Cromwell’s 1938 Algiers remaking Julien Duvivier’s 1937 Pepe Le Moko, recreating a foreign film with more familiar stars and more easily understood language has been common practice in film.13 On television, some of the great sitcoms of the 1970s, like All in the Family or Sanford and Son, were imports adapted to an American context. Many of these transnational adaptations are inspired by foreign-language originals; as foreign television crosses national boundaries to become available to American audiences (and especially American studios), and the need for content on the small screen increases, it seems a logical choice to attempt to recreate a well-received series for an American audience. Thus recent years have seen the success of many transnational foreign adaptations like The Killing (from Denmark’s Forbrydelsen, DR1, 2007–2012), The Bridge (from the Danish-Swedish co-production Broen/Bron, SVT1, DR1, 2011–),14 In Treatment (HBO, 2008–2010, from Israel’s BeTipul, HOT3, 2005–2008), Homeland (from Israel’s Hatufim, Channel 2, 2011–) or even The Returned (A&E, 2015–, from France’s Les Revenants, Canal+, 2012–).15 In contrast to British television, where many of these foreign series were broadcast and became quite successful in

Crossing Over 91 16

their original (albeit subtitled) forms, American audiences are often unaware that their favorite series exist in another language, and given the well-known reticence of American audiences to read subtitles, especially on their television screens,17 the decision to recreate the series in an American context is an easy one. Though some foreign-language feature films have become modest successes in the United States,18 the reader would be hard pressed to find a foreign-language television show that has received any sort of commercial success, and very few that are broadcast at all.19 Foreign television is available to American audiences mostly as DVDs or through streaming video provided by Netflix and Hulu, and though their dissemination is increasing through these new sources of content, their impact on American consciousness is minimal. These foreign-language transnational adaptations are a fascinating subject of study; however, the reason for these adaptations—American recalcitrance at the idea of subtitles or dubbing—seems clear (though as savvy viewers are able to see the original series for themselves, that may change). Instead, I’ve chosen to focus here on transnational adaptations that do not need to overcome the dreaded language barrier— English-language adaptations, like House of Cards, The Office, or Gracepoint (Fox, 2014; the American rendition of Broadchurch, ITV, 2013–). The reason I will be focusing on these series is largely because they exhibit most clearly the subtext implicit in these transnational adaptations: why, after all, recreate these already successful series that are already available in English for an American public? Wikipedia currently lists 133 examples of American remakes of British television series alone, 20 without taking into account series from other English-speaking countries like recent Australian adaptations The Slap (NBC, 2015; ABC1, 2011) or Wilfred (FX, 2011–2013, FXX, 2014; SBS One, 2007– 2010). Indeed, the phenomenon has become so well-known that an Anglo-American co-production, Episodes (Showtime, BBC Two, 2011–), actually takes this as its premise: Sean and Beverly Lincoln, the creative team behind the successful (fictional) British series Lyman’s Boys, are seduced by Hollywood to come and make an American version. They are assured of full control over the product, only to discover upon arrival that the show has been retitled Pucks! and now stars Matt Leblanc (playing a fictionalized version of himself). The credit sequence for the series is evocative: we see a script entitled “Episodes” rustle and take flight in the wind, flapping its pages as a sort of bird as it wings past iconic British images (a brownstone, Big Ben, rolling hills) crossing the ocean and arriving first before the skyscrapers of New York City, the Grand Canyon, and finally in front of the Hollywood sign—at which point we hear a loud shot and the script falls to pieces, with a single tattered page (with the name of the show creators) landing in a California pool. 21 This comic series is centered on the premise that transnational adaptation means destroying the original altogether, and the content of the series

92

Home Entertainment

insists that this is done for commercial reasons, to appeal to the largest possible viewership (among other things by hiring Matt LeBlanc, whose fame as Joey from the uber-successful Friends (NBC, 1994–2004) guarantees an audience). These criticisms again echo those of the remake; famous film critic André Bazin judged this (filmic) phenomenon particularly harshly, referring to it as “plagiarism” and “economic terrorism,”22 while Constantine Verevis suggests that these cross-cultural remakes are often examples of cultural imperialism; 23 Jennifer Forrest and Leonard R. Koos remind us that “[w]hile little issue is made of domestic remakes, with reviewers limiting themselves to remarks on whether the new version is better or worse than the original, remakes of foreign films are a sore spot of contention.”24 Whether the reasons for these transnational remakes are economic or cultural, few (other than the creators of said remakes) suggest that they can be in any way artistic, thus calling into question the possibility that they could be anything other than repetitions, the “retelling” that Harvey initially positioned in stark contrast to the new stories told by transmedia. Instead, the only difference between the various iterations of transnational adaptations is their cultural affiliations, reinforcing the idea that ultimately, story cannot transcend barriers (of medium or culture). This has been referred to as the “cultural discount,” which Elke Weissman explains “highlight[s] how television productions lose value when they cross national borders as audiences will not be able to appreciate all the cultural references.”25 These two forms of reappropriation, then, seemingly exemplify opposite tendencies in adaptation. Transmedia adaptations imply the universality of the serial narrative, which transcends its initial medium to continue its diegesis in another, what Gaudréault and Marion refer to as extrinsic narrativity, the idea that the narrative supersedes media specificity and is thus transposable in many media. 26 Transmedia ensures the coherency of the narrative, which continues outside the source, filling in the gaps in the source text. Ironically, then, for a form whose very nature as adaptation is in question, the transmedia text, in particular, is plagued by the bête noire of adaptation, fidelity. In order to be successful, it must be authentic, faithful to its source, though as I. Q. Hunter makes clear in his analysis of the Lord of the Rings (2001–2003) adaptations, fidelity takes on a slightly different meaning: Since the late 1970s, the dominant genre of Hollywood blockbusters has been fantasy, and it is not hard to see why. [They…] appeal internationally to the crucial teenage demographic; encourage fannish absorption in their expandable universes; showcase advances in special effects; and lend themselves readily to sequels, spin-offs and other commercially essential tie-ins. […] But the process is not one of simple ‘adaptation’. A film like Lord of the Rings is a starting place as much as an end product of adaptation: just one reference point in a

Crossing Over 93 matrix of intertextual relations created by synergic cross-promotion. Video games, graphic and literary novelizations, CD soundtracks, multiple Director’s Cuts and DVD versions, prequels, sequels, and franchises—such ostensibly secondary productions, included among what Gérard Génette called ‘paratexts’, not only extend the boundaries of contemporary Hollywood fantasy films but also increasingly determine their form and narrative. The interminable pod-racing scenes in Star Wars Episode 1: The Phantom Menace (1999) were essentially previews of the spin-off Episode 1 Racer video game; while narrative gaps were deliberately left in The Matrix: Reloaded (2003) for the spin-off video game to fill in, and its back-story was fleshed out in The Animatrix (2003), a straight-to-DVD collection of anime shorts. This is adaptation understood not as fidelity to a controlling original but as dissemination—the commodification of valuable textual material across (155) numerous media. 27 This is an opinion echoed by Jason Mittell, who also insists that transmedia sends the reader/viewer back to the original text: For the industry, some transmedia extensions might provide an additional revenue stream, but their primary function is to drive viewers back to the television series; for the creators, transmedia storytelling must always support and strengthen the core television narrative experience. 28 Fidelity, then, becomes a guarantee linking text with paratext, be it through character, theme, setting, or narrative. The source becomes authoritative because it establishes canon for that fictional universe, and for the transmedia adaptation, at least, the question of whether an adaptation can function without its source seems more clear-cut: what would The Lost Experience 29 be without Lost? Strict fidelity to that source serves to send audiences back to it, further immersing them in its diegetic universe by “policing” a chosen number of gaps that source might have. Following from Wolfgang Iser’s idea of the importance of gaps in the text which allow the reader to complete the diegetic world by actively using his or her imagination, 30 here the active reader’s role transcends the purely mental, as he or she must search out these transmedia paratexts, websites, shorts, games, etc., and then consume those texts or (in the case of examples like the aforementioned Lost Experience and other alternate reality games) actively work alone or with others to decrypt meaning from them. In so doing, the importance of fidelity becomes clear not only in the relationship between source and transmedia adaptation but also between texts and audience. Of course, these problematic forms of adaptation are also criticized for their clearly commercial nature. It is obvious, for example, that some

94

Home Entertainment

reinterpretations of previous films are termed “adaptations,” and others “remakes,” according to whether financial or artistic aims seem to predominate (while the truly successful reinterpretations, of course, are not seen as adaptations at all), as Constantine Verevis makes clear: This type of remaking can be understood as a function of industry and commerce, a type of economic pragmatism whereby existing films are thought to minimise risk by providing successful formulas for the development of new studio (or television) based projects. 31 Verevis is speaking of Gus Van Sant’s shot-for-shot remake of Psycho (1998), which dared to recreate what has come to be considered one of the cinema’s great films.32 However, the criticism engendered by updating a classic, seemingly without innovation (as it ostensibly strove to be as true to the original as possible) suggests that a balance must be struck in order to avoid appearing too crassly commercial, an idea elucidated by Leora Hadas: [I]s it an authentic creation, a story that needs telling, driven by an absence in the narrative or by genuine artistic expression? Or is it merely a cynical scheme for milking more money from consumers through their devotion to a beloved storyworld? From an industrial perspective, of course, this is a meaningless dichotomy. Few products of the media industries are ever created solely for the sake of either money or art. Yet in popular discourse the division endures, and when a brand extension is deemed to be no more than attaching a logo and trappings to a story without its own merits, the audience backlash can be powerful.33 Hadas is, in fact, talking about transmedia, illustrating the fact that both these forms—and indeed adaptation more generally—are charged with the crime of commercialism. In the latter case, Henry Jenkins suggests, it is the very industrial nature of the audio-visual landscape that has made these new forms possible: […] there are strong economic motives behind transmedia storytelling. […] Everything about the structure of the modern entertainment industry was designed with this single idea in mind—the construction and enhancement of entertainment franchises. […] there is a strong interest in integrating entertainment and marketing, to create strong emotional attachments and use them to make additional sales.34 As such, the examples of transmedia storytelling I’d like to focus on here all come from the first major media conglomerate in the American television landscape, 35 the American Broadcast Company (ABC), one of the broadcast networks that was first bought by Capital City in 1985,

Crossing Over 95 Table 4.1 ABC and sister companies ABC and Transmedia 1985: Capital Cities buys ABC 1995: Disney buys ABC/Capital Cities Other Disney (entertainment) acquisitions: • ABC • ESPN • Marvel • Hyperion • Miramax • E! • Lifetime • The History Channel Source: Understanding Disney

making it a studio as well as a simple broadcast channel (thus a means of diffusion as well as a creator of content), which was then purchased by Disney in 1995.36 Disney has since acquired Marvel, another great source of content, as well as other means of circulation (in this case, I’ll be focusing on its publishing firm, Hyperion). As a result, the possible synergies are impressive, and particularly in the last ten years, ABC has become a locus for unusual forms of transmedia storytelling. While as Jason Mittell reminds us, transmedia has now become the norm for television, 37 where each show must have its websites and bonus scenes or “making of” featurettes, I’d like to focus on three fairly original uses of transmedia adaptations that hopefully will demonstrate not only the innovation of transmedia experimentation, but also the underpinnings of this form of adaptations. The TV series Lost, which was a pioneer in what Sarah Hatchuel calls hyperseriality38 and what Jason Mittell has called diegetic extensions, 39 where products from the world of the series appeared in the “real world,” was perhaps the best known of ABC’s transmedia experiments, but more recently, there have been transmedia fictions that expand the universe of the source text. The other better-known example of transmedia storytelling on ABC is Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., a series developed by Avengers writer, producer and director Joss Whedon, which centers on Agent Coulson, a recurring character in the numerous Marvel comic book movies of the last ten years. This first foray of Marvel Studios into television was heralded as groundbreaking. Coulson and his team had no forerunners in the comic universe—Coulson was created for the Marvel films, and has only appeared in comic book form after the series debuted. As Jason Mittell rightly points out, what is unique about this series in relation

96

Home Entertainment

to transmedia storytelling is that ultimately, it was conceived of as peripheral to the films that inspired it, a transmedia adaptation rather than a source text in and of itself. The model has generally been to conclude a well-established series with a feature film, as was the case with Twin Peaks (Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, 1992), Firefly (Serenity, 2005), or X-Files (Fox, 1993–2002; X-Files: Fight the Future, 1998, and X-Files: I Want to Believe, 2008), or to recreate a beloved series as a feature film, as was the case for Starsky and Hutch (2004), 21 Jump Street (2012), or The Dukes of Hazzard (CBS, 1979–1985; film 2005). Mittell argues that the series is a rare example of a transmedia paratext striking a balance with its forerunners,40 but interviews with creator Joss Whedon suggest otherwise: Whedon claims, “They didn’t actually want me to make [Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.]… It’s like, ‘Uh, Joss, we really wanted you to do [Age of Ultron]. Instead you created a TV show, you moron.’ ‘I thought you wanted me to!’ ‘No, we just wanted you to make a movie.’ ‘Oh. My bad.’ … It went from being absolutely 100% the driving force and totally hands-on to ‘That sounds great, [Jed Whedon]! You should do that!’”41 Indeed, the very premise of the show focuses on its marginal nature: in the wake of the destruction wrought onscreen in 2012’s feature The Avengers, the diegetic world of Marvel Universe has discovered the reality of both hostile alien forces and superpowered individuals ready to protect the world from those forces. Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. focuses on ordinary human agents in this world of superheroes, characters who literally tie up loose ends that these epic battles of the films leave behind (in “The Well” (1.08), the lead characters sift through the debris left behind by Thor’s battle against Dark Elves in London during the previous week’s new Marvel release, Thor: The Dark World (2013), searching for dangerous alien artifacts that need to be isolated). The series has consistently tied its narrative to both preparing the terrain for and dealing with the fallout of the Marvel films, timing their episodes accordingly; the effort is largely unreciprocated, as The Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015) limited the impact of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.’s contribution to resolving the conflict as “[getting] help from some old friends.” In so doing, it seems to be tailoring its retelling of the Marvel Universe stories to its medium, where television has long focused on the smaller stories rather than the epic tale.42 Joseph Oldham has suggested that the series owes as much to television traditions as it does to Marvel: Although somewhat buried beneath the more arresting signifier of the Marvel brand, I would argue the programme’s actual generic category is best conceptualised as a revival of the light-hearted

Crossing Over 97 spy-fi adventure series of the 1960s, such as The Man from UNCLE (1964–68) or Mission: Impossible (1966–73). This is an entirely appropriate model, as the comics version of SHIELD [sic] originally emerged from the 1960s vogue for utopian international spy organisations with catchy acronyms.43 The fact that the series focuses on its small scale in relation to the films has been a source of criticism, with many early critics suggesting that its fidelity—returning viewers to its source—must be curtailed in order to succeed on its own terms: “Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.” may be a part of the MCU, but that’s been as much a burden as it has been an advantage […]—a network show will never look as good […] as a $220 million movie [… It must] let[…] itself be a TV show first, and part of a multi-platform franchise […] second. The idea that the characters who exist on the side or in the background of a movie like “The Avengers” have pretty interesting lives of their own […] is a sound one—now the series just needs to […] distinguish [its characters] as memorable individuals[…].44 It may be, however, that this “lack of memorable individuals” is a voluntary choice for the show. Indeed, much like the videogames associated with the films, which allow players to insert themselves into the MCU, the (relative) ordinariness of the show’s characters—because in a world of superheroes and aliens, even impressively competent secret agents, scientists and computer hackers become less than extraordinary—may allow the viewer to identify with the characters in a way they cannot with a Norse god wielding a mythic hammer. The characters become a canonical version of what fan culture refers to as a “Mary Sue,” a stand-in for the public to imagine themselves in this world. Karen Hellekson and Kristin Busse define the Mary Sue: “an original character […], all too often an avatar of the author herself, is presented as the beautiful, smart heroine who saves the day and then gets the guy, all to the virtual exclusion of the canonical characters.”45 Here the characters, while not extraordinary, are both attractive enough and distanced enough from the Marvel film universe to seem an apt “authorized” version of the fanfiction trope. Interestingly, this televisual version of a transmedia paratext has gained traction both with fans and within the brand; as criticism of the series has diminished and the critical comparisons with the film decrease (though the diegetic links to the Marvel Universe remain strong), Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. has spawned its own series of graphic novels, and given that its current storyline focuses on a character who has become “Inhuman”—the title of Marvel’s upcoming series—it could be argued

98

Home Entertainment

that the series will take on increasing importance within this universe,46 though it remains secondary to the blockbuster films. Hints of this might be found in the most recent Avengers film, where the climax of the film centered on the devastating impact that even a small piece of land can have on the entire planet (the villain plans to hoist a small town into the air and then drop it back to earth as a makeshift meteor, creating an extinction-level event reminiscent of the dinosaurs). The idea of a small thing ultimately having enormous consequences might be seen as a promise of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.’s importance in coming years, even if the series and its characters are never directly mentioned in the film. The well-publicized transmedia experiment was in fact not the first ABC series to serve as a transmedia adaptation of a sister company’s films. Once Upon A Time (2011–) is a show which posits a storybook world where all fairytale characters coexist but have been cursed. They live, unaware of their fictional nature, in our world— until a young boy discovers the truth by reading a book of fairy tales. Initially the characters are recurrent figures from the traditional folk tales collected by Grimm or Perrault—Snow White, Prince Charming, Rumplestiltskin, Sleeping Beauty, Little Red Riding Hood, and given the importance of the tome of stories to the show’s mythology, viewers would be forgiven for thinking that this series, like Grimm (NBC, 2011–), which appeared on a rival network the same year, was simply using the popular—but public domain—stories in a television format. However, as the series continued, it became increasingly obvious that what was being adapted was not the classic fairy tales, but their Disney rendition: Peter Pan, a Victorian addition to the canon of children’s literature, joined the Grimm characters, before adding Ariel, Disney’s version of Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Little Mermaid” (The Little Mermaid, 1989), also a nineteenth century tale, and of course Elsa from the very loose adaptation of “The Snow Queen”, Frozen (2013). Clearly, the series is an adaptation not of fairytales, but of Disney and its film vaults, a transmedia adaptation that seeks to create nostalgia in the viewer. Rather than sending the viewer directly back to these films, instead the show seems a particularly apt example of Christine Geraghty’s theories about the work of recall in adaptation. Geraghty suggests that rather than insist on a binary relationship between film and source text that will necessarily invoke the notion of fidelity, instead we can see adaptations as a multitude of references that she conceptualizes in terms of layers: [T]hinking about adaptations in terms of layering at least allows for the possibility of seeing through one film (in both senses) to another and acknowledges that the effect of simultaneity might draw on understandings built up through time and knowledge. The layering process involves an accretion of deposits over time, a recognition of

Crossing Over 99 ghostly presences, and a shadowing or doubling of what is on the surface by what is glimpsed behind.47 The show uses Disney’s adaptations of classic children’s stories to evoke a past time, a certain nostalgia for childhood discovery, but contextualizes for an adult audience who would perhaps be less apt to shout “I  believe” and clap their hands to keep Tinkerbell alive. Instead, the show represents a more cynical version of these childhood tales, where the daughter of Snow White and Prince Charming, the physical proof of their “happy ever after,”48 has grown up in a foster home and doesn’t much believe in magic, where Peter Pan is a psychotic villain who delights in separating children from their families and poor Captain Hook is perhaps misguided, but redeemable, where the Evil Queen might be justified in her anger (though perhaps not in her reactions) to Snow White, who has cost her dearly. By applying more relativistic morality to these well-worn tales, by creating novelty in the familiar, the series seeks to instill new loyalty in the viewer. They will (hopefully) tune in every week to hear their version of a bedtime story,49 at once a return to the past, an acknowledgement of the present, more adult mindset— and an enticement toward the future, where viewers will introduce their children to the “classic” Disney cartoons their parents have so recently rediscovered—and accompany them to the newest outings in order to keep abreast of their own favorite show. ABC is unique, then, in using television as a form of transmedia adaptation rather than as its source. In both cases, the sheer duration of the television paratext allows it to showcase multiple films (Captain America: Winter Soldier (2014), Thor: The Dark World, Avengers: The Age of Ultron for Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.; the entire Disney stable—available as home entertainment or in theaters—for Once Upon a Time). Indeed, you would be hard pressed to find another conglomerate with a sufficient number of properties to serve as the basis for one or more weekly television series. Television narrative itself becomes a marketing tool (though as we’ve seen, one that must be used cautiously to avoid backlash), and when Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. and its fellow Marvel series Agent Carter (NBC, 2015–) were renewed for the 2015–2016 television season despite mediocre ratings, it was praised for its consistency and loyalty to quality shows, rather than to their corporate overlords. 50 Perhaps the most interesting and successful of ABC’s transmedia experiments, however, is that associated with the police procedural Castle. The title character, Richard Castle, is a bestselling author of crime novels, and when a deranged fan begins imitating his fictional crime scenes in his killing sprees, Castle meets detective Kate Beckett, who heads up the investigation and who will become his muse, the inspiration for a new series of crime novels he will write featuring Beckett’s fictional avatar Nikki Heat. This seems a familiar high-concept premise for the

100

Home Entertainment

mismatched partners that have become a cliché in police dramas, perhaps going back to Sherlock and Watson, but which has run rampant in contemporary film and television, from Lethal Weapon to Starsky and Hutch (ABC, 1975–1979). However, during season 2 of the series, the Nikki Heat book that Castle was writing in the series actually appeared on bookshelves, and the readings and signings that the fictional character was involved in was echoed by the marketing campaigns trumpeting the arrival of the actual book, Heat Wave, 51 in 2009, complete with an ABC logo on the cover, published by ABC’s sister company Hyperion Books, and with no information on the author other than a biography of the television character Richard Castle. There are 7 Nikki Heat books available at the time of writing, with an eighth and ninth to appear after the series itself has ended. 52 As time went on, however, it was announced on the series that graphic novel adaptations were going to be made of Castle’s previous series (the one that had made him a bestselling author), centering on a character named Derrick Storm. This time, it was ABC’s sister company Marvel that came out with graphic novels that were supposedly adaptations of previously existing books (to date these stories only exist in graphic novel form), texts complete with a note from the author saying how proud he was to have his novel adapted to the comics and yet another biographical note (4 to date). New Derrick Storm novels (involving his resurrection and eventually an actual encounter with Nikki Heat) have since come out in e-book and in paper form (3 to date). All of these transmedia fictions have been wildly successful, and the Nikki Heat novels in particular have all appeared in the top 10 bestsellers on the New York Times lists. Novelization is of course a well-established form of transmedia adaptation, both for film and for television, 53 and has rarely (though perhaps unfairly) been associated with innovation, especially in commercial novelizations of the type discussed here. 54 However, this has become more common for American television series since David Lynch made Laura Palmer’s Diary available to fans of Twin Peaks (ABC, 1990–1991), 55 though Castle is arguably the most expansive and complex of these examples. It might also seem ironic, given this era of digital information, to cite novels as innovative transmedia adaptations—and indeed, the series does of course have more “modern” transmedia forms, including character websites and blogs. In the end, what is fascinating about the Nikki Heat books is the complexity of the backstory and the novelization that they provide; though there is no doubt of their commercial nature, their status as a marketing strategy for the series and its network, nonetheless these adaptations are far from simply fleshing out of a screenplay, a common conception of commercial novelization. Most novelization depends on the wellknown adaptive practice of expansion, adding in characterization and narrative mediation, and thus focusing on the seeming specificities of

Crossing Over 101 prose; though these Nikki Heat books use these techniques, focusing specifically on the thoughts and feelings of the title character, whose hard-nosed television counterpart Kate Beckett rarely demonstrates such vulnerability, nonetheless, the books penned by “Richard Castle” primarily use the technique more common in film adaptation, i.e. compression. Unlike many novelizations that either focus on an untold episode of a series or relate a single story arc, the Nikki Heat novels refer to most episodes in a given season of the series (in some form or another) in a single volume of the novel. In the second Nikki Heat novel, for example, Naked Heat, 56 each suspect in the murder of a celebrity gossip columnist is in fact a direct reference to one of the episodes of Season 2 of the television series, during which time the novel was supposed to be written: to give but a few examples, punk artist Soleil Grey refers to the murder of rock singer Hayley Blue in episode 2.07, “Famous Last Words,” while the novel’s star ball player Toby Mills refers to Castle’s episode 2.15, “Suicide Squeeze,” where Cuban baseball star Cano Vega is found dead on the diamond; the textual counterparts are critical, but not central, to the plot, and are but brief reminders of much larger stories—though they function perfectly well in the story for the uninitiated reader (or a reader with a faulty memory), for those who have the previous season’s episodes in mind, each reminder serves to expand the universe immeasurably, opening up further horizons for the public imagination. 57 Though undoubtedly without the literary pretentions, author “Richard Castle”58 in effect must proceed as does a screenwriter when adapting those most popular source texts, 19th century realist novels, in order to compress the events of a huge corpus into a single streamlined narrative. Castle may not have the literary heft of Vanity Fair, but with 24 hour-long episodes per season, it may have a similar quantity of material available for adaptation.59 Indeed, Season 2’s 11th episode may be referencing the sheer volume of intrigue when a character is saved from death by a bulky volume of Crime and Punishment. One of the detectives remarks, “If he’d been reading Nicholas Sparks, he’d be dead now.” (2.11 “The Fifth Bullet”), reminding us that contemporary books may no longer be lengthy enough to come in three volumes, and that it is instead television, with its complex narratives and its serial nature, that has taken the place once held by the prose serial. The Derrick Storm graphic novels are even more interesting from this perspective, because they supposedly adapt Richard Castle’s (in fact imaginary) novels preceding the series, which have ostensibly made him the star novelist we witness at the beginning of the show. As such, the preface makes explicit reference to the process of adaptation by another writer into another medium: “Adaptation. It’s a word most authors hate. It conjures images in their minds of their beloved perfect prose being hacked to pieces by literary infidels. I’m sure it happens, but if it does, this graphic novel stands as a startling exception.” The graphic novels

102

Home Entertainment

also include a sort of bonus at the end of the story itself, describing the process of transforming simple text into graphics on the page, complete with layout and inking. These graphic novels emphasize the unreality of the genre and the adaptation process, as the initial graphic novel centers around a rewriting of Chinatown (1974) (complete with video camera taping the supposed suspect at the beginning of the novel, reminding the reader of its television source text), and the plot ends with the realization that the doll house layouts Storm’s father makes are in fact recreations of the house in which Storm finds himself—in other words, that Storm finds himself inside what he originally thought was simply a fiction. The book ends with a series of fake Derrick Storm books whose mock-up covers had already been shown on the television series and an “About the Author” page that begins: “Much of what I’m about to tell you is not true. It is, however, exactly as I remember it.”60 Beyond this, however, what is intriguing in the Nikki Heat series in particular is the foregrounding of the fictional. How do you make a fictional version of a fictional universe? Few viewers would confuse Castle with a documentary, but unlike most adaptations, which recognize the fictional status of their source text and in most cases simply reproduce that, what the Nikki Heat books are purporting to be is the fictionalization of reality: if that reality is already a work of fiction, complete with aesthetic, structural, dramatic and symbolic choices, what is the nature of fictionalized fiction, or fiction to the second degree? Clearly, as we’ve noted, the ghostwriter has chosen not to simply rewrite certain episodes or character arcs, so does this mean that the writer will simply change the story into a new fiction, or that he/she will include even more fictional tropes: more melodrama? More coincidences? We could note for example that Nikki Heat’s mother’s death is similar to that of Kate Beckett in the series, but made more dramatic: while Beckett’s mother failed to show up for a family meal at a restaurant, Heat’s mother was baking with her daughter, who went out to buy cinnamon sticks for the event, and who was on the line with her mother and heard the attack (HW 16). One could chalk this up to conflation, again a popular adaptation technique, as a character in season 1 (“Home is Where the Heart Stops,” 1.07) laments her lack of availability when her mother wanted to bake, as she called and got no answer, only to discover that her mother had been murdered in her home—but of course there is also heightened drama. The impact, however, is ambiguous: does the knowledge of these television precedents actually bring the reader out of what is intended to be an emotional moment? Does heightening fictionality actually trivialize the fiction in question? Or should we once again chalk this up to knowing how not to take our fiction too seriously? How should the knowledgeable reader treat the fact that the first novel, Heat Wave, opens with a body plummeting onto the terrace of restaurant La Belle Chaleur (French for “Beautiful Heat”), for example, or that the victim’s family

Crossing Over 103 apparently gave up a house in the Hamptons conspicuously named after the last (imaginary) Derek Storm novel, whose publication was the first event of the series: ‘It’s summer, damn it, we should be in the Hamptons. This wouldn’t have happened if we were at Stormfall.’ Now that’s money. You don’t just buy an estate in East Hampton, you name it. Stormfall was beach-front, secluded, and Seinfeld-adjacent with a partial Spielberg view. (HW 8) The reader seems to be encouraged to identify here with supposed author Castle, and the series that has his name; just as the character and the series constantly move back and forth between drama and comedy, between the macabre and the mischief, so we too are expected to move in and out of the fictional world of the Heat novels, accepting the plot one moment, and chuckling at the allusions to events of the series the next. The character Castle repeatedly takes to task more dramatic science-heavy procedurals like CSI for their excessive seriousness: “You know, if this was one of those super-sciency forensics shows, you’d stick some electrodes in these fish’s brains, get a fish-eye view of whatever they saw. [… when victim has “your” in place of “you’re” on her face] I’m just saying whoever killed her also murdered the English language.” (2.02, 2:24–3:10) Castle is correct—the language error is revealing of a crucial lack of concern on the murderer’s part, and it is ultimately not science, but fiction that will allow the characters to unravel the plot, an adaptation of Strangers on a Train (1951—which of course is itself an adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s 1950 novel of the same name). Clearly, language is crucial to understanding the world of Castle—but you should never take yourself, or your art, too seriously. Thus the novels, too, seem to be showing us this is all a part of the game, a series of nudge-and-wink in-jokes for the reader in the know, all the while insisting on the necessary nature of textual analysis in order to glean all that is to be found in the text. The climax of Naked Heat seems particularly relevant to this idea of reading these texts as novelizations: after discovering that a celebrity journalist was killed in order to hush up a tell-all memoir about a supposed celebrity suicide she was writing, Jameson Rook attempts to read the first chapters in an attempt to discern through structure, style, foreshadowing, exactly who it is she suspects of killing her subject; this is both a parallel to the end of Season 2, where Castle has writer’s block, and seemingly a challenge launched at the reader, to make out shades of the series within the novel. Jason Mittell suggests that there are two forms of transmedia storytelling, the “what if”—what if Walter White was a superhero rather than a drug dealer, as in his example of transmedia extensions of Breaking Bad—and “what is,” exploring the unknown areas of the diegetic

104

Home Entertainment

universe of the television series.61 What is fascinating about these Castle transmedia texts is that they satisfy both these criteria. The Nikki Heat and Derrick Storm books allow readers to flesh out the character of Castle, the books that supposedly made him famous and those that fuel his relationship with his partner Beckett (a recurrent theme of Season 2 of the series is Beckett’s reaction to the initial Nikki Heat book being published); they also depict a sort of wish fulfillment for the character, as Nikki Heat inevitably falls for the journalist Jameson Rook (“Castling” being a chess move done with a “Rook” chess piece) who is inspired to write an exposé about her, while in the television series Castle is still hoping to spark Beckett’s interest in him. These novels could be seen as a form of novelization, as they recreate most of the previous season’s cases, associating them with a new, larger case, and at the same time, they are an obvious form of hyperseriality or diegetic extension, allowing the world of the television series to reach us in real life. As the series continued, the references to the fictionality of these texts, their status as works of fantasy, became more pronounced: in the graphic novel A Calm Before Storm (2013), once again supposedly the graphic novel adaptation of a prose novel published before the TV series Castle began, we’re told that Storm sold his private investigation service to a man named Palace, who had written books that were then transformed into a television series bearing his name, Palace. The image is clearly a version of the image for ABC’s series in Season 2, confirming Jason Mittell’s assertion that transmedia texts center on a primary source, and seek to send us back to that text.62 Though this voluntary foregrounding of textuality may seem contrary to the idea of immersion in a multiplatform fictional universe, it in fact is exceedingly faithful to both the premise and the spirit of the series: in the partnership between fiction writer Castle and hard-bitten detective Beckett, the respective advantages of fiction and reality—indeed, the lines between fiction and reality—are constantly being debated, and

Figures 4.1 and 4.2 Transmedia adaptation sending us back to the source.

Crossing Over 105 the light-hearted tone of the procedural is echoed in the playful nature of these shout-outs. When we take a look at the pilot episode of the series, we realize that the impetus behind the entire series is in fact adaptation—though a more sinister form of adaptation than one might prefer. Indeed, author Rick Castle crosses paths with detective Kate Beckett because there is seemingly a crazed fan recreating the murders described in his early novels, and he is called in as a consultant. Immediately, the series takes on a certain number of ideas central to concerns about reflexivity: the relationship between artist, work, and fandom; authorized and unauthorized adaptation; and of course, fiction and reality. Castle immediately shows himself to be accepting even of his more crazed fans, suggesting an awareness of their darker tendencies and a certain pride at being chosen for such idolatrous (not to mention murderous) attention: “Oh my gosh, in my world that’s the red badge of honor, that’s the criminal Cooperstown.” (1.01), and when he discovers that Beckett too is a fan, he tries to discern her online identity in order to evaluate her level of fandom. At the beginning of the series, all adaptations, it seems, even the most gruesome, are welcome, as homage rather than a profanation. As the series progresses, this perspective changes: Season 2 has a truly crazed fan, a serial killer enamored with Nikki Heat, and who goes so far as to write his own Nikki Heat book, Dead Heat, complete with crimes he himself has committed, and here Castle frets about his responsibility as author of the source text, though this responsibility is dismissed by the detective: “Really? Like the Beatles were responsible for Charles Manson because of ‘Helter Skelter’, or the way Jodie Foster was responsible for John Hinkley shooting Reagan?” (2.17) The series sets up Beckett and the copycat murderer as opposites on the spectrum: there are healthy and unhealthy fans, and the distinction between them seems to be the ability to distinguish between fact and fiction. Instead, we are supposed to model ourselves on Castle, himself a fan, who is offered the opportunity to write for a series featuring an unnamed British super agent whose identity we all guess (2.05), but ultimately refuses in order to continue writing his own original work.63 In the end, the unauthorized adaptations created by criminals allow Beckett to confront and capture them; in effect, order is restored by allowing the original authors (Beckett and Castle) to reassert their own authority over their story. This, to my mind, is also the function that these transmedia adaptations serve in the Castle universe: by assuaging the reader’s desire for internal musings, for the consecration of the central relationship, the show’s creators acknowledge fan desires (which are accepted and shared by the ostensible author in his novels), but maintain control over this adaptation, ushering it into the canon, once again creating authorized versions of fan fiction.64 Rather than refuse fan works, the corporate strategy seems to be to flood the market with already sanctioned works

106

Home Entertainment

of wish-fulfillment, thus limiting the market for independent fan-made works, and insisting repeatedly on the source text (and significantly, on its promotional materials, identifying itself as promotional material as well), and emphasizing I. Q. Hunter’s idea of these adaptations as a form of “dissemination [and] commodification.” To this extent, the many tie-in works are a very successful and very savvy marketing ploy to bring the public into constant contact with the world of Castle, echoing the thoughts of Henry Jenkins on the issue: Reading across the media sustains a depth of experience that motivates more consumption. Redundancy burns up fan interest and causes franchises to fail. Offering new levels of insight and experience refreshes the franchise and sustains consumer loyalty.65 By emphasizing the versatility, the adaptability of these diegetic worlds to different media, transmedia adaptations don’t necessarily reinforce the public’s belief in their realism—the examples from Castle make it clear that the creators expect fans to be aware of the artifice implicit in all forms of their diegetic universe—but deepen the audience’s commitment to the storyworld contained in the source text, becoming examples of what Henry Jenkins refers to as engagement-based viewership.66 Unlike the efforts of transmedia adaptations to ultimately send you back to the source text (the latest Marvel film or Disney success, the Castle episodes being referenced in the Nikki Heat novels), thus attempting to capitalize on fan wish fulfillment and possibly pre-empt fan-made narratives, transnational adaptations seek most often to hide their relationship to their source text, largely avoiding the fact that they are adaptations at all. This is inherent in the very nature of the transnational adaptation, which implicitly posits that the original form is not compliant with audience expectations and needs to be reinvented to suit its intended audience. In this they differ from most remakes, which count on the audience’s knowledge of the previous iteration: By repeating the same story but with a difference, the remake plays on a tension between the familiar and the new, “pre-selling” a narrative to the public. Contrary to the sequel, the remake has a more complicated task. It does not prolong a film but competes with it, and is based on the intuition that the viewers will still be interested in the story and will be ready to see an “updated” version of it. At the same time an industrial category, a textual category and a critical category, the remake always problematizes the notion of originality.67 Given the relative impermeability of American television broadcasting to foreign shows (with the notable exception of Masterpiece Theater’s

Crossing Over 107 reliance on British period drama), until recently American studios could assume that their target audiences would simply be unaware of the foreign sources for transnational adaptations in a way that film remakes could not, given the popularity of foreign film among at least a select part of the American population. The advantage, of course, is that the televisual transnational adaptation had no need to compete with its predecessor; the disadvantage was the inability to garner a “pre-sold” audience, making the guarantee of success less certain (as success in a foreign market does not necessarily cross borders). However, like the explosion of innovation in transmedia adaptation, transnational remakes, too, seem to be at a crossroads, given that these foreign shows, while still rarely broadcast, are increasingly available elsewhere. As such, television is evolving towards a situation similar to the film remake, resulting in significant criticism for those who remain oblivious to these changes. Indeed, as international television has become increasingly accessible to American audiences, there has been a tendency to criticize the shows that have hewed too closely to their predecessors, who have not demonstrated an artistic justification for its creation, or sufficient specificity to the American version of the series. The showrunners of Gracepoint, for example, the American interpretation of Broadchurch, remained convinced that there was no issue with fidelity to the original, quite simply because no one would have seen it: In our minds so few people here had seen it and it really worked and Kevin Reilly was excited about putting essentially something that had all the strengths of “Broadchurch” on the air and letting a wider audience see it. We always knew we had to expand it by a couple of episodes and that we wanted the ending to be different. Our general attitude was if it wasn’t broken let’s not fix it. I saw it a little bit as a chance to do another draft of something that was already in pretty good shape.68 There are two themes here—of expansion (in audience and content), and of revision, where reinvention would be “fixing.” What is interesting, however, is that even here, there is no discourse on fidelity, of being true to the initial vision of the author—and this is all the more fascinating given that creator Chris Chibnall wrote the pilot episode and executive produced the American series, and the series used David Strong, the director of many Broadchurch episodes, as the director of most Gracepoint episodes. 69 The draft metaphor suggests that only the latest version needs to be kept—the finished product, it is suggested, is the Fox show, and so viewing the original becomes a form of genetic criticism, akin to reading the shooting script of a film or an episode, a work of research rather than a moment of entertainment.

108

Home Entertainment

This was indeed a polished, accomplished series, with beautiful cinematography, an established cast (including Anna Gunn, fresh from the very successful Breaking Bad, David Tennant, reprising his role as the lead in the British series and increasingly well known even in the US as one of the incarnations of the popular series Doctor Who (BBC, 1963–), and Michael Peña, who had made a name for himself in films like Crash (2004) and End of Watch (2012) or series like The Shield (FX, 2002– 2008)); its scripts were written by veteran scribes like Chibnall himself, and writing partners, veteran adapters, and executive producers Dan Futterman (writer of two award-winning films, Foxcatcher (2014), and Capote (2005), both nominated for an Academy Award for best adapted screenplay), and Anya Epstein (former writer on two other well-received adaptations, Homicide: Life on the Street (NBC, 1993–1999), and In Treatment). Given the popularity of a very similar storyline on the other side of the Atlantic and the quality of the team and product being broadcast Stateside, there was no reason to expect that it would not meet with success. The series was indeed very similar to the original, becoming a transposition of an almost identical plotline to an American context. As the showrunners themselves admit in interview, the differences made to tailor the story to an American setting are not vast: The show also employed a legal adviser and a police adviser on set to keep the show accurate to its new Northern California setting, but Futterman admitted that the differences in police procedure weren’t as marked as one might think: “There is an ability of a suspect to either waive their rights or not waive their rights, and you see that in the interview rooms. And so the investigations of the various suspects can have a similar flavor, although the suspects become more different in the show.”70 Though Futterman suggests that the suspects are “more different” [sic], ultimately this was not an opinion shared by the general public,71 and given the meager ratings, the show touted as a “limited-run series” was not renewed.72 In the end, then, the show was ultimately very faithful to the original premise, a tendency that clashed with the very nature of the transnational adaptation, where the specificity of the new version, and its applicability to the culture, is crucial. This failure to “compete” and “update,” actions that, as Sarah Hatchuel reminds us, are necessary to the success of the remake, may have in fact been particularly damning given the genre of the show. As a murder mystery, the knowledgeable audience was at a significant disadvantage. Indeed, since everything hinges on knowledge (or lack thereof) of circumstances, and of the guilty party, those who knew Broadchurch were bereft of the suspense so crucial to the genre. Though the showrunners suggested that they were going to

Crossing Over 109 73

change the guilty party, the idea of foreknowledge is nonetheless problematic, suggesting themes (of the unknowability of even those closest to us, or the idea that the idyllic town—and family—are in fact a façade) that inevitably limit the pool of suspects considerably. Ultimately, for those aware of the original, the suspense on which the genre is based is only present in its relation to fidelity: the suspense is ultimately no longer about the murder, but the extent to which the series will cleave to the original. Satisfaction at knowing how things are going to turn out, which has been a major element in the success of Game of Thrones, for example, is absent here, as the killer’s identity is unknown,74 while disappointment at knowing how things are going to go is reinforced every time there’s a familiar plot twist, proving that these initial moments of suspense are all ultimately useless red herrings.75 Without suspense, of course, the public tends to rely on the pleasure of the journey rather than the outcome, as is typical in well-known texts, in the latest rendition of Romeo and Juliet for example, but here, the changes are superficial, primarily a minimalist adaptation to American mores, largely limited to accents—and to the questionable transposition of the working-class Latimer family into the Mexican-American Solanos.76 Indeed, it was only with the changes to the last few episodes to create suspense as to the identity of the killer that the show regained critical and public attention, and as a result, it is unsurprising that the showrunners promised significant divergences if given a second season: It was always the plan and it felt like a great experiment to us, that you start in the same place and you diverge to a certain point by the end. To me, what a thrilling thing it would be to then have two shows running concurrently that are on very different tracks. I’ve never seen that before. That felt like it would be a great experiment. People could compare and contrast, decide which one they liked more. That possibility is inevitable and that would be fine. So yeah, there would be some relief in that and there would be some, I think, excitement on both sides of this. I don’t mean in an adversarial way. Chris, as a writer you think, “Well, what if this plot took a different turn? What actually would play out?” And he would get to play that out through us, through the American version, as excited as he was by this alternate ending. Yeah, that all felt great and, as you said, the possibility of doing something that was consciously different in a very powerful way from the British version was also exciting.77 Though Futterman insists that this “was always the plan,” the discourse towards the media seems to have changed, from a need to simply present a “finished” version of the original to a wider audience to an alternative version of the original, no longer a draft to be dug out of archives but a fiction of equal standing that can be compared and contrasted with

110

Home Entertainment

the adaptation. This recognition of the changing nature of the transnational television remake came too late for this series, of course, but the idea of the original author simply furthering his storyline through two different avenues, the British and American versions of the plot, suggests once again that the specificity that is the basis for transnational adaptation is essentially absent, that either is, in fact, his vision interchangeable for the audience, be it British or American: the fidelity argument returns to the fore, and the relevance of an American context is essentially negated. The American version of The Office initially underwent similar criticisms, especially in its pilot episode, which is very heavily inspired by the British series.78 Here, however, the showrunners acknowledged the original show, which had caused considerable talk when it was the first British comedy ever to win a Golden Globe in 2003, an upset all the more impressive given that the series was shown only on the fledgling network BBC America,79 which was primarily known at the time for its reruns of British lifestyle shows. Indeed, the US Office took pains to credit their predecessor, going so far as to include a British flag on boss Michael Scott’s desk and to situate the Pennsylvania paper company on Slough Avenue, the town where the British original’s paper company Wernham Hogg is located. However, from the second episode of the series, the American version sought to blaze its own trail; the second episode transformed the training seminar of the first series into a session on racial sensitivity (1.02, “Diversity Day,” a loosely adapted version of the UK 1.04, “Training”) for example, so linking the humdrum of office life that the British version explored with the unique nature of racial tensions in the United States. Indeed, we can say that the structure itself was adapted to American traditions; while Gracepoint was deemed a “limited-run series,” which remains a novelty on American television, but which has long been the norm for British television in general and for Broadchurch in particular, The Office conformed to the norm of 22–24 episodes per season typical of American comedies on broadcast networks. The vastly expanded number of episodes as compared to the limited run typical of British comedies was accompanied by the expansive nature of the casting, which focused not just on the major characters featured in the British version (the boss, David Brent (UK), or Michael Scott (US); the toady, Gareth (UK), or Dwight (US); the likeable salesman, Tim (UK), or Jim (US); and the secretary, Dawn (UK), or Pam (US)), but also increasingly on the secondary characters, many of whom were invented by (and played by) the American writing staff. The adaptation, then, was of the premise for the original show, both in setting, character, and situation—beyond that, this more successful example of a transnational adaptation insisted on its own unique identity. A single example to hopefully prove my point is season 3’s “Business School” (3.16). The episode’s “A plot” is an adaptation of an event in the British

Crossing Over 111 original: David Brent has been invited to be a motivational speaker by a local consulting film—and proceeds to make a fool of himself. Though the American version borrows this premise, having Michael Scott speak before a professional audience, the context has already been “updated” and recontextualized. Here, Michael has been invited by the office intern Ryan to speak in front of his business class (a move, Ryan admits, motivated by the grade bump given when students have their bosses speak). In so doing, the series emphasizes both its affiliations with the British predecessor as well as its own uniquely American nature, focusing on secondary character Ryan, suggesting the American zeitgeist with the boom in MBA admissions, and implying the expansive nature of their adaptation as the small room of listeners is traded in for a lecture hall full of students peering behind laptops (a fact that becomes a poignant reminder of the futility of Michael as the representative of a paper company). Meanwhile, its B plot is set in the titular office, but focuses on a new premise: a bat is found in the office, and Jim takes advantage to play a prank on Dwight. Here again, the fact that the original premise is external to the office, while the office houses new, purely American, adventures, seems highly symbolic: [In office, Jim hangs up the phone.] JIM: Animal control will be here at six. DWIGHT: At six? No, that is unacceptable. Jim, you are the number two in this office, you need to step up and show some leadership. [Jim looks down, clearly focused on something else as he touches the back of his neck.] JIM: I’m sorry, what did you say? So weird … DWIGHT: What is so weird? JIM: The bat. I mean, I know I felt it bite me, but look, there’s no mark. [turns to show Dwight, who looks concerned.] I feel so… tingly. [clenches and unclenches his fists] So strangely powerful. [DWIGHT looks aghast. Jim looks up and shrugs.] Oh, well. [walks off, leaving DWIGHT clearly considering his words and looking after him with concern] [Cut to RYAN’s business school, where an uncomfortable RYAN stands before a lecture hall full of students.] RYAN: And now, without further ado, I present the regional manager of Dunder-Mifflin Scranton, Michael Scott. [The camera pans up to MICHAEL, holding a portable stereo. He presses play, and processional music from Handel’s “Water Music Suite” plays as he walks down the stairs, nodding solemnly to one side and the other of the aisle as he descends. He arrives next to RYAN] MICHAEL: Hello, everyone. I am Michael Scott. [In the background, the music ends and we hear “Hello, I’m Brandon Hidalgo, CEO of the Teaching Company. These-” MICHAEL turns hurriedly and

112

Home Entertainment stops the tape. He turns back to the crowd of students, looks at his cards] And I’d like to start today by inspiring you. May I borrow someone’s textbook, please? [The camera zooms wildly in and out of focus as it shows a close-up of a student in the front row, who offers his textbook.] What have we here? Ooh, economics. Very, very interesting… [he begins tearing pages out of the book and letting them fall onto the floor, continuing to destroy the book as he speaks, the ripping pages punctuating his sentences.] You cannot learn from books. Replace these pages with life lessons. And then [he bites his lip as he attempts to rip out several pages at a time] you will have a book that is worth its weight in gold. [The camera pans rapidly to the student who loaned the book, looking incensed, and then pans back to Michael, mugging for the camera.] I know these are expensive, but the lesson is priceless. [the camera zooms onto the student’s face, brow furrowed on consternation]. Good. All right. I think you’re inspired. (“Business School,” 3.16, 5:48–7:44)

Like many sequences in the show, here The Office appears to be defining itself for its audience. This is not a show, it appears, that affects (or tolerates) any kind of pretense, be it supernatural mythology, supposed business acumen, or even camera aesthetics, given its obvious and amateurish camera moves. Of course, this stance is in and of itself yet another form of pretense, giving the viewer the impression of immediacy and documentary-style “realism” in what is of course a scripted show, and lampooning pretense through the absurdity of the everyday’s oddities, just on the cusp of what is realistic (bat in the office, being invited to speak at the MBA course) happening to what are absurd characters (Dwight and Michael, and the others to a lesser extent). The juxtaposition of the two plots in this sequence is recurrent throughout the episode (and largely throughout the series as a whole), encapsulating the careful balance struck between what is original and what is adapted. The idea that Michael Scott seeks to set himself apart from the crowd, literally creating his own soundtrack to confirm the solemnity of the occasion, and where his attempts to “inspire” in fact appall his audience, are ironically faithful to the series’ inspiration— while also poking fun, undermining any need for this transposition of the original premise to be treated as sacred ground. Jim’s use of the implicit, assuming both Dwight’s knowledge of vampire mythology and our own knowledge of Dwight and his tendency to take this much too seriously, is based on the idea of a shared background, and a shared mindset, that instead draws the viewer in, insisting not on difference, but similarity, reinforcing thematically the inherently American nature of this new rendition of the office—and by associating this idea of proximity, of a shared (American) culture, with Jim, arguably the most likeable of the show’s cast, makes this nation-specific quality all the more

Crossing Over 113 enticing. When we learn that Joss Whedon, creator and, showrunner of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, was the director for this episode, it becomes all the more obvious that the show will not limit itself to its predecessor, but will voluntarily don various intertextual references as they suit the narrative. Ultimately, though The Office was careful to acknowledge its British counterpart—indeed, at one point including a guest appearance by Ricky Gervais as David Brent, meeting and befriending Michael Scott (“The Seminar,” 7.14)—the American series repeatedly insisted on eschewing the notion of fidelity, choosing instead to focus on the uniquely American nature of the premise. In the end, the most successful of the transnational adaptations can be characterized by the attempts made to make these shows pronouncedly American, in what Raphaëlle Moine refers to as “cultural translation” into the Hollywood idiom.80 House of Cards seems particularly pertinent in this regard; the adaptation is a series based on the British adaptation of Michael Dobbs’s novels, recounting how Francis Urquhart (become Frank Underwood in the American series), a career politician, manipulates all those around him in his rise to power. In this example, the very premise focuses on the political system, making this national affiliation—and the reinvention into an American context—not only necessary but natural. The credit sequences of the respective shows demonstrate quite clearly that each refers to its own national tradition, with the British show hovering over Parliament, while the American version features time-lapse, postcard-worthy images of well-known American monuments, going so far as to include an inverted American flag in its title. Like previous credit sequences examined in earlier chapters, this is symbolic of recurrent themes that run through the shows more generally, where the American version, in particular, focuses on issues that are subject to debate in contemporary American society, including (but not limited to) political tensions with Russia (and a Vladimir Putin stand-in), gay rights, abortion, and gender equality in politics. Though both series draw significant subtext from their allegiance to Shakespearean tragedy, each conscientiously evoking the spectres of Richard III, Iago, or Lady

Figures 4.3 and 4.4 House of Cards, where nationality is foregrounded.

114 Home Entertainment Macbeth, among others, thus affirming the shared culture of classic literature, and portraying a similar rise and fall of a shrewd but corrupt politician, the cultural differences present in the respective series are more than simple trappings. Though the very fact of adaptation (and its many incarnations throughout the ages) may testify to the immutable nature of power and those who seek it, the differences between the two series, both in culture, and in time period, also demonstrate the specificity of each iteration of power, a paradoxical riposte to those who claim that politicians are “all the same.” The depiction of Urquhart/Underwood’s wife (Elizabeth Urquhart (UK), or Claire Underwood (US)) is a telling example of how mores change with time and culture. The American version of the series highlights the relationship between the politician and his wife, making it a marriage of equals, and Claire Underwood a necessary partner in Frank’s machinations—with political inclinations of her own. Given the fact that the Netflix series has changed the political affiliation of the characters from Conservative Urquhart to Southern Democrat Underwood, this is a clear allusion to the Clintons81 and their respective campaigns for the Presidency. After Hillary Clinton’s first run for President in 2008, the issue of women in politics has been a recurrent one in the American zeitgeist, 82 and Claire Underwood’s attempts to conceal her ambition and her less popular decisions (like her repeated abortions) in an effort to please the American public says much about the current debates about feminism and female empowerment in American society.83 By focusing on the cultural, aesthetic, and thematic ramifications of the new setting, these transnational adaptations seem to be following the precepts established by André Bazin, who again redefines the concept of fidelity, associating it with the premise rather than the storyline or setting: The only way to be faithful and to perhaps become the equal of the original would be to start afresh and blaze a trail that follows the contours of a new social and historical landscape.84 Though transmedia and transnational television adaptations seem contradictory, where one insists on the transcendence of the story idea into any media, and the other focuses on the necessary uniqueness of what a Gracepoint actress (an Australian “passing” as American) refers to as “American vernacular that everyday Americans can relate to” when asked to justify the show’s existence,85 both seem to be reaching for similar goals: proximity. Transmedia seeks to make the source text and its paratexts an immersive experience, where the public takes an active role in filling in the gaps first by accessing the transmedia adaptations, and then by relating them back to the principal text, where the hiatus between seasons does not mean that the series is forgotten, but instead that its diegetic universe is brought back by different means and media.86

Crossing Over 115 Transnational adaptation seeks to foreground the similarities between audience and characters, taking inspiration from abroad, but attempting to bridge any cultural distance that might make absorption in the text more difficult. In this, these forms confirm television’s tendency towards proximity, as a medium enjoyed in the comfort of one’s home, be it on television screen, Ipad, computer, or telephone; it may be that the tendency towards the transnational adaptation also reinforces the idea of television as simple entertainment, that does not need to be challenging (in our attempt to understand foreign cultures, accents, or contexts), but ultimately, for the viewer who chooses to examine the different versions of a given series, it tells us much of what constitutes the specificity of the American mindset, and its television traditions, providing us instead with an example of what American television has to offer—and what it can learn from others. In this, television adaptation proffers a demonstration of foreign influence on contemporary American shows— it may be that rather than demonstrating the cultural hegemony of the United States, which appropriates the inventivity of others, the transnational adaptation instead marks the adoption of foreign traditions (like the limited-run television series, for example) as American.87 Whether the adaptation suggests a transcendent or a culture-specific notion of story, ultimately it seeks always to make these appropriations home entertainment.

Notes 1 Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Laocoon: An Essay upon the Limits of Painting and Poetry (1766), trans. Ellen Frothingham, Mineola, NY: Dover, 2005. 2 See for example K. J. Fielding, “Dickens and International Copyright,” Bulletin: British Association for American Studies, No. 4 (August 1962), 29–35. 3 Christine Geraghty, Now a Major Motion Picture, op. cit., 17. 4 Nick Hornby, Shakespeare Wrote For Money, San Francisco, CA: Believer Books, 2008. 5 Margaret Ann Doody, “Introduction,” in Samuel Richardson, Pamela: Or, Virtue Rewarded (1740), London: Penguin, 1981, 7–20. Jens Eder goes even further back, citing the Bible as a venerable exercise in transmedia adaptation. Jens Eder, “Transmediality and the politics of Adaptation: Concepts, Forms, and Strategies,” in Dan Hassler-Forest and Pascal Nicklas, eds., The Politics of Adaptation: Media Convergence, London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2015, 67. 6 Transmedia specialists distinguish between “crossmedia,” where several different media are used to tell a single story, which is repurposed to fit a new medium, and “transmedia,” in which several stories are told about a given storyworld. Though this is an interesting distinction that has proved its usefulness in other contexts, there is considerable overlap in practice, and here we will be using the term “transmedia” for both, and considering both as forms of adaptation. See for example Steve Peters, who sums up the controversy over terminology. “What the hell is Transmedia,” Steve Peters: Experience Design, May 18, 2011, http://www.stevepeters.org/blog/2011/05/18/ what-the-hell-is-transmedia. Accessed July 2015.

116

Home Entertainment

7 Henry Jenkins, “Searching for the Origami Unicorn: The Matrix and Transmedia Storytelling,” in Convergence Culture, New York, NY: NYUP, 2006, 95–134. 8 To give but one example, we can cite Jason Mittell, “Sites of participation: Wiki fandom and the case of Lostpedia,” Transformative Works and Cultures, no. 3. 2009. http://dx.doi.org/10.3983/twc.2009.0118. Accessed June 2015. 9 Colin Harvey, Fantastic Transmedia: Narrative, Play and Memory across Science Fiction and Fantasy Storyworlds, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015, 64. 10 Cf. pages 8–9. 11 Ibid., 73. 12 André Gaudreault and Philippe Marion, “Transécriture and Narrative Mediatics,” in Robert Stam, Allessandra Raengo, eds., A Companion to Literature and Film, Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005, 66. 13 For more on this inaugural remake of a French film, see Raphaëlle Moine. “Théories et pratiques du remake,” Remakes  : les films français à Hollywood, Paris: CNRS Éditions, 2007, Open Edition 2013. http://books. openedition.org/editionscnrs/683. Accessed July 2015. 14 This series is an interesting example of transnational adaptation because an Anglo-French adaptation of Broen/Bron was broadcast on French and British screens just four months after the American version (The Tunnel/ Tunnel, Canal+/Sky 1, 2011–). 15 The French television series is based on a 2004 French horror film of the same name (retitled They Came Back for international markets), and is the basis for the A&E series. However, another recent series with a similar premise (the dead rise, but seemingly without a taste for brains…), Resurrection (ABC, 2014–2015) was (confusingly) based on an American novel by Jason Mott, also called The Returned. Mott does not acknowledge the French film or television series as an influence, raising the question of whether the series Resurrection is an adaptation of a novel or a transnational adaptation. According to Raphaëlle Moine, this is a common occurrence, particularly with the foreign remake. Jason Mott, The Returned, Don Mills, Ontario: Harlequin MIRA, 2013. Christian Duchateau, “5 questions for ‘The Returned’ author Jason Mott,” CNN, September 2, 2013, http://www.cnn. com/2013/09/02/living/books-returned-jason-mott/. Accessed July 2015. Raphaëlle Moine, op. cit. 16 Scandinavian thrillers have become particularly popular, both in literature and on the small screen. An article from The Telegraph makes this explicit, wondering “How British television fell under the spell of Nordic noir.” Neil Midgley, The Telegraph, March 28, 2014. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/ culture/tvandradio/tv-and-radio-reviews/10724864/How-British-televisionfell-under-the-spell-of-Nordic-noirThe-Tu.html. Accessed July 2015. 17 Jennifer Forrest and Leonard R. Koos, “Reviewing Remakes: An Introduction,” in Jennifer Forrest and Leonard R. Koos, eds., Dead Ringers: The Remake in Theory and Practice, Albany, NY: SUNY UP, 2002, 24. 18 This is of course relative; the most successful foreign-language film to date is Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000), by a director wellknown to audiences after three English-language films preceding this one (Sense and Sensibility (1995), The Ice Storm (1997), and Ride with the Devil (1999)). Its total domestic gross ($128,078,872) ultimately made it only the 12th most successful film that year, well behind How the Grinch Stole Christmas, the year’s top-grossing film, which earned $260,044,825. Raphaëlle Moine reminds us how many American studios preparing remakes

Crossing Over 117

19 20

21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29

30 31 32 33 34 35

of foreign films will actually buy their distribution rights so as to keep the original from being seen before the remake comes out, thus literally obliterating the source text for the potential audience. Raphaëlle Moine, op. cit.; http://www.boxofficemojo.com/genres/chart/?id=foreign.htm; http://www. boxofficemojo.com/yearly/chart/?yr=2000&p=.htm. Accessed June 2015. Of the examples given here, only Les Revenants has been broadcast on American television, by Sundance TV. Of these 133, 36 are not fictions, but either game shows or reality shows (or both). I will be dealing only with the implications of transnational fictions adapted to an American context, given that the rationale behind remaking these game and reality shows is perhaps more easily understood (wanting the audience to feel that they, too, could be potential candidates). https:// en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_American_television_series_based_on_ British_television_series. Accessed June 2015. At the time of writing, the credit sequence is available online: https://vimeo. com/27246531. Accessed January 2014. Jennifer Forrest and Leonard R. Koos, ibid., 8. Constantine Verevis, Film Remakes, op. cit., 3. Op. cit., 6. Elke Weissmann, Transnational Television Drama: Special Relations and Mutual Influence between the US and the UK, London/New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012, 6. Op. cit., 67. I.Q. Hunter, “Post-classical fantasy cinema: The Lord of the Rings,” Deborah Cartmell and Imelda Whelehan, The Cambridge Companion to Literature on Screen, Cambridge: CUP, 2007, 154–155. Complex TV, op. cit., location 5497 of 8751. The Lost Experience was an alternate reality game that came out during the hiatus between seasons 2 and 3 of the series Lost, including clues and puzzles in sponsor advertising, websites, tie-in food items, etc., all leading to more information about the world of the television show. See for example Kent Aardse, “Alternate reality Game, Narrative Disbursement and Canon: The Lost Experience,” in Kristin M. Barton, Jonathan Malcolm Lampley, eds., Fan CULTure: Essays on Participatory Fandom in the 21st Century, Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2013, 106–117. Wolfgang Iser, The Implied Reader: Patterns of Communication in Prose Fiction from Bunyan to Beckett, Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins UP, 1974. Verevis, op. cit., 60. We will discuss Psycho, its shifting fortunes, and its impact on current American television in the next chapter. Leora Hadas, “Authorship and Authenticity in the Transmedia Brand: The Case of Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.,” Networking Knowledge, 7.1, 2014, 8. Convergence Culture, op. cit., 106. “Lured by a more lax regulatory environment that opened broadcasting to the open market and the muster of ever-increasing advertising rates, Big Media firmly integrated network television operations within its portfolios during the last 25 years. Beginning in 1985, Capital Cities purchased the network for a reported US $3.5 billion (Kleinfield 1985), and the merged company was in 1995 purchased by the Walt Disney Company for US$19 billion (Fabrikant 1995). By the 2004 merger of NBC and Universal Studios, all network television broadcasters were financially affiliated with program producers in large media conglomerates.” M.J. Clarke, Transmedia TV: New

118

36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43

44

45 46

47 48 49 50

Home Entertainment

Trends in Network Serial Production, New York, NY/London: Bloomsbury, 2013, location 214–217 of 5754. Kindle edition. Janet Wasko, Understanding Disney: The Manufacture of Fantasy, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001, location 794 of 5897. Kindle edition. “[…] in previous decades, it was exceptional for a program to employ a significant transmedia strategy, while today it is more exceptional for a high-profile series not to.” Complex TV, op. cit., 5466 of 8751. Sarah Hatchuel, Lost: fiction vitale, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2013, 8. Complex TV, op. cit., location 5562–5566 of 8751. Complex TV, op. cit., location 5489 of 8751. Merrill Barr, “Are Marvel Studios and Marvel Television Suffering a Communications Breakdown?,” Forbes, April 23, 2015, http://www.forbes.com/sites/ merrillbarr/2015/04/23/marvel-avengers-age-of-ultron/. Accessed May 2015. I am speaking of course of long-form fictions; as we have seen, short-form serial fiction is often “event television,” and is characterized by its epic scope and generation-spanning drama. This is of course all the more interesting when we consider the close links between these series and the cinema (notably the James Bond films, themselves adaptations of Ian Fleming’s novels). See Jonathan Bignell’s work on this point, for example his keynote speech at a seminar on the subject November 21, 2014 in Rouen, France. A review is available online: Shannon Wells-Lassagne, “Review of Jonathan Bignell’s conference: “Adventures between TV and film, and between Britain and America” (Journée thématique GUEST-Normandie Séries/cinéma, 21 novembre 2014, Caen),” TV/Series, n° 6, December 2014, http://revuetvseries.wix.com/tvseries#!numero6/c17p5. Accessed December 2014. Joseph Oldham, “Agents of Shield: Agency, Institutions and Transmedia Serialisation,” Critical Studies in Television Online, June 27, 2014, http://cstonline.tv/transmedia-serialisation-in-marvelsagents-of-shield. Accessed September 2014. Alison Willmore, “Can ABC’s ‘Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.’ Save Itself From Being the Blandest Part of the Marvel Universe?,” Indiewire, October 11, 2013, http://www.indiewire.com/article/television/agents-of-shield-abc. Accessed December 2014. “Introduction: Work in Progress,” in Karen Hellekson and Kristin Busse, eds., Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet: New Essays, McFarland, 2006, 11. Adam Holmes, “How the Agents of SHIELD Midseason Finale Set Up The Inhumans,” Cinemablend, n.d., http://www.cinemablend.com/television/ How-Agents-H-I-E-L-Midseason-Finale-Set-Up-Inhumans-68865.html. Accessed May 2015. Though The Inhumans was initially intended to be a film, Marvel and ABC have since announced a series whose first episodes will premiere in cinemas before being broadcast on television. Leslie Goldberg, “Marvel, ABC Set ‘The Inhumans’ TV Series,” The Hollywood Reporter, November 14, 2016, http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/live-feed/marvelabc-set-inhumans-tv-series-947296. Accessed November 2016. Now a Major Motion Picture, op. cit., 193. Indeed, in French for example, “They lived happily ever after” is supplemented with “et eurent beaucoup d’enfants”—“and had many children.” Despite its veneer of cynicism, ultimately the characters (including the villains) are all searching for their happy endings. This was of course challenged the following year, when there was a change in leadership and a cancellation of Marvel series Agent Carter given

Crossing Over 119

51 52 53

54

55

56 57 58 59

60

61 62 63 64

65

its lack of ratings. Dustin Rowles, “Here’s why ABC is the best broadcast network on television,” Uproxx, May 8, 2015, http://uproxx.com/ tv/2015/05/heres-why-abc-is-the-best-broadcast-network-on-television. Accessed May 2015. “Richard Castle,” Heat Wave, New York: Hyperion, 2009. Hereafter HW. Andy Lewis, “‘Castle’ Book Series Lives,” The Hollywood Reporter, May 20, 2016, http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/bookmark/castle-book-serieslives-read-896199. Accessed May 2016. M.J. Clarke quotes Jan Baetens, who affirms that novelization is “as old as film itself,” before staking the same claim for television novelizations: “The same could be said for television with respect to the adaptations of soap opera story lines into magazine digests or the screenplays of Hollywood telefilms into paperbacks.” Transmedia Television, op. cit., location 1378 of 5754. Jan Baetens in particular has argued that “high art novelizations” exist and deserve more critical attention. Jan Baetens, La Novellisation: du film au roman, Brussels: Les Impressions Nouvelles, 2008. See also Jan Baetens, “From Screen to Text: Novelization, the Hidden Continent,” in The Cambridge Companion to Literature on Screen, op. cit., 226–238. For a more complete overview of this phenomenon, see Claire Cornillon, “Quand les personnages de série écrivent des livres: effet de réel/effet de fiction,” Fictions contemporaines, sérialité et transmédia, Paris: Honoré Champion, forthcoming. “Richard Castle,” Naked Heat, New York: Hyperion, 2011. The recent BBC Sherlock works in a similar vein, mentioning references to the original stories (and in turn evoking the way the original stories referred to further adventures of the detecting duo that never appear in book form). I will be using quotation marks to distinguish between the pseudonym of the author (“Richard Castle”) and the television character (Richard Castle). To this extent Claire Cornillon’s suggestion that we can find a link between these books and the found manuscripts typical of 18th and 19th century novels becomes particularly pertinent: though she was referring to the common fraught relationship between reality and fiction, we could also see it as a reference to the nature of the adaptation being created. Claire Cornillon, op. cit. A more complete analysis of this graphic novel can be found in Shannon Wells-Lassagne, “De l’écran à la page: Castle and Richard Castle’s Deadly Storm,” in Benoît Mitaine, David Roche, Isabelle Schmitt-Pitiot, eds., Bande dessinée et adaptation (littérature, cinéma, tv), Clermont-Ferrand: Presses Universitaires Blaise Pascal, 2015, 299–308. Complex TV, op. cit., 5383–5871 of 8751. Indeed, it may be that the balance of source text will shift, because ABC has announced that it is currently working on a Derrick Storm pilot. This becomes significant in Season 5, when we learn that Castle’s absent father actually gave him his first copy of Casino Royale, the book that “made [him] want to become a writer.” (“Hunt,” 5.16). It could be argued, of course, that all adaptations are a form of wish fulfillment, a desire to have beloved characters come to life in a different medium, or to experience a work of art anew; however, given the emphasis on romantic interests and personal thoughts, as well as the tapestry of intertexts and authors, all hallmarks of fan-created work, I believe this link is perhaps stronger than usual. See Karen Hellekson and Kristina Busse, op. cit. Convergence Culture, op. cit., 96.

120

Home Entertainment

66 Jenkins posits that television has changed from an appointment-based model (where viewers arrange their schedule to accommodate a regularly scheduled viewing of a show) to an engagement-based model (where viewers actively seek out content through DVDs, streaming video… or illegal downloading). Henry Jenkins, Sam Ford, and Joshua Green, Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture, New York, NY: NYUP, 2013, location 2106–2110 of 7929, Kindle edition. 67 Sarah Hatchuel, Shakespeare and the Cleopatra/Caesar Intertext: Sequel, Conflation, Remake, Lanham, MD: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 2011, xxiii. 68 Jean Bentley, “‘Gracepoint’ showrunner defends killer reveal, shares Season 2 plans,” December 12, 2014, ZAP2It. http://www.zap2it.com/ blogs/gracepoint_showrunner_defends_killer_reveal_shares_season_2_ plans-2014-12. Accessed July 2015. 69 Lynette Rice, “‘Broadchurch’ coming to Fox,” Entertainment Weekly, August 1, 2013, http://www.ew.com/article/2013/08/01/broadchurch-headingto-fox. Accessed May 2015. 70 Laura Prudom, “‘Gracepoint’ vs. ‘Broadchurch’: How Fox’s Adaptation Differs From British Original,” Variety, July 21, 2014, http://variety.com/2014/ tv/news/gracepoint-broadchurch-foxs-adaptation-differs-british-original1201265784/. Accessed April 2015. 71 From this perspective, Brian Lowry’s comments, while harsh, were fairly representative: “The altered finish followed what had felt like a shot-for-shot remake of the first couple of episodes, with mild detours in the middle, but nothing that seriously departed from the program’s basic direction, scattering red herrings to keep the audience off-balance. As a result, my initial reservations about the show gradually multiplied.” Brian Lowry, “‘Gracepoint’ Finale Highlights ‘Broadchurch’ Remake’s Shortcomings,” Variety, December 11, 2014, http://variety.com/2014/tv/columns/gracepoint-finalehighlights-broadchurch-remakes-shortcomings-spoilers-1201377742/. |Accessed April 2015. 72 Entertainment Weekly reports ratings of “4 million viewers and a 0.9 rating among adults 18–49.” James Hibberd, “‘Gracepoint’ won’t get a second season,” Entertainment Weekly, December 15, 2014, http://www.ew.com/ article/2014/12/15/gracepoint-canceled. Accessed April 2014. 73 Laura Prudom, op. cit. 74 Granted, neither book readers nor television-only fans know the ultimate outcome of the events in Westeros, given that at the time of writing, George R.R. Martin has yet to complete the Song of Ice and Fire saga, but Game of Thrones fans have been notorious for spoiling major events (like the infamous Red Wedding, where many major characters were killed), something that has been spoofed in Community, as Britta attempts to spoil Bloodlines, the show’s Game of Thrones stand-in, for avid fan Abed (“Analysis of Corkbased Networking,” 5.06). 75 Interestingly, some of these red herrings unique to Gracepoint highlight its own nature as a transnational adaptation (and remind the knowledgeable viewer that many saw Broadchurch itself as an unacknowledged transnational adaptation): victim Danny is seen talking to a backpacker (whose phone number is in the pocket of his jacket post-mortem). The backpacker is identified as “Lars Pierson,” and the Scandinavian ring of the name seems a clear allusion to The Killing. The Danish original (Forbrydelsen) was largely seen as an influence on Broadchurch in the UK, as its slow pace, grim atmosphere, and focus on a single murder and its impact on the community were very similar; The Killing had a comparable impact on American television,

Crossing Over 121

76

77

78

79 80 81

82

an influence seemingly acknowledged here. Holly Williams, “Broadchurch Finally, ITV makes a Killing: An eight-parter about small-town lives is just the imitation Scandi-noir we’ve been waiting for,” The Independent, March 09, 2013, http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/tv/ reviews/tv-review-broadchurch--finally-itv-makes-a-killing-8527787.html. Accessed May 2015. Neil Midgley, “Is Broadchurch just like The Killing?,” The Telegraph, April  22, 2013, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/tvandradio/10006839/Is-Broadchurch-just-like-The-Killing.html. Accessed May 2015. The name changes between the two shows seems particularly significant; the lead in the British series is Alec Hardy, named after novelist Thomas Hardy, whose Wessex novels had made the area in the southeast of England famous, and whose novels’ bleak outlook is mirrored in the world-weary detective. The American character is named Emmett Carver; given that the series supposedly takes place in Northern California, one would assume that this is a reference to short story writer Raymond Carver, who lived and set most of his work in the same area. The move is similar to the choices made by the show itself, erasing the initial intention and replacing it with an American equivalent. Most of the major characters receive new names, but many others do not (including the victim, Danny, around whom the entire show is structured), again suggesting a superficial transposition rather than a true reinvention. Daniel Fienberg, “Post-Mortem: Co-showrunner Dan Futterman weighs in on the ‘Gracepoint’ killer reveal,” HitFix, December 12, 2014, http://www. hitfix.com/the-fien-print/post-mortem-co-showrunner-dan-futtermanweighs-in-on-the-gracepoint-killer-reveal#Y2XhjFk5wZG1KFeA.99. Accessed April 2015. For a more extensive analysis of the impact of the transnational adaptation in this first episode, see Shannon Wells-Lassagne, “Crossing the Pond: Adapting The Office to an American Audience,” TV/Series, n°2, November 2012, 171–187. http://revuetvseries.wix.com/tvseries#!numero2/c1ve8. Accessed November 2012. N.a., “Gervais’ surprise at Globes win,” BBC News, January 26, 2004, http:// news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/3423649.stm. Accessed April 2015. “Pour une analyse culturelle des remakes,” Remakes: Les films français à Hollywood, op. cit., http://books.openedition.org/editionscnrs/697. Accessed July 2015. Season 2 even sees Claire Underwood solemnly considering the ramifications of her current haircut on her husband’s bid for the Presidency, undoubtedly an allusion to both the 1993 scandal when Bill Clinton’s haircut appointment on Air Force One shut down two of LAX’s 4 runways and to the excessive attention placed on Hillary’s appearance: in 1995, for example, the then-First Lady remarked: “If I want to knock a story off the front page, I just change my hairstyle.” Annie Karni, “Hillary’s hair: She’s in on the joke,” Politico, May 28, 2015, http://www.politico.com/story/2015/05/ hillary-clinton-hair-118381.html#ixzz3ftqiLuHh. Accessed June 2015. Beyond the realm of politics proper, recent issues at the time of writing include the debate over identification as a “feminist,” a term that has been considered off-putting by many younger women, while being wielded proudly by others; recent revelations over wage inequality in Hollywood after various e-mails to and from employees of Sony were leaked to the public; or “Gamergate,” where criticism of the depiction of women in video games, notably by Anita Sarkeesian, led to harassment of the women involved. The

122

83

84

85

86 87

Home Entertainment

issue has of course become central with Clinton’s 2016 presidential bid. The depiction of Claire Underwood and her struggles can be seen as an oblique reference to issues of gender equality and representation in contemporary American culture, and Claire’s attempts to make the foray into elected office mirror and exaggerate the America’s political landscape. Genre may also play a part in this success; as was mentioned in relation to the problematic adaptation of Broadchurch/Gracepoint, most successful transnational remakes are either comedies or dramas, with examples of the latter including shows like Queer as Folk (Channel Four, 1999–2000; Showtime, 2000–2005), Skins (E4, 2007–2013; MTV, 2011), or Shameless (Channel Four, 2004–2013; Showtime, 2011–). “Le seul moyen de leur rester fidèle et d’égaler éventuellement l’original serait de tout reprendre à la source et d’en suivre le cours naturel dans un nouveau relief historique et social.” André Bazin, “Remade in USA,” Cahiers du cinéma, n° 11, quoted in Raphaëlle Moine, “Théories et pratiques du remake,” op. cit. Author’s translation. “‘I thought this was such a great story, such great characters, it has to be seen by more people,’ said Jacki Weaver […] ‘The only way to do that is to convert it into the American vernacular and make it about people that everyday Americans will recognize.’ “Shelli Weinstein, “‘Gracepoint’ and ‘Broadchurch’ Star David Tennant: ‘It’s Not Just Repeating the Same’,” Variety, October 1, 2014. http://variety.com/2014/scene/news/david-tennantgracepoint-broadchurch-not-just-repeating-the-same-1201318417/. Accessed May 2015. I am thinking here of the Battlestar Galactica webisodes, which appeared during the hiatus between seasons 2 and 3 of the series, for example. This idea is partially inspired by Alessandra Stanley, whose thoughts on the transnational adaptation of Life on Mars (BBC 2006–2007; ABC, 2008– 2009) are more negative, but echo my own: “There’s nothing new about television outsourcing. […] But the imbalance of trade keeps growing; many of the most notable shows of the season are adaptations of foreign series. It may even be the natural evolution, or devolution, of the communications business. The first phase in the rise of Japan’s postwar economy was based on imitation (transistor radios, television sets), and it looks as if the first phase in the decline of American hegemony in popular culture is marked by imitation.” Alessandra Stanley, “Imports Suffering Identity Problems,” The New York Times, October 8, 2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/09/ arts/television/09watc.html?_r=2&. Accessed April 2015.

5

Origin and Intention Authorship in Television Adaptation

One of the many points of convergence between television and adaptation is the thorny issue of attributing authorship. Film theory has long struggled with defining an author; in his work on the screenplay, Steven Price notes that Hollywood has historically stood in opposition to Romantic ideas of authorship, quoting Richard Fine’s study of Hollywood in the early twentieth century: […] “a writer’s talent was not under attack in Hollywood so much as the profession of authorship […].” Eastern writers were judging one culture—the Hollywood studio system—in terms of its diametrical opposite, that of literary New York, which had established professional values such as “creative autonomy, personal independence, legal control and ownership of their work, and fair compensation.”1 While Western society remains influenced by the Romantic ideal of a single controlling author, the collaborative nature of film has long been apparent to both practitioners and academics. When New Wave critics posited that the director was, in fact, the author of a film, 2 using his camera as an author does his pen, 3 this came to be an effective means of conceiving of film as an authored text, despite the obvious simplification of actual film production implicit therein. Richard Corliss discusses how the auteur is set apart from the simple director in terms that echo those of the Romantic conception of the author, making the auteur an artist rather than an entertainer, a solitary rather than a collaborative worker, whose own creativity diverged from the simple “interpretation” of pre-existing materials by directors. As Steven Price summarizes: In each case, the first term is associated with the “very romantic and American” notion that “art is the product of one man working alone to carve a personal vision out of the marble of his sensibility.” The second more accurately identifies the conditions under which Hollywood films are usually made.4

124

Home Entertainment

Jason Mittell refers to this as “authorship by responsibility”:5 though, of course, a director could not deal with all aspects of filmmaking personally, those who were capable of influencing cast and crew in order to create a vision unique to that auteur transcended their function to become the authoring instance for that text. These auteurs are thus distinct from directors, who are fundamentally executors of a pre-conceived text (screenplay) or genre (based on studio or marketing pressures, for example). Ironically, of course, many of those who sought to establish the director as auteur were adapting their films from sources both popular and prestigious. François Truffaut, whose essay “Une certaine tendance du cinéma français” essentially began the movement, was inspired by David Goodis’s 1956 novel Down There for his film Shoot the Piano Player (Tirez sur le pianist, 1962), Henri-Pierre Roché’s 1952 novel of the same name for his classic Jules and Jim (Jules et Jim, 1962), two of Henry James’s best known short stories (The Altar of the Dead” and “The Beast in the Jungle”) for The Green Room (1978) or Ray Bradbury’s classic science fiction tale Fahrenheit 451 for his first English-language film in 1966; he is far from unique in this regard. Indeed, Matthew Bernstein suggests that adaptation was used by these New Wave auteurs to reinforce this association of the director as the author of the film: We know that great films have come from pulp fiction: Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil (1958), derived from Robert Wade and William Miller’s Badge of Evil, comes almost immediately to mind. Yet the discussion of such films is always conducted on auteurist grounds, as a way of showing how talented directors transcend their source material. In fact, one could argue that the French New Wave practice of recasting pop fiction into art cinema mode was precisely designed to give the director priority over the writer.6 Whether or not directors can be thought to transcend their source material, adaptation makes at least some of the contradictions inherent in auteur theory explicit, showing the knowledgeable viewer that there is more than one authorial figure influencing the text. Indeed, Linda Hutcheon suggests that adaptations may question the very idea of a single authorial presence at all (perhaps explaining their ambiguous status in academic circles):7 By their very existence, adaptations remind us there is no such thing as an autonomous text or an original genius that can transcend history, either public or private. They also affirm, however, that this fact is not to be lamented.8

Origin and Intention

125

By its very nature, then, adaptation foregrounds and problematizes authorship, confirming in practice what poststructuralist thinkers like Roland Barthes9 and Michel Foucault10 have affirmed through theory. However, as Jack Boozer reminds us in his introduction to a collection of essays on the question, adaptation studies nonetheless have a tendency to recreate this fallacy of the author, setting up a binary relationship between author of source text and author of the adaptation, rather than recognizing the complex nature of authorship, particularly in filmed representation: [T]he closed fixation only on literary source and finished film both in journalistic reviews and scholarly study has often shown an indifference to the evolving intentions of producers, writers, directors and their shifting levels of input and authority.11 If, as Corliss and Price have suggested, film has repeatedly sought to establish an author in order to transform cinema from entertainment into art (to the detriment of a real understanding of how a film gets made), television has suffered from similar ills. Like its older sibling, television has been maligned as a product rather than an art form, a malady Jason Mittell suggests, is linked to its ambiguous authorial presence: Although television is clearly a creative medium, many people might bristle at the ascription of authorship to commercial television, which has typically been seen as something that is produced rather than authored.12 As American television has become more aesthetically valued over the past two decades, its author function has become more prominent, helping to justify and anchor the medium’s cultural worth through a range of discursive practices.13 Like film, it would seem that as television has become more valued as an artistic medium, a new form of authorship has appeared in television: the showrunner, a term that has come into vogue in the last decade or so, and which describes the person or persons responsible for coordinating all cast and crew (including other executive producers, the previous term for this function) to a unique guiding vision. Michael Z. Newman and Elana Levine explicitly associate this figure with the film auteur, referring to it as a “strategy of legitimation”:14 [the showrunner] is to aestheticized television as the director is to legitimated forms of cinema. The showrunner is potentially an auteur: an artist of unique vision whose experiences and personality are expressed through storytelling craft, and whose presence in cultural discourses functions to produce authority for the forms with

126

Home Entertainment which he is identified. The rise to prominence of television auteurs and of authorship discourses surrounding them functions to distinguish certain kinds of television from others, and, as in cinema, to promote auteur productions as culturally legitimate.15

This version of television authorship has been particularly successful, spawning documentaries16 and books,17 as well as an ongoing television series,18 all attributing authority to the showrunners and their unique vision. The importance of this “authored” form of television largely dates from the broadcast of Twin Peaks (ABC, 1990–1991), with David Lynch and Mark Frost helming the television series. Though Mark Frost was a television veteran, serving as a writer of such well-known series as The Equalizer (CBS, 1985–1989), The Six Million Dollar Man (ABC, 1973–1978), and Hill Street Blues (NBC, 1981–1987), David Lynch had achieved considerable fame and acclaim for films like Eraserhead (1977), Elephant Man (1980), or Blue Velvet (1986), with the latter two being nominated for Academy Awards. As such, Lynch’s move to television was seen as canonizing the eighth art as worthy of an auteur’s attention (though his sharing the burden with other collaborators, and notably with Mark Frost, continues to go largely unnoticed). As The Christian Science Monitor posited in 1990, “‘Twin Peaks’ is auteur TV.”19 Conversely, as these television fictions become increasingly serialized and complex, the very idea of a single author is necessarily a problematic notion. Paddy Chayefsky, a successful screenwriter for both the small and the silver screen, spoke of the immensity of television narratives and its resulting strain on the screenwriter: Television is an endless, almost monstrous drain […] How many ideas does a writer have? How many insights can he make? How deep can he probe into himself, how much energy can he activate?20 Chayefsky spoke in 1952, and the appetite for narrative has grown by leaps and bounds since. Indeed, while Newman and Levine associate the rise of the showrunner with “the move toward greater serialization of prime time scripted series television, which necessitates the active management of long-format stories,”21 this coincides with another fundamental change in industrial practice, from “freelance labor to staffs of writers working as a team under the showrunner’s management.”22 Ironically, it is as the showrunner rose to prominence that the duties for storytelling were more consistently shared under a fairly stable group of writers (as compared to the more rapidly-changing writers of previous generations, or the directors, who rarely stay for more than a few episodes at a time);23 the serialization that we have noted as one of the hallmarks

Origin and Intention

127

24

of “quality television” ultimately makes this notion of showrunner as auteur problematic. Jason Mittell has attempted to solve this quandary by referring instead to the “inferred author function,”25 using Foucault’s “author function” (which allows us to separate the actual human being from the usefulness of the author figure for legal, social, and critical purposes) and tailoring it to reception practices. 26 Mittell defines the term as “a viewer’s production of authorial agency responsible for a text’s storytelling, drawing on textual cues and contextual discourses,”27 ultimately making the show, rather than the showrunner, this authorial agency. Adaptation, of course, emphasizes the issue of authorship and complicates the attribution of authority, something that we’ll be examining from two extremes of the authorship debate. We will first analyse the way in which auteur theory and adaptation are used to establish the notion of “art television” (and the horror genre as having its own form of artistry) through adaptations Hannibal (NBC, 2013–2015) and Bates Motel (A&E, 2013–), before returning to question of transmedia adaptations and the way they challenge the conception of the author in Castle, Once Upon a Time, and Marvel’s Agents of SHIELD. We will conclude by looking at the possibilities for both single-author and purely collaborative television, to see the extent to which these forms are feasible for the medium of television.

‘This Is My Design’: Auteur Theory and Horror on the Small Screen28 Hannibal and Bates Motel both appeared in 2013, part of a new wave of horror brought to the small screen after the increasing gore of successful television procedurals like Bones (Fox, 2005–) or CSI (CBS, 2000–) and supernatural shows like The X-Files, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, The Walking Dead (AMC, 2010–), or Supernatural (The CW, 2005–) made it likely that true horror could be successful on the small screen; 29 though horror has generally been less present on television, if we consider series like The Twilight Zone (CBS, 1959–1964) as a frequent user of horror tropes, we could say that horror on television began with what was very often an adaptation of a short story; series like The Addams Family (ABC, 1964–1966) or The Munsters (CBS, 1964–1966), however, tongue-in-cheek their affiliation with horror might have been, both adapted either a popular comic strip (The Addams Family) or Universal Picture’s stable of B-movie creatures (The Munsters).30 A subgenre, the serial killer, is even rarer on television, though the serial killer has made sporadic appearances in primetime police dramas; it was Showtime’s Dexter (2006–2013), an adaptation of Jeff Lindsay’s novel Darkly Dreaming Dexter, that brought the serial killer to the centre of the television narrative, albeit as an extreme version of the popular anti-hero rather than the occasional antagonist the serial killer had previously

128

Home Entertainment

been. However, rather than simply riding the coattails of their television predecessors, I suggest that the two series seem instead to be standing on the shoulders of giants in their attempts to position television as the eighth art, and horror as a genre worthy of artistic consideration. Its serial killers, intriguingly enough, were both adapted from iconic sources: Hannibal is inspired by Thomas Harris’s Hannibal Lecter and his film incarnations, and Bates Motel is a prequel to Robert Bloch’s Psycho, as famously adapted to the screen by Hitchcock.31 In so doing, I suggest, the showrunners go beyond the simple economics of adapting a wellknown source text and seek to use adaptation, as film once did, to insist on the artistic possibilities of the small screen, to suggest that television can don the mantle of auteur cinema. The title of the section, “This is my design,” is a reference to a phrase repeated systematically by the lead character of Hannibal; Will Graham, an investigator for the FBI, is able to look at crime scenes and reconstruct them by entering into the killer’s mindset, imagining himself committing those same crimes, and intoning “This is my design” as he describes them. The idea of donning another’s persona, and acting out pre-determined events in an attempt to retrace the intention of the author cannot fail to evoke the idea of adaptation, of course. However, the fact that Graham uses the first person while explaining the actions of others also seems to be an acknowledgment of the fraught nature of authorship, either in television or adaptation. Through the strong presence of the showrunner, through repeated emphasis on both previous auteurs and their works and the unique and artistic nature of these television adaptations, the series, I argue, uses authorship as a tool to promote “auteur TV.” The showrunners of Bates Motel and Hannibal, Carlton Cuse and Kerry Ehrin for the former, and Bryan Fuller for the latter, are all wellknown in the world of television, having created or run previous cult shows. Kerry Ehrin was the showrunner for Friday Night Lights (NBC, 2006–2008; The 101 Network, 2008–2011), an adaptation of the 2004 film (itself based on a 1990 non-fiction book of the same name) with relatively low ratings, but critical raves and a fervent fan base who ensured the show’s survival even after cancellation on NBC; Bryan Fuller is wellknown in geek circles, as a writer for the Star Trek franchise (Star Trek: Voyager (UPN, 1995–2001) and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (syndication, 1993–1999)), as well as innovative series like Dead Like Me (Showtime, 2003–2004) and Pushing Daisies (ABC, 2007–2009), the latter of which was nominated for twelve Emmy Awards, winning seven. Carlton Cuse, of course, has long been established in cinema and television, writing two of the Lethal Weapons films as well as Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989), before working on series like The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr. (Fox, 1993–1994), a television series spoofing old film serials and bringing steampunk sensibilities to an ostensible Western,

Origin and Intention

129

Nash Bridges (CBS, 1996–2001), Lost, and more recently, The Strain (FX, 2014–). Cuse’s tenure on Lost was a highlight in the ascension of the role of the showrunner; as Jason Mittell notes, Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse are among the most prominent showrunners in using paratexts […]. In large part, Cuse and Lindelof’s high public profile was necessary to shift attention away from J.J. Abrams, who was erroneously credited as Lost’s author by the press and fans […] By making their presence known in a range of media, Cuse and Lindelof asserted control in the public eye and promoted their authorial role. They used that prominence to construct a goofy, comedic image that downplayed some of Lost’s more overwrought tendencies […] even adopting a combined fannish identity of “Darlton” to assert their collective authorship […] Their pervasive public discourses worked both to assure fans that they were in control of the program’s complex mythology and to urge viewers to lighten up and enjoy the ride by emphasizing Lost’s more fun and escapist side […]32 Cuse was well-versed in using his public person as showrunner to posit himself as author and to use that position to promote both the series, and ultimately, the viewer’s reading of that series. Given that Bates Motel was the first series Cuse undertook after Lost, the new show was subject to much speculation for its showrunner, and not just its iconic subject matter.33 Though Case is the best known of the three, Kerry Ehrin also had a certain following, and upon broadcast, the show was characterized according to its new authors. 34 Bryan Fuller, too, had his share of fans, especially since Fuller had recently completed a pilot for a remake of horror TV classic The Munsters entitled Mockingbird Lane (2012) that had drawn raves from critics and fans but was ultimately not greenlit to go to series. Like Cuse and Ehrin, Fuller has a tendency to see his new work in terms of his previous efforts. The showrunner likes to place characters from previous series in his other works, 35 causing fans to posit the existence of a Fuller-verse, a theory that he has acknowledged in interviews.36 To a lesser extent, this is also true of Bates Motel, where fans of Lost can recognize Nestor Carbonell as Sheriff Romero, who played an equally mysterious figure (Richard Alpert) on the hit ABC series; Cuse’s more recent effort, The Colony (USA, 2015–), features Josh Holloway, another Lost alum. The idea of creating a œuvre is once again a technique used to reinforce the idea of the showrunner as author and the television series as a legitimate art form (that is more easily marketed as such): [The idea of the œuvre] helps the television networks promote their new programs (“from the creator of …”) and it helps the audience

130 Home Entertainment identify signature styles and meanings. One essential component of authorship discourses is the unification of vision across works, which may include consistency of themes, motifs, verbal and visual styles, settings, and genres.37 The industry tends to reinforce this idea of the showrunner, both as a marketing tool, and as a new salesman for their product; though once executive producers might have gone unnoticed by the larger public, now they are celebrities in their own right, and representatives for their shows. Both series’ showrunners maintain active engagements with fans, notably through their annual arrival at San Diego Comic Con and other fan conventions and active Twitter feeds, commenting their shows in real time and inviting fans to join in. This has become par for the course for television showrunners, as Jason Mittell explains: The rise of online television fandom has enabled showrunners and other production personnel to have a more public, engaged, and interactive relationship with their fans. […] Some showrunners have adopted online media as a way to engage directly with fans and to construct their own public persona. 38 In so doing, these showrunners seem to be assuming what Thomas Leitch calls “the most indispensable […] factor” in becoming an auteur, i.e., assuming a “public persona […] that can be converted to a trademark more powerful than the other authorial trademarks with which it will inevitably compete.”39 Indeed, the very nature of television production is changing in favor of the showrunner as principle figure in the success of a series. Both Bates Motel and Hannibal never made a pilot, whereas previous television generations were characterized by first greenlighting a pilot, and making a decision based on that first show about whether or not the collaborative effort that goes into making that pilot was successful enough to merit a full series. Bates Motel and Hannibal, however, as series featuring veteran showrunners, both received a full season order based on a premise. Bryan Fuller is very clear on the pitfalls of this choice. Though the showrunner has been forthright about the contributions of actors and directors, recounting how David Slade’s direction of Episode 1 essentially caused him to rewrite the rest of the season in keeping with this version of Hannibal, Fuller is also clear about the evolution of the television industry in favor of the showrunner and writer rather than a more collaborative understanding of television fiction, where the showrunner remains the authority who protects the show from insidious influences: […] there is an arrogance to a direct-to-series order that negates the contributions of your cast and your director, because you’re thinking, like, ‘Oh, they’re going to do what they’re going to do, and we’re just

Origin and Intention

131

going to lay the plan out ahead of them, and they’ll fall into place.’ But with this cast and with a director like David Slade, they elevated the material so significantly that I was looking at the scripts that were coming down the pike, and I just thought, we are writing the wroooong show. [Laughs.] So it was a matter of grabbing the wheel, jerking it, and trying to turn the ship. […] It was going to be a tremendous amount of work and a tremendous amount of effort to re-break and rewrite the 10 scripts that we had ready to go, but the fact was, in my gut, I knew that they were the wrong version of this show.40 Fuller’s comments make clear that he acknowledges the collaborative nature of the television fiction, and that placing sole responsibility on the showrunner as author of the text undermines the possible inspiration coming from other sources, be it directors, staff writers, or actors. Cuse and Ehrlin have made similar statements, crediting their actors with key developments in the series.41 In this sense, then, these showrunners are not attempting to claim sole authorship of their shows; rather, they are using that perception of the showrunner as author, perhaps not to make themselves auteurs (though that might be a more debatable affirmation), but to make their shows “auteur TV,” and more generally as a means to posit television as art, since auteur theory was among the first steps taken in hoisting film to its current position as the 7th art. Through aesthetic and thematic concerns centered on the series’ unique visions, through references to film directors often thought of as auteurs (but who are also famously adaptors) and insistent references to iconic films, authorship becomes a means to promote television fiction, and more specifically horror television, as a valid art form. The two series first distinguish themselves among their adaptation brethren first through their ambiguous relationship with their sources; not only are they prequels, recounting events that happened before those of the novels they adapt; they are also reboots, in the sense that both series choose to forgo any attempt at making these period pieces and instead set them in the contemporary US. Indeed, this is a particularly playful aspect of Bates Motel’s adaptation, creating ambiguity by giving Norma and Norman Bates vintage wardrobes and the iconic old-fashioned house and motel, that then clash with the town of White Pine Bay around them, thus both meeting and subverting viewer expectations. Norma’s speech when introducing Norman to the Bates home could also be a call to the viewer to acknowledge its older furnishings, its original setting, but to be prepared for something new: “I bought the house, the whole thing, on a foreclosure. And everything came with it. […] You have to imagine it without all this crap. Just simple, elegant furnishings […]” (1.01). By acknowledging its source and insisting on novelty simultaneously, both diegetically and visually, the show creates a feeling of the uncanny that reinforces its affiliations with horror, but also insists on the unique

132 Home Entertainment

Figures 5.1 and 5.2 A return to the past… set firmly in the present (earbuds and all).

nature of the show’s vision, foregoing realism for auteurism. This is something that Cuse and Ehrin insisted on repeatedly in their interviews: I think, for Kerry Ehrin and I, the key to our reboot was making sure that we were not in the shadow of the original movie. Which is why our version is a contemporary prequel. It feels like the key to any of these reboots is finding a way to really take ownership of the material while at the same time still acknowledging the source material.42 Hannibal also insists on the problematic nature of time in its narrative, both diegetically and visually; protagonist Will Graham, an FBI investigator being treated by a psychiatrist (and unbeknownst to him, serial killer) Hannibal Lecter, contracts encephalitis. He is concerned by his blackouts, and Lecter suggests that he draw a clock, and repeat his name, the time and the place, in order to ground himself in the present. Graham draws an image that we first see through his eyes as normal… and then through Hannibal’s as grossly deformed. These blackouts represent ellipses for the viewer as well, who is unaware of sometimes crucial events happening off-screen (the identity of the murders being done either by or for the Chesapeake Ripper, who the

Figures 5.3 and 5.4 “Time’s out of joint” in Hannibal.

Origin and Intention

133

knowledgeable viewer knows is Hannibal Lecter, for example), while the show specializes in flashbacks and dream sequences that ultimately make it impossible to distinguish diegetic reality from the dream.43 Once again, these timeless/timely dichotomies seem to be both an acknowledgment of the series’ status as reboot and adaptation, and an affirmation of the unique vision of this new iteration of a well-known character, as Sarah Hatchuel makes clear in her analysis of these dream sequences: Will Graham’s terrifying visions in Hannibal are based on erasure and reconstruction, revealing the act of rewriting and the distance between this and pre-existing works. […] By representing the filmed serial killers and destabilizing this myth, the dreamlike reboot shows itself to be a killer… of films.44 Dream sequences and hallucinations in Hannibal, like the paradoxical period setting of Bates Motel, conjugate aesthetics and diegesis to insist on technical prowess and artistic vision.45 This act of erasure and reconstruction is present from the opening of both series. The titles of the shows make obvious their affiliation with well-known and primarily cinematic monsters from the onset, and as such would seem to adhere to the traditions of long-form television adaptations where, as we have seen, the source is first adhered to, and then progressively abandoned. However, here, as prequels, only the end point is fixed by these iconic sources: as per Psycho, Norman Bates will end up under the sway of Mother’s imagined influence, with fatal consequences, while Hannibal Lecter will eventually be discovered as the serial killer and cannibal The Chesapeake Ripper and jailed, a circumstance that opens Harris’s first novel Red Dragon.46 Indeed, this freedom from the sources might be most obvious in the use of time as a means of demonstrating personal vision, but the distance from the source texts has been exacerbated by the creators, as both series have taken significant leeway when adapting the world of their sources to the screen in their very premise: while in both the novel and the film version of Psycho we’re told that a lover convinces Norman Bates to buy the hotel and run it, Bates Motel makes it Norma’s decision for a fresh start for herself and her son (1.01); likewise, Thomas Harris’s first Hannibal Lecter novel, The Red Dragon, has protagonist Will Graham explaining that it was—almost—sheer luck that he caught Hannibal Lecter, who he met twice, questioning him only because he happened to be the doctor on call in the ER when a Ripper victim was brought in, a series of events that is recounted almost verbatim in Michael Mann’s adaptation Manhunter (1986).47 Hannibal, however, focuses its entire series on the burgeoning friendship between Hannibal Lecter and Will Graham, the man who will eventually capture him. Therefore, the very nature of the series as adaptation is of course in question: taking Thomas

134 Home Entertainment Leitch’s ten different levels of adaptation into account, one might be tempted to label the series as allusion or “neoclassic imitation”48 rather than outright adaptation, where references are made to the original universe and its characters, but without sustained similarities. After all, (as the title of Hannibal makes clear), it is the now iconic figures of the serial killers that are the principal draw to the series, thus confirming Robin Wood’s contention that the monster is often the emotional heart of the horror film.49 In fact, many of the things that characterize the principal figures of the source texts are disregarded in the new series: in Bates Motel, Norma is a loving, if somewhat neurotic, mother, contrary to the entire idea of Mother in Psycho and its many sequels;50 in Hannibal, the fateful discovery of Hannibal’s drawing of the Wounded Man, a famous anatomy illustration that leads the novel’s Will Graham to recognize him as the killer, is seen first by his superior Jack Crawford, and then by a Clarice Starling-like FBI trainee, Miriam Lass, who therefore usurps this most critical interaction with Lecter, only to be attacked by Hannibal in her moment of realization—thus enacting one of these acts of erasure and reconstruction Hatchuel mentions in the series, both acknowledging its cinematic and literary predecessors and recasting them to suit this new universe. Almost none of the events described in either source text come to pass in either series; Hannibal has fleshed out some brief references to back-story in Red Dragon, Hannibal Rising, and the novel Hannibal, but like Bates Motel, it is essentially the use of familiar characters that suggests its status as adaptation. We’ve moved, then, from translation of text to screen to a sort of spin-off, evoking once again Saint-Gelais’s notion of transfiction, 51 where the universe is familiar, but the suspense so important to horror remains intact. 52 Like the New Wave films that Matthew Bernstein saw as attempting to “transcend their source material” to “give the director priority over the writer,”53 here the problematic use of time, in particular, emphasizes the unique nature of these reboots, and their ability to create a new world associated with these now iconic figures. From an adaptation perspective, one might argue that part of this might be due to the fact that both of these series have a veritable treasure trove of source texts, creating a sort of palimpsest of inspiration that makes any kind of direct adaptation impossible;54 however, given the auteurist bent of the two series, I suggest that the film iconography predominates because it allows the shows to be associated with films that have already attained canonical (or, failing that, cult) status. Thomas Harris and Robert Bloch were both originally inspired by real-life serial killer Ed Gein, 55 and though the original novels are one of the primary sources of inspiration, there can be no doubt that Bates Motel, in particular, is adapting the iconography of the world of the classic Hitchcock film rather than the little-known novel; after all, Bloch’s Norman Bates is an overweight middle-aged man, not young and innocent-looking

Origin and Intention

135

feature actor Anthony Perkins. A similarly slight and fresh-faced Freddy Highmore as Norman owes more to Perkins than a more schlubby Bloch version. 56 Indeed, the opening of the series Bates Motel makes it obvious that we should be paying attention to the series’ filmic predecessor(s). The pilot opens with a shot not of the characters, but of an old television set playing His Girl Friday (Howard Hawks, 1940), where Walter Burns questions his estranged wife Hildy’s plans to marry Bruce Baldwin and move in with the man’s mother. We then pan over to a sleeping Norman Bates, who rises in a dazed state. The camera focuses on his distorted reflection in the vast array of family photos, old and recent, and he clutches on to the framed image of his parents’ wedding picture, before calling for his “mom,”57 and stumbling down the hall as the foreboding music continues. The kitchen is deserted, sauce bubbling in a pot on the stove and a game on the living room’s big-screen TV, which suggests that someone has been there, and Norman races into the garage to discover flickering overhead lights and his father prone on the ground. He runs back to the photo-bedecked hallway, screaming frantically for his mother as the sinister music swells, pounding on doors—until his mother calmly opens the door to the bathroom, hair wet, tying her bathrobe, and the music cuts off. ‘What is it, Norman?’ she questions, seemingly more resigned than worried—and his news that something has happened to his father does nothing to change her expression (0–1:35, 1.01). In this introductory sequence, then, the show repeatedly evokes the presence of film in general, and Psycho in particular, insisting on its own status as an adaptation, a reinvention of previously extant material. Whether it be the multiplicity of screens (playing Hollywood classics or contemporary American football) or the vast array of framed photographs, the visual predecessor is incessantly invoked, and linked to our expectations of action—the mention of moving in with Baldwin’s mother, of course, entices the knowledgeable viewer, reminding us of what film or novel versions of Norman Bates do when provoked into a similarly dazed state by his mother. The television screen of the game is used in tandem with the stereotypical trope of the bubbling sauce, suggesting the abrupt absence of someone who had initiated both those activities. The fact that Norman is clothed in ambiguously retro garb, and that Norma begins the series in the heavily-connoted shower, reinforce this link with Psycho: the show makes no pretense of ignoring its source text. At the same time, one would be hard-pressed to say Bates Motel simply embraces its predecessor: the fact that Norman turns away from each of the screens, and appears as a distorted reflection in one of the framed pictures, suggests that Psycho and the cinema are simply a starting point for the series (and an end point for its diegesis, as we’ve seen), and the fact that Norma emerges unscathed from her shower confirms that knowledge of Hitchcock’s film, or Bloch’s novel, will not help us to anticipate the show’s plot.58

136

Home Entertainment

Figure 5.5 Proliferating images, omnipresent frames in the opening sequence of Bates Motel.

Likewise, though showrunner Brian Fuller says he first came to the Lecter franchise through the Michael Mann adaptation of the first Lecter novel (Red Dragon), Manhunter (1986), it’s equally clear that most viewers would know the character of Hannibal Lecter as he was portrayed in Jonathan Demme’s The Silence of the Lambs (1991) by Anthony Hopkins, an Oscar-winning performance that was repeated in later sequels, Ridley Scott’s Hannibal (2001) and Brett Ratner’s Red Dragon (2002). Though one would be hard-pressed to find many similarities between Hopkins’s interpretation of the role and Mads Mikkelsen’s very reserved take on it, the series makes several visual references to the nowiconic film, especially in a season one episode that essentially constitutes an adaptation of The Silence of the Lambs into the universe and time frame of Hannibal, complete with a very similar introduction to our serial killer, here Dr. Abel Gideon. Like Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs, Gideon is kept in the final cell at the end of a dark basement hallway, and is visited by an attractive female FBI consultant looking for answers—not Clarice Starling, but Alana Bloom, herself both an evocation of the series’ status as adaptation (Bloom figures prominently in Thomas Harris’s Red Dragon, but did not appear in either of the film versions) and as a means of insisting on the uniqueness of this version (the novel’s character is Alan, not Alana, with the consequent change in genders). The show’s version of the serial killer echoes Lecter’s actions as well: he feigns illness and attacks a nurse in an attempt to escape captivity, an event that we are told of by Dr. Chilton in the book and film version of The Silence of the Lambs, but witness here for ourselves (through Will Graham, who re-enacts the murder for us). Most tellingly, Gideon has come to believe that he is the Chesapeake Ripper, thus very clearly becoming Hannibal Lecter’s proxy, and encouraging recognition of the previous iterations of Lecter, while refusing absolute identification. 59 As such, the adaptations do not just deal with television’s ability to translate the particularities of text onto screen, but the inextricable

Origin and Intention

137

mixture of text and film that factor into any new incarnation of those iconic figures. The emphasis on the previous screen adaptations suggests that the shows are positioning themselves as worthy successors to these watershed films. The fact that these films made horror both a popular and critical success (Hitchcock paved the way for the horror film as an auteur film,60 and Demme finally obtained an Oscar for his version of the horror genre, the first and only one to do so to date) may explain why these adaptations became prestige projects for networks either down on their luck (NBC) or unused to original programming (A&E). At the same time, the evocation of filmic source texts is both insistent and repeatedly disrupted or undermined, and both shows multiply visual references to classic cinema more generally, suggesting that they are the inheritors not just of these specific films, but of cinema more generally: as we have seen, Bates Motel began with Cary Grant rather than any of the characters, while Hannibal has made repeated references to great filmmakers of yore, as in its first episode references to The Shining, where a bright red and white bathroom is voluntarily reminiscent of Jack Torrance’s encounter with ghostly butler Grady in Kubrick’s film.61 Fuller regularly tweets about these homages, and speaks of them openly in interviews so that we can be in no doubt of his intentions. When asked about visual influence in the show, Fuller replied, “I literally sat at the page and asked, ‘What would David Lynch do with Hannibal Lecter?’”62 Beyond this, both series showcase elements that seem to emphasize the importance of the visual, the cinematic nature of their respective visions: the second episode of Bates Motel opens with Norman clicking a flashlight on and off as he examines an illustrated diary he’s found in the motel.63 The text, written in Chinese, is indecipherable, but the images, shown in closeups that jump-cut from one image to the next, become similar to an animation sequence (0–0:35, 1.02). We can see the teaser first as a sort of metaphor for adaptation, since the book of images will later become a story in the series, brought to life first by Norman’s imagination as seen through the subjective camera, and then diegetically when they find the shed that figures among the illustrations. More specifically, the sequence seems to refer to this unique brand of adaptation, the prequel/reboot: the fact that Norman’s acts of violence take place during ellipses in the show or absences in his perception of reality, makes the teaser symbolic of story as a whole, where the viewer must fill in the gaps, here as to the meaning of the images and Norman’s reaction to them, and more generally of Norman’s story pre-Psycho, or of his actions off-screen. Similarly, Hannibal repeatedly insists on the viewer’s acknowledgment of visual cues in order to correctly interpret the story, positing the importance of its iconography as purveyor of meaning. The show ironically leaves its most famous serial killer’s actions off-camera in the first few episodes of the series; it is not until the afore-mentioned Silence of the Lambs episode, “Entrée” (1.06), that we see him in action, attacking

138

Home Entertainment

trainee Miriam Lass. This ellipsis allows the viewer instead to fill in the blanks through the use of montage, as every time the Chesapeake Ripper’s activities are mentioned, the camera cuts to Hannibal. Beyond this, the extensive use of a raven-feathered stag in the dream sequences, reminiscent of the series’ first murder by the Chesapeake Ripper (where a young woman is impaled on antlers in the open air with ravens pecking nearby), makes a metaphorical reading of visual cues necessary to understand the events of the series. The creature is Will’s symbolic representation of the Ripper, and as he comes to recognize Lecter as the murderer, this stag takes on human form, becoming an antlered man, a Native American monster referred to as a Wendigo.64 Again, through surreal dream imagery, the show insists on analysis rather than simple consumption, and Hannibal as an art form rather than an industrial product. The shows also emphasize the idea that genre is being adapted as well, contending that horror is, and has long been, the subject of high art.65 The second episode of Bates Motel features a class assignment where Norman and his partner decide to apply literature to contemporary society, interpreting Blake’s The Tyger through contemporary killers like O.J. Simpson (1.02); in its second season, Norma Bates interrupts parents complaining about their children reading Crime and Punishment, referring to them as crazy housemoms whining about whether or not their kids have read about axe murderers and whores. Welcome to the world, ladies! There are axe murderers and whores stuffed under every rug, so your kids’d better read up on it and get educated, because that’s what life is. It’s a cesspool you claw, and scratch and fight to get out of but you never get to the top! (2.01) Hannibal makes a similar—but largely visual—reference to the horror genre in its double allusions. A season two killer is making a mural of bodies that becomes a sort of pointillist version of an eye, allowing the killer to see the eye of God (or indeed to be the eye of God); it seems fair to associate this with the camera’s eye, making the positioning of bodies in order to create an aesthetic effect a version of visual art (2.01– 2.02). When we discover that Fuller credits both classic Hollywood films (Busby Berkeley’s spectacular high-angle shots of his dancers in geometric configurations) and horror references (with the film Jeepers Creepers’ (2001) horrific reveal of corpses decorating the ceiling of a church crypt) for this work, it becomes clear that “high” and “low” art are being blurred, and that film-making is central in the show’s preoccupations. Likewise, despite an effort made by both shows to distance themselves from their iconic sources, ultimately, the fictions rely on their status as remediations of previous texts to function. In so doing, they bring

Origin and Intention

139

to mind film’s use of adaptation, first as an assurance of film’s ability to translate classic literature onto the screen, and then as a springboard to  showcase the possibilities of filmed performance. Though neither show deprives itself of gore, the suspense and anticipation that are so characteristic of the horror genre largely depend on viewer knowledge of the source texts, and thus their acknowledgment of the shows as adaptations.66 As was previously mentioned, Lecter’s acts of violence take place off-screen until half-way through Season 1, though the sumptuous feasts he serves to others become a unique version of gore to viewers aware of the character’s tendency toward cannibalism. Likewise, it is not until episode 6 (again half-way through the season) that we discover what happened to Norman’s father in the first moments of the pilot, revealing what the knowledgeable viewer already suspects, that this was Norman’s first act of violence. This unique use of adaptation, which encourages viewer knowledge of previous texts rather than attempting to “remake” the story with new thrills that will cancel out previous incarnations,67 thus reinforces the lineage between sources and series, becoming the worthy successor to literature and film (both the specific texts, and the general phenomenon). Finally, the series seem to be expanding and redefining our understanding of what television is, or can be. Hannibal takes on a certain number of stereotypical tropes of the TV procedural, in order to turn them on their head. The startling scenes of Will Graham recreating the crime being investigated insist on the gimmicks one has come to expect from procedurals but takes them to new lengths where, in his recreations, our protagonist, in fact, takes the place of the murderer, and as we identify with him, we are forced to acknowledge the violence of our own generic preferences (whether it be horror or the toned-down procedural).68 Similarly, its use of the typical “monster of the week” format makes obvious the fact that these horrific crimes are in fact a metaphor for the mental states of the main characters. Thus for example when Will is contemplating his paternal feelings towards the daughter of a serial killer he killed, the crime involves children being brainwashed into killing their families (1.04); when it becomes clear that Hannibal is manipulating Will for his own gain, the killer of the week uses his victims to create a new form of string instrument, playing them like a violin (1.08). Here, more than ever, it becomes apparent that the violence is a metaphor for more mental conflict, and that this series is ultimately a character study. Rather than accept a killer or victim of the week as a disposable element, as is the case in most television dramas, these shows, and Hannibal in particular, seek to make violence more violent, more provocative, in order to provoke reflection in its viewer. The epic scope of the “death tableaux”69 becomes even more obvious once we realize that many of them are inspired not just by film, but by contemporary art, as in a Damien Hirst-inspired death tableau, where a victim is cleaved into

140 Home Entertainment several slices and mounted on plexiglass in a work reminiscent of Hirst’s works with cows sliced and separated in individual boxes (Mother and Child Divided (1993), Some Comfort Gained from the Acceptance of the Inherent Lies in Everything (1996)). One could posit that the series’ claim to high art reflects its protagonist’s pretensions to culture. Indeed, perhaps one of the reasons these two series chose the serial killer genre to bring horror to television or to insist on horror television’s status as art, is that the serial killer is in and of itself a reflection of television and television viewing.70 There is a marked emphasis on ritual and repetition, particularly in Hannibal, whether it be in the killing, in the meal preparations, or in Will Graham’s re-enactment of the crimes and ritualized invocation, ‘This is my design’, as he recounts the violent acts committed, and of course that can only be related back to the very repetition and ritual of the TV series itself, in its traditional crime of the week, its tendency to solve the crime by the end of the episode, or more generally, of course, the three-act formula that has become the golden standard for American television whatever its network. From this perspective, the explanation that Will gives of each of the murders, the obligation to acknowledge the artistry and the effort that has gone into each of these crime scenes, repeating “This is my design,” can be associated with the intent in creating other forms of art that are not yet appreciated as art in their own right (television, horror, or perhaps adaptation, all of which are too often accused of commercial rather than artistic intent). By forcing the viewer to acknowledge the artistry behind the TV shows, viewers are not simply consuming fiction, they appreciate it71, acknowledging the wealth and diversity of its heritage, and by association, recognizing the art of this newest incarnation, emphasizing the aesthetic nature of the show, and the provocative and reflective nature of art. In so doing, the show seems to be echoing the end of Thomas Harris’s Red Dragon, and Will Graham’s final thoughts about violence: He wondered if, in the great body of humankind, in the minds of men set on civilization, the vicious urges we control in ourselves and the dark instinctive knowledge of those urges function like the crippled virus the body arms against. He wondered if old, awful urges are the virus that makes vaccine.72 In making the viewer confront the violence of these series, their illustrious and socially acceptable forbearers, and thus the viewer’s own assimilation of violent work, the shows cause us to reflect on the nature of violence on both a personal and a social level, all the while emphasizing the artistic nature of television, of horror, and of adaptation, which here shoulder the responsibility to not just entertain, but to sublimate and to provoke.73 Between the aura of adaptation and that of the auteur, it

Origin and Intention

141

may be that Will speaks for his creator as well as his criminal when he repeatedly asserts, “This is my design.”

Branding TV: The Fallibility of the Author in Transmedia Adaptations If Bates Motel and Hannibal utilise this perception of the showrunner as auteur in order to elevate television to an art form, exploiting the iconic nature of its source texts to establish the premise of “auteur TV,” the transmedia adaptations we analysed in the previous chapter seem to represent the opposite end of the spectrum in its representation of authorship. Jason Mittell refers to the author function of television as a “higher power”: As with religion, the powerful author is a figure only experienced through discourse, via texts and paratexts, and glimpsed through oblique moments when we infer something greater at work than just the characters living their lives, as we hope that the events seen on screen are not just random occurrences but all part of a larger plan that a creator has worked out in advance.74 This religious metaphor seems particularly interesting to these television adaptations, especially given the almost mythical status of our two monsters, Hannibal Lecter and Norman Bates.75 Hannibal in particular deals with this divine nature of the author diegetically, making Lecter a Satan figure76 whose ponderings on the divine tell us much about the conception of authorship in the series: Killing must feel good to God, too. He does it all the time, and are we not created in God’s image? WILL GRAHAM: Depends on who you ask. HANNIBAL LECTER: God’s terrific. He dropped a church roof on 34 of his worshipers last Wednesday night in Texas, while they sang a hymn. WILL GRAHAM: Did God feel good about that? HANNIBAL LECTER: He felt powerful. (“Amuse-bouche,” 1.02) HANNIBAL LECTER:

This is almost a direct quote from Thomas Harris’s novel Red Dragon, in keeping with Fuller’s assertion that he is “grounded in the text,” and here we see that the divine creator is made in Hannibal’s image, and not the other way around. God is characterized by his power and his cruelty (and perhaps his fine sense of irony)—all characteristics necessary for the author of the cruel world that Hannibal’s characters inhabit. If the author is associated with his God-like powers in these auteurinspired adaptations, transmedia texts, which necessarily involve

142 Home Entertainment various collaborators, take a very different stance. Thus ABC’s Once Upon a Time, for example, places considerable emphasis on the presence of the tome of fairy tales that reveals the true identity of the characters living an ordinary life in Storybrooke, unaware they are in fact fairytale characters. The book sets in motion the events of the series, causing young Henry to seek out his birth mother (coincidentally the daughter of Snow White and Prince Charming and “the Savior” for the town under a curse); it seems to have performative powers, as whatever is written therein eventually comes to pass. Season four of the show had a plotline focused on a search for “the Author,” who supposedly penned the book of fairytales that initially inspired the series, and who the characters hope will allow them their happy ending. The author, however, turns out to be simply another fabulist, whose magic powers can create and manipulate worlds, but who is ultimately subject to a higher power: the Sorcerer. As one of the more knowledgeable characters explains: There have been many Authors throughout time; it’s a job, not a person. And the one trapped in here was just the last tasked with the great responsibility… to record; to witness the greatest stories of all time and record them for posterity. (4.16) The Author in this clearly poststructuralist world is a function, not a person, who does not create, but simply records. By the end of the season (“Operation Mongoose, Part 2,” 4.22), the previous author has been imprisoned, and the young boy whose readings inspired the events of the show has taken his place. Here, contrary to the Godlike powers of Hannibal, the Author is more fallible and corrupt that those whose lives he records. The true power, we are told, is that of the Sorcerer, whose hat looks suspiciously familiar to those acquainted with Disney productions. Though the author may have a book, the Sorcerer (here clearly Disney, or Yen Sid, as is his name in the 1940 Fantasia)77 has an entire

Figures 5.6 and 5.7 The author’s power is subject to the Sorcerer.

Origin and Intention

143

universe at its disposition, with swirling galaxies to be glimpsed in its depths. A book is no longer sufficient to contain this storyworld, clearly, and the Author must simply record events, a fallible servant to a greater power. ABC’s other transmedia adaptations also question the divine nature of the author, though perhaps less explicitly than does Once Upon a Time. Richard Castle, as the lead character in his eponymous series, becomes the prototypical author (going so far as to have “Writer” stenciled across his bullet-proof vest), and the insistence on his name, through Castle (in the series), Palace (in the graphic novels), and Rook (in the novels), distinguishes him as the source of authorship. The problematic nature of this overt authorship becomes obvious in the novel Naked Heat, where Jameson Rook reveals that he is also a ghostwriter, and secretly poses as Victoria St. Clair to write romance novels: “‘It’s not uncommon for magazine writers to supplement their income. Some teach, some rob banks, some do a little ghostwriting here and there. I do mine here.’”78 This is a statement that seems to align with the character’s philosophy of writing elucidated later in the novel: “He wrote as if he were the reader. It was also how he kept his writing from becoming too cute, which is to say, about him, not the subject. Rook was a journalist but strove to be a storyteller, one who lets his subjects speak for themselves and stayed out of their way as much as possible.”79 Rook demands respect as a journalist but is absent as an author, much like whoever the real writer of this series is. As such, we are brought to question the very nature of authority, the role of the author, both as a brand (in our world and within the series, “Castle” is a pseudonym, and that fabulation has since become a brand-name for the entire franchise) and as artist—a question that seems particularly relevant when dealing with the fraught question of authorship to American television series. Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., of course, makes the authority for their text clear from their very title: it is Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. Though some have argued that Joss Whedon’s authorship has been crucial to creating coherence across the franchise,80 ultimately that ostensible authorship is hollow, as after creating the series and directing the pilot episode, Whedon has not had significant input on the series itself. Significantly, the lead character Skye begins the series as what she refers to as a “hacktivist,” devoted to telling the real story behind the powers that be—only to have this budding authorial figure abandon her calling to join up with S.H.I.E.L.D. and ultimately, to become a power in her own right, as one of the Inhumans Marvel’s upcoming series has promised to depict. Whether the absent author is Joss Whedon (or the real showrunners of the series, Jed Whedon and Maurissa Tancharoen, who remain very much in the wings of any press on Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.) or Skye, he/she is ultimately less important than the larger institution (be it Marvel, or within the diegesis,

144

Home Entertainment

the S.H.I.E.L.D. organization), whose ubiquity characterizes the show’s reality, and, as yet another comic book film fills our screens, our own. This use of media conglomerates to create transmedia texts, then, focuses on the idea of an author in its attempt to make these multiplatform narratives as coherent as possible, but in so doing, ultimately recognizes that the author figure must be replaced by the author function. This is typical of transmedia: In many transmedia television texts a sense of authorship is not necessarily attributed to an individual but instead to the larger production and broadcasting institutions behind those individuals. Branding and industrial policy combine to create an authorial figure that provides both a marketable coherence and an integrated production process.81 In these shows, the author is not God, but an acolyte to a higher power, a sentiment that is no doubt unsurprising for the Disney or Marvel series, whose adaptations of older source texts have long usurped favored status as the primary renditions of their tales. This is all the more interesting given the contrast with the increased emphasis on the showrunner as author. By situating the author ultimately not in individuals, but instead in the content itself (in the diegetic author or the producers of content, either Marvel or Disney), authority is given to the diegetic universe, reinforcing its narrative coherency for the viewer (and allowing its sprawl to move beyond a single author figure). The ambiguous time schemes that were a means for Hannibal and Bates Motel to establish themselves not just as distinct from their sources, but as purveyors of a unique vision, are yet another point of contrast with transmedia adaptations. Timing is essential to these transmedia forms, as we have seen: paratexts are carefully timed to coordinate with events in the source text (for example the destruction of S.H.I.E.L.D. as recounted in the Captain America: The Winter Soldier, which obviously had a significant impact on the show, which intended to represent the employees of that now-defunct organization), but unlike the uncanny sense evoked by Bates Motel and Hannibal, here Castle and Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. in particular insist that diegetic time and real time are the same: Nikki Heat books go on sale in our world at the same time as in the world of Castle, and events of the Marvel films happen when the films appear on American screens. Though there is a blurring of boundaries between what is fact and what is fiction, through the use of hyperseriality or diegetic extensions, this is not meant to confuse the viewer, causing them to question what they see; it is instead intended to reassure the viewer that it is all real (or at least, to give the viewer leave to pretend to believe this is so).

Origin and Intention

145

These two forms of adaptation, then, seem to adopt the figure of the author either as a tool to prove their artistic aspirations or as a figure to be rejected in favor of a larger institutional authority that can be counted on to entertain. Either way, however, these adaptations focus our attention on the inescapable whirl of intertext—between series, between past and present sources, between source and paratext, or source and adaptation. Though adaptations are not unique in their reliance on the characteristic dialogism of texts, their very nature foregrounds that exchange, and challenges the notion of the Romantic author. Though the showrunner may be “author by management,” as Jason Mittell terms it, ultimately authority resides only in the fiction itself.82

Notes 1 Steven Price, The Screenplay: Authorship, Theory and Criticism, London/ New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2010, 5. Price’s initial quote is from Richard Fine, Hollywood and the Profession of Authorship, Ann Arbor, MI, UMI Research Press, 1985, 14. 2 François Truffaut, “Une certaine tendance du cinéma français,” Cahiers du Cinéma, n° 31, January 1954. 3 Alexandre Astruc, “Naissance d’une nouvelle avant-garde: la camera-stylo,” L’Écran français, n° 144, March 30, 1948. Available online: http://fgimello.free. fr/documents/seminaire_astruc/camera_stylo-1948.pdf. Accessed July 2015. 4 Richard Corliss, Talking Pictures: Screenwriters in American Cinema, New York: Overlook, 1985, xviii–xix, quoted in Steven Price, op. cit., 8. 5 Jason Mittell, Complex TV, op. cit., 1701 of 8751. 6 Matthew Bernstein, “High and Low: Art Cinema and Pulp Fiction in Yokohama,” in James Naremore, ed., Film Adaptation, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 2000, 173. 7 “It is the (post) Romantic valuing of the original creation and of the originating creative genius that is clearly one source of the denigration of adapters and adaptations. Yet this negative view is actually a late addition to Western culture’s long and happy history of borrowing and stealing or, more accurately, sharing stories.” Linda Hutcheon, op. cit., 3–4. 8 Ibid., 111. 9 Roland Barthes, “La mort de l’auteur (1968),” Le bruissement de la langue, Paris: Seuil, 1984, 61–67. 10 Michel Foucault, “Qu’est-ce qu’un auteur ?” (1969), Dits et écrits I, 1954–1975, Paris: Gallimard, 2001. 11 Jack Boozer, “The Screenplay and Authorship in Adaptation,” in Jack Boozer, ed., Authorship in Film Adaptation, Austin: U of TX Press, 2008, 3. 12 Jason Mittell, Complex TV, op. cit., 1826 of 8751, Original emphasis. 13 Ibid., 1858 of 8751. 14 Michael Z. Newman and Elana Levine, Legitimating Television: Media Convergence and Cultural Status, NY, NY/London: Routledge, 2012, location 967–970 of 6016, Kindle edition. 15 Ibid., 967–970 of 6016. 16 Showrunners: The Art of Running a TV Show (2014). 17 David Wild was among the first to use the term “showrunner” in his book The Showrunners. David Wild, The Showrunners: A Season Inside The

146 Home Entertainment

18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26

27 28

29

30

31

32

Billion-Dollar, Death-Defying, Madcap World Of Television’s Real Stars, New York, NY: Harper Colllins, 1999; Tara Bennett, Showrunners: The Art of Running a TV Show, London: Titan Books, 2014; Brett Martin, Difficult Men: Behind the Scenes of a Creative Revolution: From The Sopranos and The Wire to Mad Men and Breaking Bad, London: Penguin, 2013. The Writer’s Room (Sundance, 2013–). David Sterritt, The Christian Science Monitor, April 25, 1990, http://www. csmonitor.com/1990/0425/ltwin.html. Accessed July 2015. Quoted in Dave Itzkoff, Mad as Hell: The Making of Network and the Fateful Vision of the Angriest Man in Movies, New York, NY: Times Books, 2014, 10. Op. cit., 1028 of 6016. Ibid., 1035 of 6016. Jason Mittell, op. cit., 1737 of 8751. See Chapter 2. Op. cit., 2062 of 8751. “[…] instead of asking whether an implied author may or may not be lodged in a text as a scholarly heuristic, we should ask how viewers use the concept of authorship to guide their processes of reception and comprehension.” Ibid., 2053 of 8751. Ibid., 2067 of 8751. This analysis of Hannibal and Bates Motel was inspired by a round table talk on television’s serial killers for the Festival du cinéma américain in Deauville, France in September 2013. My thanks to the organizers of that festival and to my collaborators Sylvaine Bataille, Ariane Hudelet, Monica Michlin, Sarah Hatchuel, and Claire Cornillon for their contributions. Indeed, Maureen Ryan cites this justification for Bates Motel: “In the wake of the massive success of ‘The Walking Dead,’ every TV network wants a scary-story franchise, preferably one with a readymade fan base.” Maureen Ryan, “‘Bates Motel’ Review: Checking In To TV’s New Horror Hotel,” Huffpost, March 14, 2013, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/maureen-ryan/ bates-motel-review_b_2867312.html?utm_hp_ref=maureen-ryan. Accessed June 2015. Though shows like Friday the 13th (CBS, 1987–1990), Freddy’s Nightmares: A Nightmare on Elm Street: The Series (Syndicated, 1988–1990), or Tales from the Crypt (HBO, 1989–1996) revived the genre somewhat in the late eighties and early nineties, the genre was much rarer on the small screen than in movie theatres, except perhaps in broadcasting Hollywood’s back catalogue of horror films, and remained largely absent from television during the heyday of independent horror in the 1970s and from the nineties until the 2010s. See also “The TV in TV Horror” for a more complete (if perhaps more broadly defined) overview of horror on television. Lorna Jowett and Stacey Abbott, “The TV in TV Horror: Production and Broadcast Contexts,” in Lorna Jowett and Stacey Abbott, TV Horror: Investigating the Dark Side of the Small Screen, London: I.B. Tauris, 2013, 1–15. Another show premiering that same year, The Following (Fox, 2013–) goes even further, suggesting that its serial killer and the cult that he inspires were influenced by Edgar Allan Poe. I will not be focusing on The Following, as its literary premise, though tantalizing, is fairly rapidly abandoned, while Bates Motel and Hannibal continue to emphasize their affiliations to their source texts, a more promising subject of study for adaptation theorists. Jason Mittell, Complex TV, op. cit., 1976–1985 of 8751.

Origin and Intention

147

33 Interestingly, fellow Lost showrunner Lindelof similarly chose to move to adaptation, transforming Tom Perrota’s 2011 novel The Leftovers into an HBO series (2014–). The show has often been interpreted and marketed in the light of Lindelof’s past tenure on Lost. See for example, Steve Bryant, “What The Leftovers can learn from Lost,” Esquire, July 16, 2014, http://www.esquire. com/entertainment/tv/a29397/the-leftovers-make-us-care/. Accessed July 2015; Andy Greenwald, “Lost in Translation: Damon Lindelof returns to TV with HBO’s deeply dark ‘The Leftovers,’” Grantland, June 25, 2014, http:// grantland.com/features/hbo-the-leftovers-lost-lindelof/. Accessed July 2015; Matt Barone, “Last Night on ‘The Leftovers,’ Damon Lindelof Atoned for ‘Lost’s’ Nikki and Paolo,” Complex, July 14, 2014, http://www.complex. com /pop-culture/2014/07/the-leftovers-two-boats-and-a-helicopterepisode-reaction. Accessed July 2015. 34 Tim Stack, “EP Carlton Cuse: ‘Bates Motel’ ‘is one part ‘Friday Night Lights,’ one part ‘Lost’ and one part ‘Twin Peaks’,” Entertainment Weekly, March 18, 2013, http://www.ew.com/article/2013/03/18/bates-motel-premiere. Accessed July 2013. 35 In Hannibal, for example, a character named “Georgia,” played by Ellen Muth, has a rare disease referred to as Cotard’s Syndrome, where the person believes he or she is dead (1.10 and 1.12). The fan of Fuller’s work would have recognized Muth as the lead character of his previous series, Dead Like Me, “George.” The allusion to the previous show is all the more obvious since while Hannibal’s Georgia believes she is dead (and acts accordingly), Dead Like Me’s George dies in that show’s first episode, and spends the rest of the show as a Grim Reaper, collecting souls for the afterlife. 36 Jennifer M. Wood, “Bryan Fuller on Pushing Daisies, Dead Like Me, and Being Cancelled,” Esquire, March 19, 2015, http://www.esquire.com/ entertainment/tv/interviews/a33774/bryan-fuller-interview/. Accessed June 2015. 37 Michael Z. Newman and Elana Levine, op. cit., 1217 of 6016. 38 Jason Mittell, Complex TV, op. cit., 1939–1944 of 8751. 39 Film Adaptation and Its Discontents, op. cit., 256. 40 Todd VanDerWerff, “Bryan Fuller walks us through Hannibal’s debut season,” The AV Club, July 24, 2013, http://www.avclub.com/article/bryan-fullerwalks-us-through-ihannibalis-debut-se-100644. Accessed July 2013. 41 “The season-two finale featured a shockingly intimate kiss between Norman and his mother—a development that star Freddie Highmore pitched to the writers. […] The actors often contribute ideas for storylines, according to Cuse and Ehrin; In fact, Farmiga pitched what became one of the most pivotal plot points of the second season: ‘The idea that she had had this allegedly incestuous relationship with her brother—and I say that just because something bad definitely happened, but the circumstances of that are meant to be somewhat shadowy still, narratively. It was her idea that Caleb, her brother, would’ve had this relationship with her. We just fell in love with that idea,’ Cuse said.” Laura Prudom, “Carlton Cuse on ‘Bates Motel’ Ending: This Isn’t a Show That Should Run for 10 Years,” Variety, June 6, 2014, http://variety.com/2014/tv/news/carlton-cuse-on-bates-motel-endingthis-isnt-a-show-that-should-run-for-10-years-1201215236/. Accessed June 2015. 42 Carlton Cuse, Reddit AMA, April 30, 2015, https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/ comments/34eon2/im_television_showrunner_carlton_cuse_currently/. Accessed July 2015.

148 Home Entertainment 43 See Sarah Hatchuel’s comments on the subject: “Hannibal gives us a number of dream sequences that we can at first assume are ‘reality,’ and as many nightmarish situations that turn out to be horribly ‘real’, so that we are constantly watching a state of altered consciousness, somewhere between the impression that dreams show the truth and the idea that the reality of the diegesis is nothing but a dream from which we cannot escape.” “La série Hannibal […] présente un nombre élevé de séquences de rêve que l’on peut d’abord prendre pour la ‘réalité’ et autant de situations cauchemardesques qui s’avèrent ensuite atrocement ‘réelles’—si bien que nous regardons toujours la série dans un entre-deux étrange, entre l’impression que les rêves montrent le vrai et l’idée que la réalité diégétique n’est qu’un immense songe dont nous restons prisonniers.” Sarah Hatchuel, “Hannibal ou le rêve comme marque de la narration en reboot,” Rêves et séries américaines: la fabrique d’autres mondes, Aix-en-Provence, Rouge Profond, 2016. Author’s translation. 44 “Les visions terrifiantes que subit Will Graham dans Hannibal se fondent, quant à elles, sur l’effacement et la reconstruction, révélant le geste de réécriture et la distance prise avec les œuvres préexistantes. […] En représentant des tueurs en série cinématographiques et en renouvelant et déstabilisant les mythes, la série onirique en reboot se ferait elle-même tueuse de cinéma.” Ibid., Author’s translation. 45 In this, they echo their forerunner Twin Peaks, which was largely characterized by (and found innovative because of) its dream sequences and complex chronology. Pacôme Thiellement suggests that this complex relationship to time is a direct result of Lynch’s experimentations on Twin Peaks: “Time that goes ‘all David Lynch’ [a reference to a comment in Buffy the Vampire Slayer] is time where reconstructing a chronology has become impossible, time having somehow lost its arrow. This broken time only appears in David Lynch’s œuvre at the end of Twin Peaks. […] It’s a time where there is no longer any difference between dreaming and waking.” “Le temps devenu tout “David Lynch” est ce temps où la reconstitution d’une chronologie quelconque est devenue impossible, le temps s’étant en quelque sorte perdu hors de sa flèche. Ce temps brisé n’apparaît dans l’œuvre de David Lynch qu’à partir de la fin de Twin Peaks. […] C’est un temps où il n’y a plus de différence entre rêve et veille.” Pacôme Thiellement, “Et le temps devint tout ‘David Lynch’: David Lynch après Twin Peaks,” Pop Yoga, Paris: Sonatine Éditions, 2013, location 6911–6922, Kindle edition. Author’s translation. 46 As per Thomas Leitch’s comments on the remake, references will often be made to Harris’s texts rather than solely to the film iterations of the Hannibal Lecter saga, because the series owns rights to all books (other than The Silence of the Lambs, owned by MGM) but none of the films, and Bryan Fuller is quick to credit the novels rather than the films as his inspiration. Likewise, the opening credits of Bates Motel cites Robert Bloch’s novel as the basis of their characters, before going on to mention Hitchcock’s film adaptation, again justifying the emphasis on the adaptation from the literary text as well as the remake from their respective films. Thomas Leitch, ‘Twice-Told Tales: The Rhetoric of the Remake’, Film/Literature Quarterly 18, no. 3 (1990): 138–149; Alan Sepinwall, “‘Hannibal’ producer Bryan Fuller on cannibal cuisine, renewal and more: How did the ‘Pushing Daisies’ creator avoid cloning previous Hannibal Lecter adaptations?,” Hit Fix, June 19, 2013, http:// www.hitfix.com/whats-alan-watching/hannibal-producer-bryan-fulleron-cannibal-cuisine-renewal-and-more. Accessed July 2013. 47 Brett Ratner’s more recent adaptation (Red Dragon, 2002) changes this somewhat, suggesting that Graham sought out Lecter for help catching the

Origin and Intention

48 49

50 51

52

53 54 55

149

Ripper, though the relationship between the two characters is briefly represented in the film and has none of the intensity of the show’s depiction. The latter is characterized by “surprise and delight in the resemblance between two disparate cultures, a perspective that illuminates them both.” Thomas Leitch, Adaptation and its Discontents, op. cit., 104. “Few horror films have completely unsympathetic Monsters […]; in many (notably, the Frankenstein films), the Monster is clearly the emotional centre, and much more human than the cardboard representatives of normality.” Wood’s hypothesis is ultimately that the viewer identifies with the monster and his rebellion against society’s norms, a premise that seems to have been borne out on an even larger scale than he intended given the extreme popularity of the antihero in contemporary television in particular. Increasingly, modern horror has built Wood’s theories into its own screen fictions. Robin Wood, “An Introduction to the American Horror Film,” in Bill Nichols, ed., Movies and Methods: Volume 2, Berkley: University of California Press, 1985, 205. Interestingly, Seasons 2 and 3 of the series make it clear that “Mother” is ultimately not Norma Bates at all, but a personality Norman adopts, who wears the guise of the boy’s mother, but reflects his own neuroses. Saint-Gelais’s comments point to the importance of paratext (and particularly, authorial paratext) as crucial to evaluating transfictions: “A transfiction acts on the previous narrative (or more precisely, on its diegesis); it effects the fictional framework by crossing the intangible in-between space separating the texts; it raises problems of legitimacy that readers cannot resolve with only the contents of the texts themselves, but by keeping in mind the identity and the authority of their respective authors.” “Une transfiction agit sur un récit antérieur (ou plus exactement sur sa diégèse); elle affecte le cadre fictionnel en traversant l’impalpable espace intercalaire qui sépare les textes; elle soulève des problèmes de légitimité que les lecteurs ne peuvent arbitrer en fonction du seul contenu des textes, mais en tenant compte aussi de l’identité et de l’autorité respectives de leurs auteurs.” Richard Saint-Gelais, Fictions transfuges, op. cit., 16–17. Author’s translation. In this sense, both shows appear to be following in the footsteps of the recent spate of remakes of classic 1970s horror films. In his work on the topic, David Roche makes clear how much the remakes change the original storylines (and political content) in order to maintain viewer suspense. At the same time, Sarah Kozloff reminds us that this may be an even more crucial problem for television, as scholars have long held that television, given its repetitive, formulaic nature, has been considered lacking in suspense, something that writers have compensated for by proliferating storylines. Here, interestingly enough, it is the adaptation itself that is a significant source of suspense. David Roche, Making and Remaking Horror in the 1970s and 2000s: Why Don’t They Do It Like They Used To?, Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2014, 13–14; Sarah Kozloff, “Narrative Theory and Television,” in Robert C. Allen, ed. Channels of Discourse, Reassembled: Television and Contemporary Criticism (1992), 2nd edition, Oxon: Routledge, 2003, 73–74. Matthew Bernstein, “High and Low,” op. cit., 173. From this perspective, we could associate these series with film and television adaptations of comics, which also often adapt only the diegetic world and characters rather than the storylines of the rhizome-like source texts. Gein apparently had an excessively close relationship with his mother, who taught him and his brother that women were necessarily tainted with sin.

150 Home Entertainment

56

57 58

59

60

61

He was found to have killed several women and robbed the graves of several others (middle-aged women resembling his mother) in order to preserve different parts of the corpses, notably attempting to cross-dress by making a ‘woman-suit’ out of his victims. Norman Bates was based on Ed Gein, as was Jame Gumb, the serial killer and former patient of Hannibal Lecter’s in The Silence of the Lambs. It is interesting to note that Bates Motel actually reinstated an element from Gein’s biography: the presence of Bates’ brother Dylan, who attempts to distance Norman from his unhealthily close relationship with their mother, who echoes the actions of Gein’s brother Henry. In his work on remakes, Constantine Verevis cannily elucidates the many ways these stories circulate, “as texts and as memories,” and suggests that the title credits can be a marker as to the importance of specific source texts for creators. Bates Motel, interestingly, hedges its bets by citing both novel and film, as was mentioned previously (‘Based on characters from the novel by Robert Bloch and as portrayed in the theatrical film Psycho’), while Hannibal comes down soundly on the side of the text (‘Based on characters from the book Red Dragon by Thomas Harris’)—but the lacunae in this attribution for a series so aware of its filmic predecessors, whose allusions to film versions of The Silence of the Lambs or even Hannibal Rising are legion, seems almost disingenuous. Constantine Verevis, op. cit., 53. This is perhaps the only time in the series that prefers this familiar moniker to the more formal (and more cinematically evocative) “Mother.” Indeed, while this sequence would seem to have given a justification and inspiration for Norman’s sexual perversion, positing Norma as a proto-Marion Crane, the “bad girl” of the original novel and film, the series seems to glory in its divergence from Hitchcock’s key scene, multiplying the moments of tension or suspense taking place in the bathroom, including a scene where Norman and his mother stock a corpse in one of the motel’s bathtubs, hidden only by a shower curtain, only to have an overly-curious sheriff insist on using the toilet in that room. Despite the viewer’s expectations, of course, the cadaver remains undiscovered (1.02). This is made clear in Bryan Fuller’s comments about the inspiration for the episode: “We knew we were going to be doing a Hannibal Lecter-like character to juxtapose who our Hannibal Lecter was in contrast to how we’ve seen him portrayed previously.” Todd VanDerWerff, “Bryan Fuller walks us through Hannibal’s debut season,” The AV Club, July 24, 2013, http:// www.avclub.com/article/bryan-fuller-walks-us-through-ihannibalis-debutse-100644. Accessed July 2013. The fact that Verevis’s second chapter is devoted to different remakes of Psycho, while David Bordwell’s Making Meaning illustrates versions of film criticism by writing ‘Seven Models of Psycho’ says much about the film’s importance to both popular culture and film studies. David Bordwell, “Rhetoric in Action: Seven Models of Psycho,” in David Bordwell, Making Meaning: Inference and Rhetoric in the Interpretation of Cinema, Boston, MA: Harvard UP, 2007, 224–248. Fuller sees this not just as paying tribute to Kubrick’s visual style, but also to his creation of non-realist storytelling: “What’s so remarkable about [the bathroom set in The Shining] is it’s a purely psychological space. You were inside this secret corner of Jack Torrance’s mind where the ghost of Overlook’s past has cornered him and is having a conversation about killing his family. It’s almost like a fantasy bathroom that actually doesn’t exist in reality because it’s anachronistic to the rest of the ballroom—it’s such

Origin and Intention

62

63

64 65 66

67 68

69

70

151

a stark juxtaposition to everything else that we’re seeing at the hotel. It’s like they dipped the entire set in blood. […] this was psychological storytelling. He wasn’t concerned what was real or what was not real. […] The camera is doing as much as the actors in order to convey emotion. […] The beauty and symmetry of the images always keep the audience in a point of view where you’re sitting up straight and looking directly down the barrel of the story. It’s very enveloping. When I see a Kubrick film I feel I am cocooned in his story.” James Hibberd, “NBC’s ‘Hannibal’ contains ‘The Shining’ shout-outs,” Entertainment Weekly, April 4, 2013, http://insidetv. ew.com/2013/04/04/hannibal-bryan-fuller-the-shining. Accessed July 2013. This attribution of credit to a Lynchian perspective on the Hannibal Lecter saga is of course a reference to this first instance of “auteur TV” via Twin Peaks, and is all the more interesting given that Carlton Cuse, too, attributes the surreal feel of Bates Motel to the influence of Twin Peaks. Alan Sepinwall, “Comic-Con 2013: ‘Hannibal’ panel live-blog,” Hit Fix, July 18, 2013, http:// www.hitfix.com/whats-alan-watching/comic-con-2013-hannibal-panel-liveblog. Accessed July 2013; Tim Stack, “EP Carlton Cuse: ‘Bates Motel’ ‘is one part ‘Friday Night Lights,’ one part ‘Lost’ and one part ‘Twin Peaks’,” op. cit. This is of course also a reference to the credit sequences, with a “Bates Motel” sign that flickers on and off, suggesting that the original is coming back to life (to light?), but will also “go dark” so as to be interspersed with elements unique to the reboot. My thanks to Sarah Hatchuel for this suggestion. The Algoquian mythology associates the Wendigo with cannibalism, suggesting that those who indulge in the taboo activity are at risk of becoming a monster. This is ironic given the association with auteur theory since, as Jennifer Forrest and Leonard R. Koos rightly point out, the “politique des auteurs” ultimately sought to counter genre fare. Op. cit., 17. Andrew Horton and Stuart McDougal’s comments on the remake seem very pertinent here: “by announcing by title and/or narrative its indebtedness to a previous film, the remake invites the viewer to enjoy the differences that have been worked, consciously and sometimes unconsciously, between the texts.” Andrew Horton and Stuart Y. McDougal, eds., Play it Again, Sam: Retakes on Remakes, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998, 6. This is a problem encountered in recent remakes of classic 1970s horror films, and lamented by critics studying the relationship between the two. Cf. David Roche, op. cit. Indeed, the first and most impressive of these recreations, which opens the first episode, shows the police leaving the scene, as Will Graham basically ‘rewinds’ the crime scene to re-enact the crime: clearly, we’ve left police dramas behind. Bryan Fuller speaks openly of the efforts made to create “striking cinematic deaths,” insisting on its artistic bent. In an interview with Hitfix, he spoke of the artistry of violence, “We’re constantly looking for, ‘What is the poetry of the murder? What is the art of the murder?’” He used the term ‘death tableaux’ for the crimes. Jim Halterman, “Bryan Fuller Breaks Down Homoerotic Charge of Hannibal,” Backlot, April 22, 2014, http:// www.thebacklot.com/bryan-fuller-breaks-down-the-homoerotic-chargeof-hannibal/04/2014/2/. Accessed April 2014. Alan Sepinwall, “Hannibal’ producer Bryan Fuller on cannibal cuisine, renewal and more,” op. cit. Of course, the same has also been said of the parallel between the serial killer and the franchises he has spawned.

152 Home Entertainment 71 One could point to the comments made by appreciative fans in an interview where Fuller discusses his Busby Berkeley references. Todd VanDerWerff, “Hannibal’s Bryan Fuller on blending Busby Berkeley with murder,” The A.V. Club, March 8, 2014, http://www.avclub.com/article/hannibals-bryanfuller-blending-busby-berkeley-mur-201919. Accessed March 2014. 72 Thomas Harris, Red Dragon (1981). New York, NY: Dell, 2002, 454. 73 To that extent they could be seen as reflexive version of remakes, which “highlight […] more than any other type of film the double nature of the cinema […] manufactur[ing] commercial products, as well as creat[ing] moving works of art.” Jennifer Forrest and Leonard R. Koos, op. cit., 30. 74 Jason Mittell, Complex TV, op. cit., 2228 of 8751. 75 André Bazin suggests that such mythical figures no longer depend on a source text, which makes the fact that the two shows do depend so heavily on their iconography—all the while refusing to be enslaved by it—all the more apparent. “Alexandre Dumas or Victor Hugo only gave filmmakers characters or adventures which are largely independent of their literary nature. Javert or d’Artagnan are now part of an extra-literary mythology, they enjoy a sort of autonomous existence, and the original work is nothing more than an accidental manifestation of that existence.”Alexandre Dumas ou Victor Hugo ne fournissaient guère au cinéaste que des personnages et des aventures dont l’expression littéraire est dans une large mesure indépendante. Javert ou d’Artagnan font désormais partie d’une mythologie extra-romanesque, ils jouissent en quelque sorte d’une existence autonome dont l’œuvre originale n’est plus qu’une manifestation accidentelle.” “Pour un cinéma impur : Défense de l’adaptation,” in André Bazin, Qu’est-ce que le cinéma ?, Paris : Ed du Cerf, 2002, 81. Author’s translation. 76 See for example Todd VanDerWerff, “‘Cannibalism isn’t that big of a deal’: Bryan Fuller on Hannibal Lecter, the perfect devil,” Vox, June 4, 2015, http:// www.vox.com/2015/6/4/8729679/hannibal-season-3-interview-bryanfuller. Accessed June 2015. 77 The final episode names the Sorcerer Merlin, no doubt preparing the viewer for a foray into Arthurian legend, but the reference to the Sorcerer and his Apprentice (another character in the series) is particularly obvious; likewise, in “Operation Mongoose, Part 1” (4.21), the Author previous to the character depicted in the series is referred to as Walt. The date on the letter inviting this new Author to come for a new job is December 15, 1966, incidentally the day that Walt Disney actually died. 78 “Richard Castle,” Naked Heat, op. cit., 256. 79 Ibid., 345. 80 Leora Hadas, “Authorship and Authenticity in the Transmedia Brand,” op. cit. 81 Elizabeth Evans, Transmedia Television: Audiences, New Media, and Daily Life, 2011, 33. 82 In so doing, adaptation seems to confirm the words of André Bazin: “All things considered, it is possible to imagine that we are moving toward a reign of the adaptation in which the notion of the unity of the work of art, if not the very notion of the author himself, will be destroyed. […] The ‘work’ [source text] would then be only an ideal point at the top of this figure, which itself is an ideal construct. The chronological precedence of one part over another would not be an aesthetic criterion any more than the chronological precedence of one twin over the other is a genealogical one.” “Le cinéma comme digeste,” La Revue des lettres modernes. N° 36–38, Summer 1958 (Cinéma et roman). 207. Quoted in James Naremore, ed., Film Adaptation, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 2000, 26.

Part III

Broadcasting …

This page intentionally left blank

6

Here and There and Back Again TV’s Influence on Popular Fiction

All too often adaptation theory has been taken to task for privileging the source text and using the adaptation as a simple illustration or point of comparison with the source rather than a work of equal value and importance. In an attempt to avoid that charge, to be as complete as possible in this preliminary study of the impact of adaptations in television, and to conclude this study with a sort of grace note, related to (but not necessarily building on) what has come before, this final chapter will focus on how television becomes a source text in its own right, impacting contemporary fiction, “broadcasting” its influence to other media. In so doing, I hope to make clear that the relationship between television and literature (both in the sense of canonical texts, but also in the sense of pre-existing narratives) is not one-sided; though literature may have brought much to television, the eighth art has much to offer literature as well. Though this study could be done on television’s impact on other forms of fiction narrative, like the serialization Joseph Oldham sees in the constantly expanding Marvel Comic Universe films,1 in keeping with (and as a subversion of) the tendency to view adaptation primarily as a transfer from text to screen, here I will be examining television’s impact on written fictions. After all, novelists are increasingly writing for television, with best-selling authors like George R.R. Martin (Beauty and the Beast, CBS, 1987–1990; The Twilight Zone, CBS, 1985–1989; Game of Thrones), George Pelecanos (The Wire, HBO, 2002–2008; The Pacific, HBO, 2010; Treme, HBO, 2010–2013), Neil Gaiman (Neverwhere, BBC, 1996; Doctor Who, BBC, 1963–1989, 2005–), or Suzanne Collins (Little Bear, CBC, 1995–2003; Clifford’s Puppy Days, PBS, 2003–2004, among other children’s shows) moving to the small screen (and then back again), while established novelists like Nic Pizzolatto (True Detective, HBO, 2014–), Tom Perotta (The Leftovers, HBO, 2014–), David Benioff and D.B. Weiss (Game of Thrones) have spun their literary success into employment as the showrunners for some of the most critically acclaimed television series in recent years. 2 David Foster Wallace famously worried about the impact of television on a new generation of writers who grew up with television:3 if literary

156 Broadcasting … texts, traditions, and structures have inspired TV, as has become manifest in the preceding chapters, why not the other way round? To a large extent, popular consensus has often been that television and literature are antithetical; Wallace was not alone in fearing that visual media were going to usurp literature’s place, essentially turning viewers into passive consumers unable to interact with more challenging art forms,4 or that the rampant commercialism of television would hinder the success of avant-garde fiction: The generation I think of myself as part of was raised on television, which means that, at least I was raised to view television as more or less my main artistic snorkel to the universe, and I think television, which is a commercial art, that’s a lot of fun, that requires very little of the recipient of the art, I think effects […] what people are looking for in various kinds of art, and I think, can make the sort of fiction [… that] is harder than average to read, weird, [less appealing. …] commercial art, its efficiency, its sheer ability to deliver pleasure in large doses, changes people’s relationship to art and entertainment, changes what the audience is looking for. 5 This is but a single example of a consensus that television is siphoning off potential readers—those who once would have read for enjoyment now watch television, and children are watching more television rather than learning the pleasures of reading. It must be said that a similar argument has been made about film, notably by Christian Metz, who sees film as the successor of the 19th century novel,6 and more specifically, about film adaptations; Linda Hutcheon reminds us of George Bluestone’s suggestion that filmed adaptations became popular once the novel began favoring aesthetic innovation rather than plot, noting wryly that “[t]his theory makes film adaptations into the revenge of story, abandoned as the novel got all caught up with language.”7 The ubiquity of television, however, has proved greater grounds for alarm, and these accusations have become all the more pointed as television has cut its cords and is always more or less at our fingertips. Ironically, Wallace’s comment was not only made on television, on a show featuring Wallace and two other fellow avant-garde writers, Mark Leyner and Jonathan Franzen, to promote their respective books, but it was essentially broadcast just a few months before what is arguably television’s most visible contribution to the reading of contemporary and canonical literature, the Book Club sponsored by the Oprah Winfrey Show (ABC/Syndicated, 1986–2011), which began on September 16, 1996. Though many of these books were popular fiction, others, like those written by Toni Morrison, Maya Angelou, Joyce Carol Oates, Cormac McCarthy, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, or even Jonathan Franzen himself, have won considerable critical acclaim, and they joined more canonical literary choices like Carson McCullers, Pearl Buck, John Steinbeck, Charles Dickens, Leo Tolstoy or

Here and There and Back Again

157

William Faulkner. Oprah’s decision to create a “book club” and to make it a recurring feature on her daily talk show was a cultural phenomenon: not only did the books chosen by the television maven become immediate bestsellers,8 but her initiative spawned individual book clubs throughout North America, individuals who would meet regularly to discuss books they read. Rather than limiting the number of readers who preferred to tune into the television, Winfrey greatly increased their numbers. Though Oprah Winfrey is perhaps the best-known example of this phenomenon, the television book club has functioned on various levels in different television series like The Gilmore Girls (The WB, 2000–2006, The CW, 2006–2007) or Lost, where fans have taken careful note of the books being read by the different characters in the series and have taken it upon themselves to do the same, often meeting online in a virtual book club to discuss the texts (and their possible meaning for the plot of the series in which they appeared).9 Though this may be a more passive promotion of reading, serving to characterize their show’s bibliovores Rory Gilmore or Sawyer (James Ford) as much as they are actually promoting the books that appear on screen, nonetheless both the shows’ repeated insistence on literature as both prop and plot point and the fan reaction to this literary presence shows that television may bring the viewer back to literature, rather than taking him or her from it. Of course television has also inspired more explicitly literary efforts— the very title of Don DeLillo’s White Noise10 suggests the importance of the audiovisual medium (he apparently originally wanted to entitle it Panasonic, but couldn’t obtain permission), just as David Foster Wallace’s magnum opus Infinite Jest features addictions to M*A*S*H, while Jonathan Franzen’s short story “Two’s Company”11 features a couple who write for television until the husband can no longer put up with his wife’s “fraudulent, wishful middle-aged woman’s fantasy”12 (his characterization of the wife’s latest project), and returns to more artistic (though less successful) fiction. Though these more critically acclaimed literary works acknowledge television as part of the contemporary landscape, all too often these works use the medium as a focal point for describing the decline of civilization, emphasizing as does Wallace their inherently commercial nature, and focusing on advertisements rather than narratives, which remain much more bound to the traditions of realism than does the contemporary American literary novel, something John Barth famously explored in his essays “The Literature of Exhaustion” and “The Literature of Replenishment.”13 DeLillo’s description of the television (through the mouthpiece of an academic who is obsessed with popular culture, and wants to create a field of Elvis Presley studies) makes the point very clear: I’ve come to understand that the medium [television] is a primal force in the American home. Sealed off, self-contained, self-referring […] Look at the wealth of data concealed in the grid,

158 Broadcasting … in the bright packaging, the jingles, the slice-of-life commercials, the products hurtling out of darkness, the coded messages and endless repetitions, like chants, like mantras. ‘Coke is it, Coke is it.’14 DeLillo’s is a comic novel, mocking the pretension of an academic who could find meaning (much less mysticism) in the mindless advertising typical of the medium. Here, television is depicted as a perfect example of Guy Debord’s “Society of the Spectacle,” where spectacle has supplanted human interaction.15 These novels seem to lament the popularity of television not only as the end of civilization as we know it but more specifically as the end of literature, whose lofty aims are to be sacrificed on the altar of the visual and the material. This is ironic, of course, because as Kathleen Fitzpatrick argues, the novel originally came under similar criticisms: However odd it may sound in the era of MTV and first-person shooter games, the novel was once blamed for many of the ills of youth culture that have since been charged against jazz, moving pictures, rock and roll, television, video games, and the Internet. The argument that the novel corrupted the morals of women and adolescents revealed its ideological basis most clearly in the political turn such accusations took in the early United States. The novel was accused of being antirepublican, of producing solipsistic, individualistic (in the original negative, Tocquevillian sense) readers who shirked the masculine world of action and commerce for the feminine realm of domesticity and illusion. This is the crux of the matter: concerns about the genre’s insalubriousness mask far deeper, nearly unspeakable ideological terrors that revolve around its apparent powers of feminization.16 Fitzpatrick uses the framework of Harold Bloom’s Anxiety of Influence17 to suggest that unlike each generation of artists seeking to rebel against the previous one in order to leave their mark in literature (Bloom’s thesis), contemporary American authors, the representatives of the older art form, seek to rebel against new media in order to shore up their status as producers of high art.18 In so doing, as she makes clear here, they are simply reiterating the arguments originally proffered to the detriment of their chosen art form. These more literary examples, as we have seen, essentially allude to television rather than examining the possible influence of its narrative forms, while television novelizations, though increasingly popular, on the whole, differ little from film novelizations, limiting the impact of the televisual form, while maintaining the series’ plot points. Here, then, we will examine examples that celebrate television’s contributions to storytelling, seeing the relationship between television (and specifically

Here and There and Back Again

159

television adaptation) and literature as a source for renewed narrative rather than a combative relationship that spells the demise of the written text of high culture, or indeed of culture altogether. I have chosen to focus on novels that are resolutely popular, but which reveal “high-culture” underpinnings, thus exemplifying the blurring of high and low art that has come to be seen as characteristic of postmodernism19 (both as it has been admired by some and disdained by others). I have chosen, therefore, to speak of “chick lit” (particularly as spawned by Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones’s Diary)20 and Jasper Fforde’s Thursday Next series, focusing in particular on the fifth volume in the series, First Among Sequels. 21 In keeping with the idea of this chapter as a “grace note” to those that preceded it, these are British novels, largely inspired by British television adaptations, which contrasts somewhat with previous chapters, which have tended to focus on American media. However, the transnational barriers so obviously present in television 22 are largely absent in written literature, where, with some notable exceptions, the United States has published literature of the United Kingdom more or less simultaneously with British publishers for at least the past 150 years, as the publishing schedule of William Thackeray or Charles Dickens’s serials aptly demonstrates. 23 Though some British authors might be less well-known on American shores, both Fforde and Fielding have met with considerable success, 24 and are arguably as familiar to the American reading public as they are to the British. Similarly, the television series that inspire them will also be largely familiar to the American reader. Primarily, they are particularly interesting examples of fiction writers who were inspired both by subject matter and by storytelling techniques to be found on television and in television adaptations. In studying these two authors, I am essentially studying an entire series of novels; Fforde is extremely prolific, with seven Thursday Next novels, and two novels in the Nursery Crime series, all of which take place in the same universe. 25 Helen Fielding made her initial novel into a series of books as well, with the third installment appearing in 2013, but above all, her novel became the emblematic of a new genre of “women’s” literature, inspiring what essentially became the most profitable and powerful new genre of fiction in the 1990s and 2000s. 26 “Chick lit” is a term that was originally coined ironically, a feminist literature that did not need to follow patriarchal rules. 27 Since then, chick lit has become a major industry, consisting of comic novels focusing on contemporary life and romance, largely marketed as a genre not just due to their subject matter, but through visual cues, thanks to the overwhelming very pointedly gender-skewed pink covers. 28 However, the term only really came to public attention (and spawned an entire genre) upon the publication of Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones’s Diary, a novel written in epistolary form featuring London singleton Bridget Jones and her struggles with work, family expectations, weight and men (not necessarily in that order). It is

160

Broadcasting …

a comic novel, meant to be a caricature of the modern woman; it is also an adaptation of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. Fielding acknowledges her debt openly: The plot of Bridget Jones’s Diary was actually stolen from Pride and Prejudice. I thought that Jane Austen’s plots were very good and had been very well market-researched over a number of centuries, so I thought I would actually steal it. I thought she wouldn’t mind, and anyway, she’s dead. 29 Bridget ends up attracting the dashing but seemingly haughty Mark Darcy, who is, as you will have guessed, the contemporary version of Mr. Darcy in Austen’s text; reread through the light of Austen’s narrative, Bridget’s flighty mother becomes a version of both Mrs. Bennett and Lydia (she attempts to matchmake, but also runs off with a most unsuitable conman by the name of Julio), while Wickham, the villain of the novel, is doubled as both Julio and Bridget’s boss, Daniel Cleaver—he cheats on Bridget, thus recalling Wickham’s abandonment of Elizabeth Bennett when the richer prize of Miss King comes along, and sleeps with Darcy’s wife, echoing Wickham’s attempt to elope with Mr. Darcy’s younger sister. These equivalences, of course, tell us much about what was once and is no longer provocative, for example. Fielding’s follow-up novel, Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason, also adapted an Austen text—when Bridget becomes convinced that Darcy is interested in someone else and breaks things off, she becomes the latter-day version of Anne Elliot, with Darcy taking over for Captain Wentworth. 30 Indeed, many of the most popular chick lit novels claim literary affinity with some of the great novels of the past few centuries; Stephanie Harzewski lists a few in her article “Tradition and Displacement in the New Novel of Manners”: Chris Dyer’s lesser-known Wanderlust (2003) advertises itself as an Austen-inspired novel of “Sex and Sensibility.” In interviews, Tama Janowitz has stated she intended A Certain Age (1999) as a modern version of The House of Mirth; Candace Bushnell’s Trading Up (2003) contains direct allusions to Wharton’s novel as well as strong thematic parallels with The Custom of the Country, as Bushnell has acknowledged Wharton as a principal literary influence.31 Given that these novels often could be seen as comic styling of contemporary romances, of course, this overt affiliation with great authors of the past seems a way to give increased gravitas to the genre; however, it is also a way to insist on a reevaluation of the older novels, which might now have been assimilated into the canon, but which were once

Here and There and Back Again

161

considered superficial “women’s fictions” themselves. Thus Lauren Baratz-Logsted quotes Charlotte Brontë dismissing Austen’s work in a letter: Why do you like Miss Austen so very much? I am puzzled on that point. What induced you to say you would rather have written Pride and Prejudice or Tom Jones than any of the Waverley novels? I had not seen Pride and Prejudice till I read that sentence of yours, and then I got the book. And what did I find? An accurate daguerreotyped portrait of a commonplace face; a carefully fenced, highly cultivated garden, with neat borders and delicate flowers; but no glance of a bright vivid physiognomy, no open country, no fresh air, no blue hill, no bonny beck. I would hardly like to live with her ladies and gentlemen, in their elegant but confined houses. These observations will probably irritate you. But I shall run the risk. […] Miss Austen is only shrewd and observant.32 Brontë sees Austen’s novel as “pretty” (with its gardens and flowers) and “confined,” both elements that she will reject soundly in her novel Jane Eyre, 33 while Imelda Whelehan reminds us that Pride and Prejudice “has long been seen as the ur-text for Mills & Boon commercial fiction.”34 Though few would question the relative merits of Austen’s classic romance and the average bodice-ripper, we could see this insistence on the influence of literary forerunners as a veiled means of insisting on the chick lit genre being reevaluated for literary merit as well. Just as chick lit seems very openly couched in the literary, Jasper Fforde’s Thursday Next series also seems to embrace classic literature, albeit in a very different way. In the first book of the series, The Eyre Affair, 35 Fforde describes an alternate world where literature is sacred, where children exchange playing cards of 18th-century authors instead of baseball players, and people participate in performances of Shakespeare’s Richard the Third as they do to The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975):36 “Welcome, all you Will-loving R3 fans, to the Ritz at Swindon, where tonight (drum roll), for your DELECTATION, for your GRATIFICATION, for your EDIFICATION, for your JOLLIFICATION, for your SHAKESPEARIFICATION, we will perform Will’s Richard III, for the audience, to the audience, BY THE AUDIENCE!” The crowd cheered […] There was a moment’s pause and then the curtains re-opened, revealing Richard at the side of the stage. He limped up and down the boards, eyeing the audience malevolently past a particularly ugly nose. “Ham!” yelled someone at the back.

162

Broadcasting … Richard opened his mouth to speak and the whole audience erupted in unison: “When is the winter of our discontent?” “Now,” replied Richard with a cruel smile, “is the winter of our discontent…” A cheer went up to the chandeliers high in the ceiling. The play had begun.37

The titular heroine, Thursday Next, is a literary detective, tasked with investigating all literary crimes in this text-loving world. When all copies of Jane Eyre suddenly go blank halfway through the book—Jane has been kidnapped, and since it’s a first-person narrative, the story has stopped— Thursday finds a way to enter the fictional world of the novel and stop the criminal Acheron Hades from holding Eyre for ransom—and inadvertently changes the ending to one where Jane returns to a chastened Rochester, the one familiar to Brontë readers (whereas in Thursday’s world, Jane originally left with Saint John for India). Here again, the link with literature seems obvious, and the plot nearly unfilmable, proudly demonstrating its literary antecedents (though Lawrence Sterne is perhaps closer to Fforde’s absurdist humor than is Brontë). 38 However, on closer inspection, these novels that at first glance seem so clearly enamored with texts (and specifically with classic literature), ultimately show a close affinity with television and its adaptations. Helen Fielding’s writing of Bridget Jones’s Diary (originally as an anonymous newspaper column in The Independent) corresponded with the airing of the 1995 BBC miniseries Pride and Prejudice, whose popularity made Colin Firth a star, gave screenwriter Andrew Davies a niche, and launched Austenmania for the next decade in earnest (something that continues to a lesser extent to this day, as can be seen in recent titles like Austenland39 and Pride and Prejudice and Zombies 40 and their film adaptations). Indeed, character Bridget is also an avid spectator, speaking of her “simple human need for Darcy to get off with Elizabeth.”41 Helen Fielding admitted that her Darcy was inspired by Firth’s portrayal, leading to a “real” interview with the actor appearing in the sequel novel, Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason, and to the actor playing the part of Mark Darcy in the 2001 film adaptation. The obsession with television adaptation, we shall see, is, in fact, a recurrent image in chick lit, where affinities with Austen’s novel are soon revealed to be remembrances of Colin Firth, as we can see in these passages from chick lit novels Amber Scott is Starting Over and Austenland: I may spend far too much time dreaming about Mr. Darcy (the Colin Firth version, of course), but I bet once Lizzy Bennet moved into Pemberley she pretty soon got fed up with having to pick up his socks or being told that she didn’t pack the shopping away properly and bruised all the fruit. Romance only goes so far, before reality kicks in.42

Here and There and Back Again

163

Sure, Jane had first read Pride and Prejudice when she was sixteen, read it a dozen times since, and read the other Austen novels at least twice, except Northanger Abbey (of course). But it wasn’t until the BBC put a face on the story that those gentlemen in tight breeches had stepped out of her reader’s imagination and into her nonfiction hopes. Stripped of Austen’s funny, insightful, biting narrator, the movie became a pure romance. And Pride and Prejudice was the most stunning, bite-your-hand romance ever, the kind that stared straight into Jane’s soul and made her shudder.43 It is worth noting that both of these quotes come from the beginning of their respective narratives, and both make it clear that the fascination that Austen exerts over the narrator comes by way of the 1995 BBC adaptation. Indeed, the first of these, from Amber Scott is Starting Over, takes this as a given, and Mr. Darcy becomes not a singular character, but a protean figure that changes with each actor taking on the role: “(the Colin Firth version, of course).” Both suggest that the television adaptation is bringing fantasies to life, as Amber “dreams” and Jane “imagines,” though both are convinced that this is ultimately contrary to “reality kicking in” (even Jane has “nonfiction hopes,” where the presence of “fiction” and “hope” appears to limit the realism of that possibility significantly).44 And though Amber Scott may mention “Lizzy Bennett,” making clear the narrator’s familiarity with the iconic character, it is ultimately contemplation of the male characters that dominate. In fact, as Imelda Whelehan reminds us, this adaptation was seen to update the novel in significant ways—most notably the way the male body was framed and represented. The adaptation included scenes of Darcy in the bath, and, with wet shirt and breeches clinging to his drenched body, having swum in the lake at Pemberley.45 Whelehan gives this concise summary of the BBC adaptation in a study devoted to Bridget Jones’s Diary, of course, because Bridget, too, expresses a fascination with Colin Firth. These two aspects seem to coalesce in the Austenland quote, where the fantasy nature of the adaptation and the “tight breeches” cause the character to bite her hand and shudder (a none-too-subtle hint at the sexual nature of what is here termed “romance”). However, the passage also focuses on the unique televisual nature of the storytelling, and how this makes the “romance” more potent: if the television adaptation is the true inspiration for much of chick lit’s affinity with the classic romance, then it is because that adaptation has done away with the ironic narrator that is so characteristic of Austen, in favor of “putting a face on the story” and allowing for “pure romance.” The romance mentioned here, of course, is not just the plot, which is

164

Broadcasting …

more or less unchanged. Instead, it seems to be the “lake scene” in this adaptation that Whelehan described above that has inspired much of chick lit,46 an invention of screenwriter Andrew Davies’s that has become so iconic that it was voted “most memorable TV drama moment” in a 2013 British poll,47 inspiring a statue, which now resides in the lake where the miniseries was originally filmed.48 It is therefore by appealing to the female gaze as well as the female perspective,49 creating Darcy as an aesthetic object in addition to allowing us to experience Georgian England from a female point of view, as Austen does, and by doing away with the ironic voice of the narrator, which served to distance the reader from the “pure romance” in the interests of social critique, 50 that this specific adaptation proves so tantalizing to chick lit authors. As such, the recurrent presence of the first person narrator (in Bridget Jones, and in Amber Scott, as well as in the majority of chick lit novels) can be seen as an adaptation of the intimacy the viewer feels with “Lizzy,” able to fully identify with her now that the Austenian narrator has been silenced. 51 However, beyond the hypnotic presence of Mr. Darcy, there are other elements that point to an association with television adaptations rather than to the original novels to which chick lit authors lay claim. The fact that Bridget begins the 1996 novel working at a publishing company under Daniel Cleaver, the Wickham character, only to move on from Cleaver and publishing into television, where she excels, suggests the importance of the move from text to screen (and back again, given that this is described in a novel); this has since become one of the recurrent tropes of the genre, where the heroine necessarily works in some form of new media, allowing the author to reflect on the relationship between these new media and the older form of the novel. 52 Likewise, one of the principal (and much-derided) characteristics of chick lit is its materialism: the heroines of these novels focus on shopping, on their consumption of calories, alcohol, and cigarettes, to the extent that some argue that they, and not the romance, are the focus of the narrative: An offshoot of romantic comedy, chick lit virtually jettisons the figure of the heterosexual hero, with Manolo Blahniks upstaging men. The genre relegates the hero to a cipher as the protagonist’s suitor or fiancé becomes like the men in bridal magazines, that is, a shadow presence or pleasingly pat background figure.53 To the avid Austen reader, this, of course, seems odd—Austen’s novels are famously very parsimonious in their descriptions of things, or of physical traits of her characters. But the adaptation is clearly focusing on the details of elegant Georgian society, what Andrew Higson refers to as the “pictorialist museum aesthetic”54 typical of the period drama, something that becomes very obvious when looking at the opening credits of the miniseries, which show a female hand carefully stitching embroidery,

Here and There and Back Again  165

Figure 6.1  A fascination with objects, or Georgian materialism.

only for the image to then dissolve and for the camera to linger over delicate buttons on rich fabrics, and then finally displaying the title of the piece over artistically tousled silks, thus immediately calling the viewer’s attention to the adaptation as a traditionally feminine pursuit (as embroidery and fashion have traditionally been), and to the very romantic (and flattering) costumes that will soon appear onscreen. 55 Bridget Jones’s Diary makes a similar reference to the importance of things, the material nature of the setting and costumes, in making the relationship between Elizabeth and Darcy appealing, as their modern counterparts are decidedly uninspiring: I stumbled upon a photograph in The Standard of Darcy and ­Elizabeth, hideous, dressed as modern-day luvvies, draped all over each other in a meadow: she with blonde Sloane hair, and linen trouser suit, he in striped polo neck and leather jacket with ­Shoestring-style moustache. Apparently they are already sleeping together. That is absolutely disgusting. 56 Though the “romance” is more obvious in this modern photograph, complete with both the image of the two actors in an intimate position and the knowledge of their consummated relationship, the relationship is “disgusting” without the trappings of period drama. Indeed, Paul Kerr’s argument that certain traditions and production styles have led to a sameness in the television adaptation of the canonical text may also be relevant to chick lit. Kerr argues that aesthetic differences integral to the written text are ultimately smoothed over by television adaptation. Careful comparison between [classic novels] and their tele-versions reveals a tendency towards homogenization in television adaptation. The very profound formal differences that [exist] between novels become all but invisible on television.57

166 Broadcasting … As was discussed in Chapter 2, the short form adaptation has often been charged with aesthetic conservatism. This is something that Sarah Cardwell lays squarely at the feet of television production, and not the canonical texts themselves: The way adaptations look (their visual style, recurring motifs, generic traits and stylistic conventions—all those things that, in combination, set them apart from other programmes enough to constitute a set or genre), and indeed their use of a certain type of elegant, decorous or wistful orchestral music on their soundtracks, cannot be explained in literary terms. Such is the pervasiveness of these features that we accept this generic style with little awareness of its lack of literary origins—what feature can be found in virtually every nineteenth-century novel to explain, for example, the use of the long-take, extreme long-shots of grand buildings, or the preference for slow, smooth tracking shots over alternative shots which are more quickly and painlessly achieved? We must look elsewhere to explain the presence of this distinctive style to which these adaptations tend to adhere; the source novels do not help us. 58 By using a standardized style as well as recycling settings and costumes, 59 these adaptations have essentially created a genre, the period drama, and generic expectations in the viewer, who can expect lush scenery revealed in abundant establishing shots, the fetishizing of elegant dress, and of course, high drama. As such, it shares much with the “heritage film,” the film version of the period adaptation that became a cinematic phenomenon when Merchant Ivory’s films swept cinemas with its numerous adaptations of E.M. Forster60 and Henry James,61 and can be charged with similar criticisms: Andrew Higson, in particular, saw the genre as fundamentally conservative and nostalgic for a more elegant past where class distinctions were readily apparent, a symptom of Margaret Thatcher’s politics (and which profited from one of her policies, the establishment of the English Heritage Trust in 1983).62 Similarly, it has been argued that chick lit has equally conservative aims, being tasked with postfeminism in the protagonist’s relentless quest for a man, and that their content depends less on the individual fiction than on the tropes of the genre, where one pink cover is more or less the equivalent of another, something intimated by protagonist Amber Scott in Amber Scott is Starting Over: The air thrums with the drowsy buzzing of bees and the soft breeze carries with it the heady scents of summer flowers. […] I wander along the rows of plants, trailing my hands through the leaves and flowers to release the most delicious perfumes and raising my face to feel the kiss of the sun. Pulling off my scrunchie, I shake back

Here and There and Back Again

167

my curls from my face and slip my gypsy top from my shoulders. Assume romantic heroine position! All I need now is a trailing skirt, a wicker basket over my arm and Mr. Darcy—in a wet shirt obviously—and I’d be right there in pink-book land!63 Pink books are obvious examples of chick lit, which apparently form a coherent whole rather than standing out individually; these are ultimately indistinguishable from the famous television adaptation of Pride and Prejudice, and the importance of a wet Darcy. The chick lit book recognizes the recurrent imagery of the television adaptation and appropriates it as its own. Despite these obvious leanings toward fantasy apparent in the previous quote, the miniseries, like chick lit itself, is an attempt to inject realism into the central romance inspired by Austen. The adaptation does so by attempting to realistically depict the setting of the time, through Davies’s attempts to dramatize various activities of the period, from hunting for birds, or horse riding, to the workers outside the ball dancing drunkenly in the mud; chick lit discusses contemporary issues like balancing personal and professional life and the pettiest of details about everyday life (like the shopping being put away properly in order not to bruise all the fruit). Likewise, the efforts Davies made to sexualize romantic hero Mr. Darcy, a recurrent feature of Davies adaptations,64 can be seen as the counterpart to the relatively promiscuous nature of the chick lit novels, which diverge from their romance novel counterparts by actually including both a sexually experienced protagonist, and interest in more than one male character. Lost in Austen (ITV, 2008), a short form series that essentially parodies (and panders to) chick lit, highlights this fact; its protagonist Amanda Price’s addiction to Pride and Prejudice results in her switching places with Elizabeth Bennett. Ultimately (and inevitably) she and Mr. Darcy fall in love, but he is unable to accept her sexual experience (at least initially), thus once again suggesting that chick lit may owe more to television’s racier renditions than to the original texts. Beyond his literary inspirations, Jasper Fforde might initially be thought more influenced by film: he spent 15 years as a focus-puller for large film productions like Goldeneye (1995) or The Legend of Zorro (2005), and his character of Thursday Next, as a “literary detective,” obviously owes much to film noir, as she necessarily is injured in some way as she fights to solve the central crime of each novel. Fforde is outspoken about his debt to film grammar: Since I was raised on film then I do feel I have a very visual look to things. Some aspects of TEA [The Eyre Affair] are actually visual gags that really don’t belong in books but I thought: “Why the heck

168

Broadcasting … not?” and put them in anyway. A car chase? in a book? Next I’ll be having a sword fight.65

In the novel I’ll be discussing here, First Among Sequels, there is even a critique of television and its deleterious effect on reading rates, as the Powers That Be in BookWorld decide that in order to increase readership, they’ll turn classic novels into “reality book shows”: “… and the first classic to be turned into a reality book show?” “Pride and Prejudice,” announced Yogert proudly. “It will be renamed The Bennets and will be serialized live in your household copy the day after tomorrow. Set in starchy early nineteenth-century England, it features Mr. and Mrs. Bennet and their five daughters, who will be given tasks and then voted out of the house one by one with the winner going on to feature in Northanger Abbey, which itself will be the subject of more ‘readeractive’ changes.” […] “For too long we have suffered under the yoke of the Stalinist principle of one-author books […] and in the modern world we must strive to bring democracy to the writing process.”66 One might find this a criticism not only of reality shows but also of the very “sexing up” so attractive to chick lit authors, appealing to the libido rather than the intellect and so in its own way appealing to the masses. The intimacy that characterizes television fictions has bred contempt, as the story becomes extraneous to the same trappings so attractive to the readership/viewership. Here, serialization is seen not as a way to foment narrative coherence, as discussed in Chapter 2, but a means of transforming that initial coherence into an episodic narrative, where each episode consists of the characters attempts to complete a task unrelated to the previous one, and whose effects are cumulative (the gradual elimination of all but one of the participants) rather than linear. This is a depiction of television as the lowest common denominator, which has ultimately forgone complexity—or even plot—in its pursuit of spectacle. Indeed, one of the principal reasons that the Thursday Next novels can be associated with live-action adaptations could be attributed to either television or film. In this universe, the reader is taken “inside” the novel and gets a “behind the scenes” glimpse of fiction in the making. The book, we discover, is, in fact, a sort of film or TV set: One of the odd things about the BookWorld was that when characters weren’t being read they generally relaxed and talked, rehearsed, drank coffee, watched the cricket or played mah-jong. But as soon as a reading loomed they all leapt into place and did their thing.67

Here and There and Back Again

169

In the world of Thursday Next, literature is ultimately not read, but performed, and that performance is then transmitted to the mind of the reader, a course of events that sounds suspiciously similar to the broadcast of television fictions.68 When read, the characters must act out their designated roles, using a script they cannot change, and availing themselves of stunt doubles or understudies as the situation demands—this is not literature, but literary adaptation. The novel also describes this world of fiction as one that follows the principles of narrative economy, where things simply aren’t as detailed as in the real world because the average reader doesn’t require them; this cannot fail to make us think of filming techniques that use flimsy materials to create sturdy-looking décors or cheap equivalents of rich-looking fabrics, or quite simply the careful choice of what is and is not in the frame of the camera: There was a cot in one corner, a sideboard in another and the floor was covered with curly wood shavings, but no sawdust or dirt. The fictional world was like that; a sort of narrative shorthand that precluded any of the shabby grottiness and texture that gives the real world its richness.69 Though these elements are common to television and film, Fforde’s inspiration for his subject matter seems to lean toward the former. When discussing his influences, rather than cite any films, in particular, he instead mentions Monty Python’s Flying Circus (BBC, 1969–1974) specifically for its inspired depiction of classic literature that was both comic, popular, and respectful of the original text: Monty Python taught me that low brow can be mixed with high to a devastating effect (witness the performance of Wuthering Heights’ by Semaphore flags) or that you could be very erudite and well-read, but still have a silly sense of humour. And that’s the fun of it. I can use groaning puns, fart gags and textual slapstick right next to some obscure joke about Richard III.70 The sketch Fforde mentions was in the 1970 episode “The Spanish Inquisition” (2.02), where the viewer sees a stack of books as an announcer exaggeratedly American accent speaks in voice-over: And now for the very first time on the silver screen comes the film from two books which once shocked a generation. From Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights and from the International Guide to Semaphore Code. Twentieth Century Vole presents The Semaphore Version of Wuthering Heights. (Monty Python Flying Circus, 2.02)

170

Broadcasting …

We then see Catherine and Heathcliff, each in a dramatic, wind-blown close-up, before a cut to medium, then wide shots reveal that they are standing on separate mountain peaks, from which they then signal their eternal love (through flag-waving), while subtitles interpret their words with an ever-increasing number of exclamation points. The sketch goes on to show us Julius Caesar by Aldiss lamp and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953, itself an adaptation of Anita Loos’s 1925 novel) using smoke signals. Clearly, this is skewering the pitfalls of adaptation to new (or in this case, very old) media. Amy Martin locates the humor of the sketch in its contrast of the shocking with the banal, and ultimately in its parody of the tendency in adaptations to focus on the conventional love story rather than the more provocative aspects of Brontë’s prose: The banality suggested by a book about semaphore code adds humor to the contemporary interpretation of Wuthering Heights as a conventional love story. As the film interpretations have become more widespread and popular, the controversy that the novel originally experienced has disappeared; to some viewing this sketch, both books being described as shocking could seem funny. […] The writers behind this show find the comedy in twisting what has become the obvious example of the story: they assume their audience will know the original image they are mocking.71 Though this critique of television adaptations as being overly focused on the central romance is not an issue specifically raised by Fforde’s novels, it is in line with chick lit’s reading of television adaptations. More generally, however, what both Fforde, the adaptations, and chick lit all seem to agree on is the sense of proximity to the work. Whether the intimacy with the canonical text is motivated by desire or simple recognition, these adaptations bring the original closer, and the popular fiction it inspires attempts to make these allusions either part of our everyday experience, as we see in the emphasis on the minutiae of the everyday in chick lit, or as we see in both the Monty Python sketch and in Fforde’s texts, a comic treatment that forces us to recognize our jaded associations with these texts and to discover them anew. The absurdist humor that made Monty Python so memorable and its association with iconic literature seem clear forerunners to Fforde’s comic treatment of classic texts. Fforde’s other television influence is also an adaptation; he mentions David Nobb’s The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin (BBC, 1976–1979), which began as a series of novels the author then rewrote as a TV series in the 1970s. Reginald I. Perrin (R.I.P.) is having a bit of a midlife crisis, leading him to fake his death to escape his humdrum life.

Here and There and Back Again

171

In the novel, his slowly decaying control manifests itself in inappropriate language: “Are we going to see the hippopotamus on Sunday?” he said. “What do you mean?” said [his wife] Elizabeth. “I meant your mother. I thought I’d call her a hippopotamus for a change.” Elizabeth stared at him, her wide mouth open in astonishment. “That’s not a very nice thing to say,” she said. “It’s not very nice having a mother-in-law who looks like a hippopotamus,” he said.72 This dialogue is repeated almost word-for-word in the first episode of the show, but has been prefaced by Reginald thinking of his motherin-law—and suddenly having the screen cut to stock footage of a hippopotamus, its jaws gaping impressively as it wallows in the mud. The juxtaposition of the banal (the mother-in-law) and the grotesquely exotic (the hippopotamus) is verbal, thematic, and visual, echoing Fforde’s own tendency to juxtapose the very familiar (drinking coffee, playing mah-Jong, watching cricket) with the absurd exoticism of Jiminy Cricket studying in hopes of snagging the lead in Charlotte’s Web.73 Beyond its simple status as adaptation, The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin also makes significant use of canonical literature: Reginald lives on “the Poet’s Estate,” and as he walks to the train station, we are first given a close-up of street signs “Coleridge Close,” “Tennyson Avenue,” and “Wordsworth Drive” before the protagonist actually passes in front of them. The camera makes clear that the signs are the focus, as Reginald is only partially visible in each of the shots.

Figures 6.2 and 6.3 Foregrounding literature.

I’m convinced both the idea of parallel lives (that increasingly intertwine in a comic way) and the importance of the Romantic poets, who

172

Broadcasting …

led their own form of rebellion against conformity (only to become institutions themselves, as these street signs demonstrate), are evocative of Fforde’s work in his Thursday Next novels, where the titular heroine goes back and forth between “Outland” and “BookWorld,” and finds herself unable to give up the excitement that literature provides her, and whose prose may center on long-dead authors,74 but does so in order to create something entirely new—as The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin did in its time. In fact, in Fforde’s BookWorld, the story essence is suspiciously television-shaped: In the centre of the room was a circular waist-high bronze plinth about the size and shape of a ship’s capstan, upon which two electrodes sprouted upwards and then curved gently outwards until they were about 6 inches apart. At the end of each electrode was a carbon sphere no bigger than a ping-pong ball, and between the two of them a languid blue arc of electricity crackled quietly to itself.75 The structure described seems halfway between an electrode from science fiction films of the 1950s and the television with rabbit ears all too common until the late 1980s. Other aspects of the Thursday Next texts also seem to point to the influence of television narrative, notably the complex relationship between seriality and episodic storytelling: the fact that the fictional characters are constantly reenacting the same tale with each reading suggests the episodic nature of television sitcoms, for example, always reestablishing the status quo in time for the next episode; however, the novel also emphasizes the fact that our fictional character Thursday has allowed her adventures to be made into a series of five novels (just as in our reality, the book we are reading, First Among Sequels, is the fifth of the Thursday Next novels), and the ongoing events and relationships highlight the serial nature of the enterprise; in a stock television technique, the novel ends on a cliffhanger, where Thursday realizes that the mysterious figure who has been attacking characters in Book World (including herself) is not choosing the victims randomly— they are all the protagonists of a book series, making him (you guessed it) a serial killer.76 The mixture of episodic and serial storytelling is of course once again more characteristic of television than of film; when we take into account that his second series, Nursery Crime, features a character who plays a significant role in the Thursday Next novel The Well of Lost Plots, Jack Spratt, who then “spins off” into his own series of novels (The Big Over Easy 77 and The Fourth Bear),78 it becomes obvious that television techniques are being used to textual ends. Indeed, we can argue that the very structure of the storytelling is also evocative of television; Fforde favors the multiple plotlines and arcs that make a choral form like television so enticing, in contrast to the more single-minded focus of cinema:

Here and There and Back Again

173

The Hollywood narrative […] emphasizes closure. […] However, most of the television narrative fiction we see today does not use this classic Hollywood mode of narration […] We have come to expect that television narrative will give us multiple story threads, temporary or partial resolutions, or none at all.79 This use of multi-plot narratives is reminiscent of television more generally if we look at it from the perspective of what John Ellis calls the “segment” or the basic narrative building block in television,80 to be contrasted with Raymond William’s idea of “flow” as the more global picture of television moving from a program to a commercial to another program. In his emphasis on abrupt changes of locales, characters, and plotlines, in his change in media from text to illustration, and the fictional epigraphs that either contextualize or comment on plot events, in his use of serial techniques, including a “previously on” segment in his second Thursday Next novel, The Well of Lost Plots,81 Fforde seems to be inspired by the subject matter and storytelling devices of television, using them to create a narrative that is uniquely textual. Ultimately the content of both these series of novels may be inspired by television (be it Monty Python, sitcoms, or period dramas), but some of its underlying concerns may also have been instigated by the small screen. To come back to the iconic lake scene, Lost in Austen’s reenactment may be revelatory of what exactly television brings to these popular fictions. Amanda Price has won the love of Mr. Darcy, and he ardently professes his feelings to her as strings play in the background. She looks up at him poignantly and asks, “Will you do something for me?” The camera cuts to Darcy coming to the surface of a nearby fountain and standing, as Amanda gasps with pleasure, saying, “I am having a bit of a strange postmodern moment here.” (Lost in Austen, 1.03) The back and forth between humor and drama is characteristic of both Fforde, and the tropes of chick lit (though Fforde’s humor tends to depend less on the ogling of the male characters), but Amanda’s final comment seems to point to a larger issue. These novels, like the television series that inspire them, are ultimately negotiating the ins and outs of postmodernism. In so doing, of course, they serve as a counterpoint to David Foster Wallace’s argument that postmodernism is an avantgarde movement that positions itself in opposition to television. Wallace argues that television has become self-referential and can mock itself, but in so doing, poses a threat to “serious” literature. My two big premises are that, on the one hand, a certain sub-genre of pop-conscious postmodern fiction, written mostly by young Americans, has lately arisen and made a real attempt to transfigure a world of and for appearance, mass appeal, and television; and that, on the other hand, televisual culture has somehow evolved to a

174

Broadcasting … point where it seems invulnerable to any such transfiguring assault. TV, in other words, has become able to capture and neutralize any attempt to change or even protest the attitudes of passive unease and cynicism TV requires of Audience in order to be commercially and psychologically viable at doses of several hours a day.82

Wallace posits that literature, and not television, should be the locus for critique of commercial culture, and that television, though enjoyable, remains relegated to this commercialism, to the lowest common denominator mentioned earlier. In this he seems to echo Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno’s 1944 analysis of popular culture in “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception,”83 which suggests that mass media is used to subdue the general populace into passivity, while high art is meant to provoke, a stance taken in relation to modernist, rather than postmodern literature. Postmodernism is perhaps most like modernism in its variety of definitions, some of which seem contradictory. Though Wallace may advocate references to “low culture” in high art, his insistence on their fundamental differences contrasts with much of postmodern theory, which sees this blurring of boundaries as a fait accompli, which is either to be lamented (as in the case of Marxist critic Fredric Jameson)84 or celebrated as a more inclusive vision of culture (as Angela McRobbie does).85 Though Fforde and Fielding (and her fellow chick lit writers) acknowledge this aspect of television, the postmodern elements that they find in small-screen adaptations nonetheless inform their fictions profoundly, notably through their deconstruction of the hierarchy of culture, and their savvy use of hybrid genres. In Bridget Jones’s Diary, there is a long discussion of television adaptations that essentially makes a plea for postmodern recreation (and is coincidentally the first time we see Darcy sticking up for Bridget and sharing her opinions): “We were just talking about hierarchies of culture,” boomed Perpetua. “Bridget is one of these people who thinks the moment when the screen goes back on Blind Date is on a par with Othello’s ‘hurl my soul from heaven’ soliloquy,” she said, hooting with laughter. “Ah. Then Bridget is clearly a top post-modernist,” said Mark Darcy. “This is Natasha,” he said, gesturing towards a tall, thin, glamorous girl beside him. […] “I must say,” said Natasha, with a knowing smile, “I always feel with the Classics people should be made to prove they’ve read the book before they’re allowed to watch the television version.” “Oh, I quite agree,” said Perpetua, emitting further gales of laughter. “What a marvelous idea!” […] “Though in many respects, of course,” said Mark’s Natasha, suddenly earnest, as if concerned the conversation was going quite the wrong way, ‘the democratization of our culture is a good thing –” […] “What I

Here and There and Back Again

175

resent, though”—Natasha was looking all sort of twitchy and distorted as if she were in an Oxbridge debating society—“is this, this sort of, arrogant individualism which imagines each new generation can somehow create the world afresh.” “But that’s exactly what they do, do,” said Mark Darcy gently. “Oh well, I mean if you’re going to look at it at that level …” said Natasha defensively. “What level?” said Mark Darcy. “It’s not a level, it’s a perfectly good point.”86 This is, of course, the equivalent of the long debate about accomplished women in Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, where Miss Bingley extolls the necessary virtues of a proper woman, and Elizabeth vehemently disagrees; Fielding has replaced Austen’s critique of what constitutes feminine accomplishment with an appeal for a larger conception of culture, a postmodern vision where each generation can remake some of these universal truths for themselves. The fact that the television adaptations of classics become an allegory for the novel in which it is discussed strengthens my contention that the one inspired the other, but also suggests that they both participate in undermining the hierarchy of culture that Perpetua mentions. Chick lit thus becomes a postmodern negotiation of what is supposedly a profoundly conservative genre, the period drama, investigating how it differs from its source and how its contemporary audience receives these nostalgic narratives in a postmodern world. Rather than leading people away from the originals, television adaptations (and in turn, we can assume chick lit novels) essentially serve as gateways to their literary predecessors. Thus, when Bridget moves to the television station, she becomes a valuable resource because of her knowledge of texts: “Why don’t you interview Joanna Trollope?” I said. “A trollop?” he said, staring at me blankly. “What trollop?” “Joanna Trollope. The woman who wrote the Rector’s Wife that was on the telly. The Rector’s Wife.” […] A leery smile spread across his face. “Brilliant,” he said to my breasts. “Absolutely fucking brilliant. Anyone got a number for Joanna Trollope?” There was a long pause. “Er, actually I have,” I said eventually, feeling walls of hate vibes come from the grunge youths.87 Television adaptations lead back to the author, hopefully not just to Joanna Trollope, but also to Gustave Flaubert, whose Madame Bovary serves as a template for Anna Bouverie, the titular Rector’s wife; rather than usurping their place, they are increasing the awareness of the original, upending the hierarchical part of this culture.

176

Broadcasting …

Jasper Fforde makes similar claims in his novels. In the Book World he’s created, the greatest fear of the fictional characters is to be reduced to text, no more than a simple assemblage of words, instead of taking life in a story, whatever its form. In the very lowest level was the Text Sea, and it was on the shores of this ocean that scrapped books were pulled apart by work gangs using nothing more refined than hammers, chains and muscle. The chunks of battered narrative were then dismantled by cutters, who would remove and package any salvageable items to be resold. Any idea, setting or character that was too damaged or too dull to be reused was unceremoniously dumped in the Text Sea, where the bonds within the sentence were loosened until they were nothing more than words, and then these too were reduced to letters and punctuation, the meaning burning off into a bluish mist that lingered near the foreshore before evaporating.88 Ultimately, Fforde preaches not for the novel, nor even really for reading, but instead for story, whatever the medium, as Thursday argues (against the reality book show idea): The book may be the delivery medium but what we’re actually peddling here is story. Humans like stories. Humans need stories. Stories are good. Stories work. Story clarifies and captures the essence of the human spirit. Story, in all its forms—of life, of love, of knowledge—has marked the upward surge of mankind. And story, you mark my words, will be with the last human to draw breath, and we should be there, supporting that one last person.89 The critique of reality television, then, is not a critique of the delivery medium—the television—but ultimately of its lack of story. The fall in reader rates, we later learn, is due not to television, but to a problem in attention spans (in the absurdist world of Thursday Next, this is due to time travelers mining what is referred to as the Now): […] the easily digestible TV is not the cause—it’s the effect. The short Now will also spell the gradual collapse of forward planning, and mankind will slowly strangulate itself in a downward spiral of uncaring self-interest and short-term instant gratification. […] No wonder we were seeing Outlander read-rates go into free-fall. The short Now would hate books; too much thought required for not enough gratification.90 It is the sustained involvement with the story, with meaning, Fforde argues, that will allow us our critical distance. There are no metanarratives

Here and There and Back Again

177

in Fforde, except the need for fiction (just as Lyotard’s insistence on the lack of metanarratives is a metanarrative itself).91 Fforde seeks not to please a cultural elite with his comic novels on classic literature, but instead to insist that they are but one aspect of a greater culture of fictions: The classics are sometimes good and sometimes wonderful and sometimes rubbish—exactly the same as contemporary literature. What I’m making comment about is how the classics have been taken away from the general reading format and into the “study text” format where they are dissected word for word and analyzed, something you should never do with any book. […] I’m also wholly against books being placed on pedestals and made into “hallowed ground.” […] That’s why I do what I do—to try and puncture the cloud of pomposity that floats above the classics like a dark thundercloud […].92 Though, as an academic, I disagree about the deadening impact of literary analysis (as this very chapter demonstrates), Fforde’s attempts to bring these classics back into popular rather than elite culture is one that I share. In the same way that television adaptations attempt to bring these classics to life for a new generation, making them believable characters rather than iconic literary figures, so Fforde’s comedy tries to be true to the spirit of the written characters while upending this hierarchy of culture that would leave literature teetering on its pedestal well out of view. One of the means of accomplishing this, of course, is through his mixture of various genres within the novels themselves; Fforde’s books defy any attempts at categorization, including elements of science fiction, detective fiction, romance, or the thriller, to cite but a few, into each of his novels, and has his Book World characters comment about the permeability of genres: This was one of those boring-but-important items that while of little consequence to the book in question subtly changed the way in which it was policed. We had to know what novel was in what genre—sometimes it wasn’t altogether obvious, and when a book stretched across two genres or more, it could open a jurisdictional can of worms that might have us tied up for years. […] “Orwell’s 1984 is no longer truly fiction, so has been reallocated to non-fiction.”93 The question of genre in literature and television is a fraught one— though useful for both producers and consumers of fiction, they can be constricting, and as Jason Mittell notes, “many critics have argued that television programming in the postmodern era is marked by such genre

178

Broadcasting …

hybridity that the notion of pure generic forms is outdated.”94 In a vein similar to television’s crossing generic boundaries, Fforde insists on the plethora of genres to which his novels belong. Though Fielding’s novel is less free-wheeling from that perspective, chick lit more generally is often characterized by its generic hybridity, structuring its narrative around an etiquette book (Kathleen Tessaro’s Elegance),95 including seemingly extraneous texts like recipes, magazine articles or quizzes, or, as in Bridget Jones’s Diary, resorting back to epistolary form for a postmodern tale. Indeed, it could be argued that Fielding’s novel itself has undergone the process of adaptation from one genre to another (here, from a newspaper column to a novel), in addition to being inspired by another medium. From this perspective, Jan Baetens’s comments on novelization seem pertinent for our analysis of the television-inspired texts: […] novelization forces us to consider cinema and literature in the global (mass) media structure of our time and to tackle the various ways in which media complete and contaminate each other, without losing their specific features. Novelization, therefore, is less an agent of simplification than of complexification, since it foregrounds the internal hybridization of contemporary media, both literary and cinematographic.96 By acknowledging the contributions of television both to popular culture and to storytelling, Fforde and Fielding (and those who followed her) are also foregrounding the hybridization of media;97 their work, and its popularity, essentially serve as high-profile examples of Henry Jenkins’s ideas about spreadable media, where texts are continually shaped and reshaped by professionals and amateurs of a given narrative.98 Rather than seeing television as a rival to the novel, it has become a new resource to mine for fictional gold, and to ensure that the novel has many happy days to come. As Kathleen Fitzpatrick opines: […] the novel is hardly the sole literary form whose death has been critically mourned; one might similarly investigate the “ends” of the epic, the long poem, the sonnet, the drama in verse, the tragedy, poetry and the theatre altogether, the belletristic essay, and the literary letter. Each of these genres is “dead,” and yet each lives on, albeit in altered forms. The epic has been reborn in the big novel (e.g., Gravity’s Rainbow, Underworld); the popular poem flourishes in song lyrics and the spirit of the theatre in independent film; et cetera. Each form is altered by its historical circumstances of production and reception and by the forms that succeed it; this alteration does not equal death but the recombination of old forms into new.99

Here and There and Back Again

179

The influence that television in general, and television adaptation in particular, is having on contemporary fiction is not cause for alarm. It does not foretell the end of the novel, or of the written text more globally. It is proof of the durability of the novel, which has always been an aggregate form, endlessly adaptable to new contexts—and new media—and the possibilities they offer. As these works of popular fiction make clear, television adaptations might not necessarily lead us back to their source texts—but they might very easily lead us back to the book.

Notes 1 Joseph Oldham, “Agents of Shield: Agency, institutions and transmedia serialisation,” op. cit. 2 It is no surprise that so many of these novelists work for HBO, given that channel’s focus on authorship in television, notably by placing their showrunners in that role: “HBO promotes the creators of the drama series and encourages reporters to flesh out their biographies so that the public learns to identify the artistic vision of a single creator behind each series, no matter the scale and complexity of the production or the number of people involved in bringing it to the screen. […] In its avid promotion of those who have created its drama series, HBO has enhanced the value of its brand while also contributing to a more widespread discourse of authorship in television.” Christopher Anderson, “Overview: Producing an Aristocracy of Culture in American Television,” in Gary R. Edgerton and Jeffrey P. Jones, The Essential HBO Reader, Lexington: University Press of KY, 2008, 36–37. 3 David Foster Wallace, “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction,” Review of Contemporary Fiction, 13:2 (1993: Summer) 151–194. 4 See for example Wallace’s novel Infinite Jest (1996), where the title refers not just to Hamlet’s soliloquy about Yorick, but also to the overwhelming nature of contemporary society’s unceasing need to be entertained, as well as a fictional film so appealing that it is impossible to stop watching, causing its viewers to simply waste away. 5 Interview with David Foster Wallace on Charlie Rose (PBS, 1991–) May 17th, 1996. Available online: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cj0JgqOnK2M. Accessed March 2015. 6 “‘Inasmuch as it proposes behavioral schemes and libidinal prototypes, corporeal postures, types of dress, modes of free behavior or seduction, and is the initiating authority for a perpetual adolescence, the classical film has taken, relay fashion, the historical place of the grand-epoch, nineteenth-century novel (itself descended from the ancient epic); it fills the same social function, a function which the twentieth-century novel, less and less diegetic and representational, tends partly to abandon.’” Christian Metz, Le Signifiant imaginaire, quoted in Kamilla Elliot, op. cit., 3. 7 Linda Hutcheon, op. cit., 53. 8 Toni Morrison apparently owed more sales to her status as Book Club author (four of her books were chosen over the course of the Book Club) than she did from receiving the Nobel Prize; Cecilia Konchar Farr notes that in the first four years of the Book Club, chosen books spent an average of 15 weeks on the bestsellers list, and the last two years, 17 weeks on the bestsellers list. Indeed, from the beginning of the Book club, Farr writes, there was at least one book chosen by the talk show host for her televised Book

180

9

10 11 12

13

Broadcasting …

Club on the bestsellers list from its debut until the experiment ended. More recently, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart (Comedy Central, 1999–2015) and The Colbert Report (Comedy Central, 2005–2014) have had a similar impact on non-fiction books. Bob Minzesheimer, “How the ‘Oprah Effect’ changed publishing,” USA Today, May 22, 2011, http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/life/books/news/2011–05–22-Oprah-Winfrey-Book-Club_n.htm. Accessed March 2015; Cecilia Konchar Farr, Reading Oprah: How Oprah’s Book Club Changed the Way America Reads, Albany, NY: State University of NY Press, 2005, 16. Ron Charles, “Who will miss Jon Stewart most? Book publicists,” The Washington Post, February 11, 2015, https://www. washingtonpost.com/news/style-blog/wp/2015/02/11/who-will-miss-jonstewart-most-book-publicists/. Accessed July 2015. Indeed, Lost speaks to this fan phenomenon in the first episode of Season 3, where we first see the mysterious “Others” in their native habitat… at a book club. This was another example cementing the series’ reputation for its hyperawareness of its fanbase (something that showrunners Lindelof and Cuse also contributed to through their presence on social media, as was discussed in Chapter 5). The impact of the fiction in the series is explicitly studied in Sarah Clarke Stuart’s work Literary Lost: Viewing Television through the Lens of Literature. “The Rory Gilmore Book Club,” http://www.goodreads. com/group/show/758-the-rory-gilmore-book-club. Accessed March 2015; “The Lost Book Club,” http://thelostbookclub.tumblr.com. Accessed March 2015; “Lost Book Club,” https://www.goodreads.com/group/show/94-lostbook-club. Accessed March 2015. Sarah Clarke Stuart, Literary Lost: Viewing Television through the Lens of Literature, London: Bloomsbury, 2011. Don DeLillo, White Noise, New York, NY: Viking, 1985, Kindle edition. The New Yorker, May 23, 2005. Available online: http://www.newyorker. com/magazine/2005/05/23/twos-company-2. Accessed March 2015. Ibid., Franzen is a complex example because he seems to have an ambiguous stance towards television: he expressed reservations about his novel The Corrections being chosen for Oprah’s Book Club, suggesting that this would alienate male readers and was a corporate logo (thus once again insisting on the commercial nature of television), and was thus publicly denied an appearance on Winfrey’s show; however, he worked on an (unsuccessful) adaptation of that same novel for an HBO series, and appeared as himself (along with more arguably pop culture-friendly author Michael Chabon) in an episode of The Simpsons. Cecilia Konchar Farr, op. cit., 75–76; Sean O’Neal, “HBO won’t be making The Corrections into a TV Show after all,” The AV Club, May 1, 2012, http://www.avclub.com/article/hbo-wontbe-making-emthe-correctionsem-into-a-tv-s-73347. Accessed July 2015; “Moe’N’a Lisa,” The Simpsons, 18.06. Barth posited “the used-upness of certain forms” (notably realism) in his 1967 essay “The Literature of Exhaustion,” something he expanded on in a follow-up essay, “The Literature of Replenishment.” This emphasis on commercial tendencies rather than narrative strategies is of course not always the case—recent Pulitzer Prize winner Jennifer Egan credited The Sopranos along with Proust as inspiration for her novel Goon Squad, citing its sprawling form of narrative that advanced laterally, for example—but such admissions are the exception rather than the rule. John Barth, “The Literature of Exhaustion” (1967), in The Friday Book, Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins UP, 1997, 62–76; “The Literature of Replenishment” (1979), in The Friday Book, Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins UP, 1997, 193–206. Dave Itzkoff,

Here and There and Back Again

14 15

16 17 18

19 20 21 22 23

24

25

26

27

181

“Jennifer Egan Discusses TV Plans for ‘A Visit From the Goon Squad’,” The New York Times, April 21, 2011. Op. cit., 50–51. “All life in societies where modern conditions of production hold sway is an immense accumulation of spectacles. All that was once directly experienced is now simply a representation.” “Toute la vie des sociétés dans lesquelles règnent les conditions modernes de production s’annonce comme une immense accumulation de spectacles. Tout ce qui était directement vécu s’est éloigné dans une représentation.” Guy Debord, La Société du spectacle (1967), Paris: Gallimard, 1992, 10. Author’s translation. Kathleen Fitzpatrick, The Anxiety of Obsolescence: The American Novel in the Age of Television, Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt UP, 2006, 14. Available online: http://www.anxietyofobsolescence.com. Accessed February 2015. Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (1973), Oxford: OUP, 1997. Fitzpatrick concentrates her analysis on the contemporary American novel, and this open disdain for television does seem to be particularly prominent in the United States, perhaps due to the domination of commercial television (as compared to the massive impact of public broadcasting in Britain, for example). Andreas Huyssen, After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism, Bloomington, IN: Indiana UP, 1986. Helen Fielding, Bridget Jones’s Diary, London: Picador, 1996. Jasper Fforde, First Among Sequels, London: Hodder and Stoughton, 2007. Cf. Chapter 4, “Crossing over.” See the Norton editions of Great Expectations or Vanity Fair, for example; see also Kate Flint, “The Victorian novel and its readers,” in The Cambridge Companion to the Victorian Novel, Deirdre David, ed., Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2012, 29. First Among Sequels was tenth on the New York Times Bestseller List upon its publication, for example, while Bridget Jones’s Diary sold over two million copies in the US and inspired a veritable tidal wave of similar “singleton” books written by both British and American authors. “Hardcover Fiction,” The New York Times, August 10, 2007. Available online: http://www. nytimes.com/2007/08/12/books/bestseller/0812besthardfiction.html?_r=0. Accessed July 2015; Carol Memmott, “Chick lit, for better or worse, is here to stay,” USA Today, 21 June 2006, http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/life/ books/news/2006–06–20-chick-lit_x.htm. Accessed July 2015. He has also written a series of novels entitled The Last Dragonslayer (three published at the time of writing and one planned for 2016), and Shades of Grey (unrelated to the E.L. James publishing phenomenon), a novel that will apparently have a sequel/prequel in 2015, but which are less relevant to the argument here. The New York Times referred to it as a “chick lit pandemic” in a 2006 essay, arguing that chick lit is a global phenomenon, with local writers rivaling more famous examples like Fielding in Eastern European countries that previously featured relatively few female authors. Rachel Donadio, “The Chick-Lit Pandemic,” The New York Times, March 19, 2006, http:// www.nytimes.com/2006/03/19/books/review/19donadio.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0. Accessed July 2015. See for example Suzanne Ferriss, Mallory Young, “Introduction,” in Suzanne Ferriss, Mallory Young, eds., Chick Lit: The New Woman’s Fiction, New York, NY: Routledge, 2006, 3.

182

Broadcasting …

28 Some critics have seen the use of pink in the Victoria’s Secret line, for example, as a form of transmedia marketing. Stephanie Harzewski, “Tradition and Displacement in the New Novel of Manners,” in Chick Lit: The New Woman’s Fiction, op. cit., 33. 29 Suzanne Ferriss, “Narrative and Cinematic Doubleness: Pride and Prejudice and Bridget Jones’s Diary,” in Chick Lit: The New Woman’s Fiction, op. cit., 71. 30 Helen Fielding, Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason, London: Penguin, 2001. 31 Chick lit, op. cit., 41. 32 Charlotte Brontë, writing to George Henry Lewes on January 12th 1848, quoted in Lauren Baratz-Logsted, “Introduction,” This is chick lit, Dallas, TX: BenBella Books, 2013, 2. 33 Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre (1847), Oxford: OUP, 2001. 34 Imelda Whelehan, The Feminist Bestseller: From Sex and the Single Girl to Sex and the City, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005, 3115 of 4181. Kindle Edition. 35 Jasper Fforde, The Eyre Affair, London: Penguin, 2001. 36 The musical comedy has developed a sort of cult following, where viewing the film itself is almost peripheral to the many rituals associated with the screening, including pre-emptive comments before well-known lines of dialogue, throwing objects (rice, etc.) at the screen in reaction to events, or participation in songs and dances along with the film characters. 37 The Eyre Affair, op. cit., 182–183. 38 Indeed, we could see Sterne’s own parodic use of classic works by authors like John Locke, Horace, François Rabelais, or Erasmus as the forerunner of Fforde’s own comic takes on canonical texts. Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy (1761–1767), Howard Anderson, ed., New York, NY: W.W. Norton, 1980. 39 Shannon Hale, Austenland, London: Bloomsbury, 2007. A film adaptation of the novel appeared in 2013. 40 Seth Grahame-Smith, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, San Francisco, CA: Chronicle Books, 2009. A film adaptation was released in 2016. 41 Bridget Jones’s Diary, op. cit., 246. 42 Ruth Saberton, Amber Scott is Starting Over, London: Orion, 2013, 27. I would like to thank my student Sarah Trubert, whose Master’s thesis on chick lit introduced me to this novel and thus prompted the idea that chick lit could be inspired by adaptation. 43 Austenland, op. cit., 2. 44 They will, of course, end up meeting their own versions of Mr. Darcy with whom they will have many a misunderstanding before settling into a happily ever after. 45 Imelda Whelehan, Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones’s Diary, London: Bloomsbury, 2002, 34. 46 Whelehan notes that in Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason, Bridget and her friends watch the lake scene repeatedly. Whelehan, Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones’s Diary, op. cit., 35. 47 N.a., “Top 10 memorable TV drama moments revealed with Mr. Darcy’s lake scene in Pride & Prejudice topping list,” Irish Mirror, July 5, 2013, http://www.irishmirror.ie/whats-on/top-10-memorable-tv-drama-2027204. Accessed July 2015. 48 The poll was taken as part of a campaign to launch a new UK channel called “Drama,” and the results prompted the channel to hire a publicity firm to

Here and There and Back Again

49

50 51

52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59

60 61 62 63 64

65 66 67 68

183

capitalize on the results by making the Darcy statue. Taylor Herring, “Giant Mr. Darcy Launches Drama Channel,” n.d., http://www.taylorherring.com/ case-studies/mrdarcystunt/. Accessed March 2015. A reference, of course, to Laura Mulvey’s “male gaze,” as posited in her landmark text. See also Lisa Hopkins on the subject of the female gaze in the television adaptation. Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Screen 16:3 Autumn 1975, 6–18. Lisa Hopkins, “Mr. Darcy’s Body: Privileging the Female Gaze,” in Linda Troost, Sayre N. Greenfield, eds., Jane Austen in Hollywood, Lexington: University Press of KY, 2001, 111–121. From this perspective, the fact that Austenland’s Jane is less interested in Northanger Abbey than in any other of Austen’s novels seems logical, as Northanger Abbey is the most overtly ironic of her completed novels. Stephanie Harzewski suggests that this same device also distances the male characters, thus in a sense recreating Austen’s female society—and perhaps also allowing for the male objectification we find in the 1995 adaptation: “The genre’s typical first-person narrator and confessional mode render direct male speech at least once removed.” “Tradition and Displacement in the New Novel of Manners,” op. cit., 38. See for example Ferriss and Mallory, Chick Lit: New Women’s Fiction, op. cit., 1. “Tradition and displacement in the new novel of manners,” op. cit., 37. Andrew Higson, English Heritage, English Cinema: Costume Drama since 1980, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003, 39. See also Lisa Hopkins’s “Mr. Darcy’s Body,” a detailed look at the title sequence of Pride and Prejudice. Lisa Hopkins, op. cit., 112. Bridget Jones’s Diary, op. cit., 247. Paul Kerr, “Classic Serials—to be continued,” Screen, 23:1, 1982, 11, quoted in Sarah Cardwell, Adaptation Revisited, op. cit., 79. Sarah Cardwell, Adaptation Revisited, op. cit., 80. Indeed this homogenization of the different television adaptations extends to the very costumes they wear, as a website chronicling the recycling of period costumes from one production to the next can attest. Recycled Movie Costumes, http://www.recycledmoviecostumes.com/regencyromantic010.html. Accessed March 2015. Room with a View (1985), Maurice (1987), Howards End (1992). The Europeans (1979), The Bostonians (1984), The Golden Bowl (2001). English Heritage, English Cinema, op. cit. Op. cit., 160. A recent Sense and Sensibility adaptation (2008) by Andrew Davies, for example, begins with Willoughby’s seduction of Eliza, a scene that is absent from the novel, and which here serves to seduce the viewer as well as the hapless Eliza, reinforcing this intimacy and sexualized “romance” chick lit finds in these adaptations. “Questions and Answers for Hodder (UK Publishers) January, 2001,” Jasper Fforde.com, http://www.jasperfforde.com/qa2.html#strait16. Accessed March 2015. First Among Sequels, op. cit., 296. Ibid., 69. Another quote preceding this one makes the idea of transmission even more clear: “The books we have in the Outland are no more similar to these than a photograph is to the subject—these books are alive, each one a small

184 Broadcasting …

69 70 71

72 73 74

75 76

77 78 79 80

81 82 83 84

universe unto itself—and by throughputting some of that energy from here to their counterparts in the real world, we can transmit the story direct to the reader.” Ibid., 61. Ibid., 65. Original emphasis. Jasper Fforde.com, op. cit., http://www.jasperfforde.com/qacaitlin.html#q3. Accessed March 2015. Amy Martin, “Wuthering Heights and Adapting the Adaptation,” in Film Remakes, Adaptations, and Fan Productions: Remake, Remodel, Katherine Loock, Constantine Verevis, eds., London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012, 80. Original emphasis. David Nobbs, The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin, New York, NY: Random House, 1975, Kindle edition, 189–195 of 4643. First Among Sequels, op. cit., 67. Jasper Fforde has openly admitted that he uses only literary references in the public domain, and has little interest in contemporary literature. Jay MacDonald, “Jasper Fforde: Fantastic voyage,” Book Page, March 2004, http://bookpage.com/interviews/8241-jasper-fforde#.VcJcW3hhegM. Accessed July 2015. First Among Sequels, op. cit., 81. In a similar nod to television’s traditions, this cliffhanger is never dealt with, though there is mention of the Bobby Ewing technique in the follow-up novel, One of our Thursdays is Missing, described as “a procedure […] where you wake up next chapter and it’s all been a dream, but it’s pretty painless so long as you don’t mind any potential readers throwing up their hands in disgust.” Jasper Fforde, One of Our Thursdays is Missing, London: Penguin, 2012, 366. Jasper Fforde, The Big Over Easy, London: Penguin, 2005. Jasper Fforde, The Fourth Bear, London: Penguin, 2006. Anne Dunne, “The genres of television,” in Narrative and Media, Rosemary Huisman, Julian Murphet, Helen Fulton, eds., Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005, 129–130. Original emphasis. “The series is composed of segments. The recognition of the series format tends to hold segments together and provide them with an element of continuity and narrative progression from one to the next. The segment form itself has strong internal coherence.” John Ellis, Visible Fiction (1982), New York, NY: Routledge, 1992, 147. “Thursday Next: The Story So Far….” Jasper Fforde, The Well of Lost Plots, London: Penguin, 2004, xiii–xiv. “Et Unibus Pluram,” op.cit., 171. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception,” in Dialectic of Enlightenment, Redwood City, CA: Stanford UP, 2002, 94–136. In an early text on the subject, Jameson’s critique of this aspect of postmodernism was scathing: “[T]he erosion of the older distinction between high culture and so-called mass or popular culture […] is perhaps the most distressing development of all from an academic standpoint, which has traditionally had a vested interest in preserving a realm of high or elite culture against the surrounding environment of philistinism, of schlock and kitsch, of TV series and Reader’s Digest culture, and in transmitting difficult and complex skills of reading, listening, and seeing to its initiates.” Fredric Jameson, “Postmodernism and the Consumer Society,” The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the Postmodern, 1983–1998, London: Verso, 1998, 2.

Here and There and Back Again

185

85 “In Postmodernism and Popular Culture I make two quite simple suggestions. I suggest that the superficial does not necessarily represent a decline into meaninglessness or valuelessness in the culture. [… I also] argue that to opt for the superficial can be a deliberate political strategy. Only by theorizing the producers of culture […] and by paying closer attention to the social practices of consuming culture, can we get a better understanding of how the tinsel and the glitter can produce meaning, in a different but no less significant kind of way than the great deep works of modernism.” Though both Jameson and McRobbie acknowledge the blurring of boundaries between high and low culture, McRobbie’s insistence that “superficial culture” can be “no less significant” than modernist works is one of her primary sources of contention with Jameson’s work. Angela McRobbie, Postmodernism and Popular Culture, London: Routledge, 1994, 4. 86 Bridget Jones’s Diary, op. cit., 101–102. 87 Ibid., 209. 88 First Among Sequels, op. cit., 90. 89 Ibid., 221. 90 Ibid., 289. 91 Jean-François Lyotard saw the failure of metanarratives (like the Enlightenment or Marxism) as characteristic of the postmodern period. Jean-François Lyotard, La condition postmoderne, Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 1979. 92 http://www.jasperfforde.com/qagiornale.html#q3. Accessed March 2015. 93 First Among Sequels, 43–44. 94 Jason Mittell, Genre and Television, op. cit., xii. 95 Kathleen Tessaro’s Elegance, New York, NY: William Morrow, 2004. 96 Jan Baetens, “From screen to text: novelization, the hidden continent,” in The Cambridge Companion to Literature on Screen, op. cit., 236–237. 97 Fforde in particular has used his website as a repository not just for press releases or announcements, but for “bonus features” that include illustrations, games, and picture galleries that call to mind DVD bonuses—and transmedia adaptation. http://www.jasperfforde.com/subindex/tn_index. html. Accessed March 2015. 98 Henry Jenkins, Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture, New York, NY: NYUP, 2013. 99 Op cit., 24.

This page intentionally left blank

Conclusion

The discussion of the BBC’s adaptation of Pride and Prejudice in the previous chapter brings to mind one of the most recent versions of Austen’s most famous novel, The Lizzie Bennet Diaries (Youtube, 2012–2014). The first season, in particular, is a fairly traditional contemporary retelling—but in “vlog” (video log) format, with a fixed camera, confessional, “talking head”-style episodes of two to eight minutes, appearing not on television, but on Youtube. The series continued after Lizzie and Darcy’s happy ending by having the peripheral characters appear in other Austen adaptations: Caroline Bingley, here Caroline Lee, becomes Reverend Elton’s wife in Emma Approved (Youtube, 2013–2014), while “Gigi Darcy”—Georgiana as was— appears as the main character in an adaptation of Sanditon, Welcome to Sanditon (Youtube, 2013). In so doing, Austen becomes a selling point for the still relatively unknown format of the web series, using the hyper-canonicity of the novelist to attract attention to the possibilities offered by non-broadcast screen fictions, which can vary in length and format in a way that broadcast fictions cannot yet match.1 The well-known story contrasts with the innovative format, allowing for a successful transition between canon and cutting edge that led to the series winning an Emmy Award for “Original Interactive Program” in 2013. 2 The company making the series, “Pemberley Digital,” named for Darcy’s luxurious estate, suggests that screened fictions will continue to rely on classic texts even into the digital age. 3 This mixture of old and new, of text and image, of a three-volume novel and eight-minute vlog, is but one of many examples pointing to the very rich potential offered to television and adaptation theorists in the field of television adaptation. Issues of non-fiction adaptations becoming TV fictions (Orange is the New Black, Netflix, 2013–), or of simultaneous adaptations, where the novel is begun but unfinished as the series is developed, often leading to the initial text being considered the novelization of the more prominent show (The 100, The CW, 2014–; Wayward Pines, Fox, 2015—and of course the final seasons of Game of Thrones, where the show has now outstripped the book series), are

188 Conclusion but two possible avenues of further research for the future. In these examples, as in those examined in this book, television adaptations prove themselves a complex and rewarding area of study, constantly challenging our assumptions of what constitutes a television narrative, and what defines an adaptation. As television continues to evolve, both in terms of content and format, and its sweep continues to grow with its outlets reaching beyond the scope of broadcast or cable television, so it will find new ways of adapting pre-conceived narratives to its purposes, and like many of the examples to be found here, our pre-conceived notions will be challenged. I began this study by emphasizing all that television and adaptation studies have in common, and after analyzing these different aspects of television adaptation, I hope to have shown the extent to which both the media themselves and the disciplines that study them, are in fact complementary. As television celebrates its newest Golden Age and searches for new and complex content to satisfy the increasing audience demands for both quality and quantity, prose fictions remain a primary source, and screen fictions a proven quantity; as those fictions appear on the screen, they drive people back to the text, whether it is the source text, or a literary allusion,4 in order to get the most out of their television viewing—and perhaps discover a new favorite book by the same occasion. I conceived of this book as a sort of optical illusion, where you might first see two faces, before changing perspective and seeing a vase. Likewise, my hope is that this confluence of two disciplines, television and adaptation, will prove useful to those who specialize in television studies, allowing them new perspectives on the shapes that television narratives can take when influenced by a previous fiction (like serialization and the possibilities of challenging the gaps that characterize serial fiction), and to those interested in adaptation studies, since by studying television adaptations, theorists come to a new understanding of what is adaptable (the indices or the functions proper), reconceptualizing the idea of the source text, the fidelity debate, and the author that have always been central to adaptation studies, while suggesting new definitions for the adaptation itself. Though I have not shied away from the ever-problematic fidelity debate, inevitable as it is when discussing the adaptation as adaptation and thus implicitly in relation to a prior text, television, as we have seen, affords new perspectives on exactly what it is the adaptation might be faithful to (source text, genre, or the fictional context in which it is ensconced, as in the microadaptation), and when this fidelity is central to the adaptation’s very premise (as in the transmedia adaptation) or on the contrary, should be eschewed in favor of an emphasis on the singularity of the new fiction (as in the transnational adaptation). Studying these adaptations also allows for a

Conclusion

189

new perception of issues of televisuality, seriality, transmedia and transnational television, authorship, and auteurship, all equally important to television studies. In examining some of the complexities involved in television adaptations, I hope to have made a case for the complexity of television fiction, whose vast narrative is not to be relegated to simple entertainment or “commercial art,” but whose variety and ubiquity points to a new understanding of the possibilities offered by fiction in general, and serialized fictions in particular. By looking forward, of course, I am also looking back—Julie Sanders cites sources as diverse as Harold Bloom, T.S. Eliot, and Adrienne Rich in her assertion in favor of adaptation. 5 In Bloom’s Anxiety of Influence, Eliot’s “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” and Rich’s “When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision,” the authors’ motivations were varied, but were unanimous in their insistence “on an historical understanding to foster creativity both in the present and in the future.”6 Reaching into the past for content is not just nostalgic, nor is it necessarily conservative: it can either perpetuate tradition, as Eliot suggests, or allow adaptors to understand better the past traditions they are rejecting or subverting, as is Rich’s position. In keeping with the postmodern nature of television, originality is no longer a matter of source material, but of delivery, and I am confident that both artists and scholars will find new and exciting ways to develop the promises that this fusion of old and new offers. Though this is but a preliminary study, I hope that the reader will agree with me that the perspectives offered by this area of study point to many fascinating experiments in years to come.

Notes 1 This may be specific to the American media landscape, as some of French television’s most successful shows have adopted a “sketch” format, lasting about ten minutes. Though sketch shows like Saturday Night Live (NBC, 1975–), In Living Color (Fox, 1990–1994) or Key and Peele (Comedy Central, 2012–2015) have long been popular in the US, the stand-alone sketch has yet to make its appearance on American screens other than by way of the webseries. 2 Rachel Poletick, “Top Chef’s” ‘Last Chance Kitchen,’ ‘Oprah’s Lifeclass,’ the Nick App, and ‘The Lizzie Bennet Diaries’ to Receive Interactive Media Emmys,” Yahoo! TV, August 22, 2013, https://www.yahoo.com/tv/bp/-topchef--s--last-chance-kitchen----oprah-s-lifeclass---the-nick-app--and--thelizzie-bennet-diaries--to-receive-interactive-media-emmys-151953269. html?nf=1. Accessed August 2015. 3 Indeed, their next project was a webseries entitled “Frankenstein, M.D.” (Youtube, 2014) adapting Mary Shelley’s classic tale with PBS’s Youtube channel. 4 See for example the recent sales of an obscure 1895 novel, The King in Yellow by Robert W. Chambers, which jumped to number nine on Amazon’s

190

Conclusion

list of top-selling books after a website cited it as the source of the recurrent phrase in the first season of True Detective. Ria Misra, “True Detective has made 1895 book The King in Yellow a bestseller,” io9.com, February 21, 2014, http://io9.com/true-detective-has-turned-the-king-in-yellow-into-abes-1528086031. Accessed February 2014. 5 Julie Sanders, Adaptation and Appropriation, New York, NY: Routledge, 2006, 8–10. 6 Ibid., 9.

Works Cited

TV Shows Cited 12 Monkeys. SyFy. 2015–Present. Television. The Addams Family. ABC. 1964–1966. Television. The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr. Fox. 1993–1994. Television. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. ITV. 1984–1994. Television. Agatha Christie’s Poirot. ITV. 1989–2013. Television. Agent Carter. NBC. 2015–Present. Television. Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. ABC. 2013–Present. Television. Alice. CBS. 1976–1985. Television. All in the Family. CBS. 1971–1979. Television. American Horror Story. FX. 2011–Present. Television. Angel. The WB. 1999–2004. Television. The Animated Tales from Shakespeare. BBC2. 1992–1994. Television. Bates Motel. A&E. 2013–Present. Television. Batman. ABC. 1966–1968. Television. Battlestar Galactica. ABC. 1978–1979. Television. Battlestar Galactica. Syfy. 2003–2009. Television. Battlestar Galactica: Blood and Chrome. 2012. Web series. Beauty and the Beast. CBS. 1987–1990. Television. BeTipul. HOT3. 2005–2008. Television. Bionic Woman. NBC. 2007. Television. Bones. Fox. 2005–Present. Television. Breaking Bad. AMC. 2008–2013. Television. Brideshead Revisited. ITV. 1981. Television. The Bridge. FX. 2013–2014. Television. Broadchurch. ITV. 2013–Present. Television. Broen/Bron. SVT1, DR1. 2011–Present. Television. Buffy the Vampire Slayer. WB. 1997–2001, UPN. 2001–2003. Television. Cadfael. ITV. 1994–1996. Television. Caprica. Syfy. 2010. Television. Castle. ABC. 2009–2016. Television. Charlie Rose. PBS. 1991–Present. Television. Cheers. NBC. 1982–1993. Television. Clifford’s Puppy Days. PBS. 2003–2004. Television. The Colbert Report. Comedy Central. 2005–2014. Television. Cold Case. CBS. 2003–2010. Television.

192 Works Cited The Colony. USA. 2015–Present. Television. Community. NBC. 2009–2014; Yahoo. 2015–Present. Television. CSI. CBS. 2000–Present. Television. The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. Comedy Central. 1999–2015. Television. Dallas. CBS. 1978–1991. Television. Dead Like Me. Showtime. 2003–2004. Television. Desperate Housewives. ABC. 2004–2012. Television. Dexter. Showtime. 2006–2013. Television. Doctor Who. BBC, 1963–Present. Television. Dollhouse. Fox. 2009–2010. Television. The Dukes of Hazzard. CBS. 1979–1985. Television. Dynasty. ABC. 1981–1989. Television. Episodes. Showtime, BBC Two. 2011–Present. Television. The Equalizer. CBS. 1985–1989. Television. The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin. BBC. 1976–1979. Television. Family Matters. ABC. 1989–1997; CBS 1997–1998. Television. Fargo. FX. 2014–Present. Television. Firefly. Fox. 2002. Television. The Following. Fox. 2013–Present. Television. Forbrydelsen. DR1. 2007–2012. Television. The Forsyte Saga. 1967. Television. Frasier. NBC. 1993–2004. Television. Freddy’s Nightmares: A Nightmare on Elm Street: The Series. Syndicated. 1988–1990. Television. Friday Night Lights. NBC. 2006–2008; The 101 Network. 2008–2011. Television. Friday the 13th. CBS. 1987–1990. Television. Friends. NBC. 1994–2004. Television. Game of Thrones. HBO. 2011–Present. Television. The Gates. ABC. 2010. Television. The Gilmore Girls. The WB. 2000–2006; The CW. 2006–2007. Television. Girls. HBO. 2012–Present. Television. Gracepoint. Fox. 2014. Television. Grimm. NBC. 2011–Present. Television. Hannibal. NBC. 2013–2015. Television. Happy Days. ABC. 1974–1984. Television. Hatufim. Channel 2. 2011–Present. Television. Hill Street Blues. NBC. 1981–1987. Television. Homeland. Showtime. 2011–Present. Television. Homicide: Life on the Street. NBC. 1993–1999. Television. House of Cards. Netflix. 2013–Present. Television. House of Cards. BBC. 1990–1995. Television. How I Met Your Mother. CBS. 2005–2014. Television. I, Claudius. BBC. 1976. Television. In Treatment. HBO. 2008–2010. Television. The Irish R.M. BBC 4/RTÉ. 1983–1984. Television. Iron Man: Armored Adventures. Nicktoons. 2009–2012. Television. Jewel in the Crown. ITV. 1984–1985. Television. Jim Henson’s Muppet Babies. CBS. 1984–1992. Television. Justified. FX. 2010–Present. Television.

Works Cited Just Shoot Me. NBC. 1997–2003. Television. The Killing. AMC. 2011–2013; Netflix. 2014. Television. Laverne and Shirley. ABC. 1976–1983. Television. Law and Order. NBC. 1990–2010. Television. The Leftovers. HBO. 2014–Present. Television. Life on Mars. BBC. 2006–2007. Television. Life on Mars. ABC. 2008–2009. Television. Little Bear. CBC. 1995–2003. Television. The Lone Ranger. ABC. 1949–1957. Television. Lonesome Dove. CBS. 1989. Television. Lost. ABC. 2004–2010. Television. Lost in Austen. ITV. 2008. Television. Lost in Space. CBS. 1965–1968. Television. Mad Men. AMC. 2007–2015. Television. M*A*S*H. CBS. 1972–1983. Television. Masterpiece Theater. PBS. 1971–Present. Television. Mockingbird Lane. NBC. 2012. Television. Monty Python’s Flying Circus. BBC. 1969–1974. Television. Moonlighting. ABC. 1985–1989. Television. Mork and Mindy. ABC. 1978–1982. Television. The Munsters. Joe Connelly, Bob Mosher. CBS. 1964–1966. Television. The Muppets. CBS. 1976–1981. Television. The Muppets Go to the Movies. ABC. 1981. Television. Muppet Babies. CBS. 1984–1991. Television. Nash Bridges. CBS. 1996–2001. Television. Neverwhere. BBC. 1996. Television. The Odd Couple. ABC. 1970–1975. Television. The Odd Couple. CBS. 2015–Present. Television. The Office. NBC. 2005–2013. Television. The Office. BBC. 2001–2003. Television. Once Upon a Time. ABC. 2011–Present. Television. Oprah Winfrey Show. ABC/Syndicated. 1986–2011. Television. Orange is the New Black. Netflix. 2013–Present. Television. Ozzie and Harriet. ABC. 1952–1966. Television. The Pacific. HBO. 2010. Television. The Pallisers. BBC. 1974. Television. Pride and Prejudice. BBC. 1980. Television. Pride and Prejudice. BBC. 1995. Television. Pushing Daisies. ABC. 2007–2009. Television. QB VII. ABC. 1974. Television. Queer as Folk. Channel Four. 1999–2000. Television. Queer as Folk. Showtime. 2000–2005. Television. Resurrection. ABC. 2014–2015. Television. The Returned. A&E. 2015–Present. Television. Les Revenants. Canal+. 2012–Present. Television. Roots. ABC. 1977. Television. Sanford and Son. NBC. 1972–1977. Television. Sense and Sensibility. BBC. 2008. Television. Sesame Street. PBS. 1969–Present. Television. Shameless. Channel Four. 2004–2013. Television.

193

194

Works Cited

Shameless. Showtime. 2011–Present. Television. Sherlock. BBC. 2010–Present. Television. The Shield. FX. 2002–2008. Television. The Simpsons. Fox. 1989–Present. Television. The Six Million Dollar Man. ABC. 1973–1978. Television. Skins. E4. 2007–2013. Television. Skins. MTV. 2011. Television. The Slap. ABC1. 2011. Television. The Slap. NBC. 2015. Television. Sons of Anarchy. FX. 2008–2014. Television. The Sopranos. HBO. 1999–2007. Television. Starsky and Hutch. ABC. 1975–1979. Television. Star Trek. NBC. 1966–1969. Television. Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. Syndication. 1993–1999. Television. Star Trek: Voyager. UPN. 1995–2001. Television. Steptoe and Son. BBC1. 1962–1965. Television. The Strain. FX. 2014–Present. Television. Supernatural. The CW. 2005–Present. Television. Super Why! PBS. 2007–2012. Television. Tales from the Crypt. HBO. 1989–1996. Television. The Thorn Birds. ABC. 1983. Television. Till Death Us Do Part. BBC1. 1965, 1966–1968, 1970, 1972–1975. Television. Trapper John, M.D. CBS. 1979–1986. Television. Treme. HBO. 2010–2013. Television. True Blood. HBO. 2008–2014. Television. True Detective. HBO. 2014–Present. Television. The Tunnel/Tunnel. Canal+/Sky 1. 2011– Present. Television. The Twilight Zone. CBS. 1959–1964, 1985–1989. Television. Twin Peaks. ABC. 1990–1991. Television. V. NBC. 1983, 1984–1985. Television. V. ABC. 2009–2011.Television. V: The Final Battle. NBC. 1984. Television. The Vampire Diaries. The CW. 2009–Present. Television. Vanity Fair. BBC. 1998. Television. Vanity Fair. BBC. 1967. Television. The Walking Dead. AMC. 2010–Present. Television. Wallander. BBC. 2008–2010. Television. Wilfred. SBS One. 2007–2010. Television. Wilfred. FX. 2011–2013; FXX. 2014. Television. The Wire. HBO. 2002–2008. Television. Wishbone. PBS. 1995–2001. Television. The Writer’s Room. Sundance. 2013–Present. Television. X–Files. Fox. 1993–2002. Television.

Films Cited 10 Commandments. Cecil B. DeMille. Dir. 1956. Film. 12 Monkeys. Terry Gilliam. Dir. 1995. Film. 21 Jump Street. 2012. Film.

Works Cited

195

Algiers. John Cromwell. Dir. 1938. Film. Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore. Martin Scorsese. Dir. 1974. Film. Animal House. John Landis. Dir. 1978. Film. The Animatrix. Peter Chung, Andrew R. Jones, Yoshiaki Kawajiri, Takeishi Koike, Mahiro Maeda, Kôji Morimoto, Shinichirô Watanabe. Dirs. 2003. Film. Austenland. Jershua Hess. Dir. 2013. Film. The Avengers. Joss Whedon. Dir. 2012. Film. The Avengers: Age of Ultron. Joss Whedon. Dir. 2015. Film. Blade Runner. Ridley Scott. Dir. 1982. Film. Blue Velvet. David Lynch. Dir. 1986. Film. The Bonfire of the Vanities. Brian De Palma. Dir. 1990. Film. The Bostonians. James Ivory. Dir. 1984. Film. Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Francis Ford Coppola. Dir. 1992. Film. The Breakfast Club. John Hughes. Dir. 1985. Film. Bridget Jones’s Diary. Sharon Macguire. Dir. 2001. Film. Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason. Beeban Kidron. Dir. 2004. Film. Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Fran Rubel Kuzui. Dir. 1992. Film. Capote. Bennett Miller. Dir. 2005. Film. Captain America: Winter Soldier. Anthony Russo, Joe Russo. Dirs. 2014. Film. Casablanca. Michael Curtiz. Dir. 1942. Film. Crash. Paul Haggis. Dir. 2004. Film. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Ang Lee. Dir. 2000. Film. Double Indemnity. Billy Wilder. Dir. 1944. Film. The Dukes of Hazzard. Jay Chandrasekhar. Dir. 2005. Film. Elephant Man. David Lynch. Dir. 1980. Film. End of Watch. David Ayer. Dir. 2012. Film. Eraserhead. David Lynch. Dir. 1977. Film. The Europeans. James Ivory. Dir. 1979. Film. Fahrenheit 451. François Truffaut. Dir. 1966. Film. Fantasia. Norman Ferguson. Dir. 1940. Film. Foxcatcher. Bennett Miller. Dir. 2014. Film. Friday Night Lights. Peter Berg. Dir. 2004. Film. Frozen. Chris Buck, Jennifer Lee. Dirs. 2013. Film. Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. Howard Hawks. Dir. 1953. Film. Ghost. Jerry Zucker. Dir. 1990. Film. The Golden Bowl. James Ivory. Dir. 2001. Film. Goldeneye. Martin Campbell. Dir. 1995. Film. The Green Room. François Truffaut. Dir. 1978. Film. Hannibal. Ridley Scott. Dir. USA. 2001. Film. Hannibal Rising. Peter Webber. Dir. 2007. Film. His Girl Friday. Howard Hawks. Dir. USA. 1940. Film. Howards End. James Ivory. Dir. 1992. Film. How the Grinch Stole Christmas. Ron Howard. Dir. 2000. Film. The Ice Storm. Ang Lee. Dir. 1997. Film. Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. Steven Spielberg. Dir. 1989. Film. Jeepers Creepers. Victor Salva. Dir. 2002. Film. La Jetée. Marker, Chris. Dir. 1962. Film. Jules et Jim. François Truffaut. Dir. 1962. Film. The Legend of Zorro. Martin Campbell. Dir. 2005. Film.

196

Works Cited

Lethal Weapon. Richard Donner. Dir. 1987. Film. The Little Mermaid. Ron Clements, John Musker. Dirs. 1989. Film. Manhunter. Michael Mann. Dir. 1986. Film. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Kenneth Branagh. Dir. 1994. Film. Maurice. James Ivory. Dir. 1987. Film. M*A*S*H. Robert Altman. Dir. 1970. Film. The Matrix. Andy Wachowski, Lana Wachowski. Dirs. 1999. Film. The Matrix: Reloaded. Andy Wachowski, Lana Wachowski. Dirs. 2003. Film. The Odd Couple. Gene Saks. Dir. 1968. Film. Pepe Le Moko. Julien Duvivier. Dir. 1937. Film. Psycho. Alfred Hitchcock. Dir. 1960. Film. Psycho. Gus Van Sant. Dir. 1998. Film. Rear Window. Alfred Hitchcock. Dir. 1954. Film. Red Dragon. Brett Ratner. Dir. 2002. Film. Ride with the Devil. Ang Lee. Dir. 1999. Film. The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Jim Sharman. Dir. 1975. Film. Romeo and Juliet. Baz Luhrmann. Dir. 2013. Film. Room with a View. James Ivory. Dir. 1985. Film. Salem’s Lot. CBS. 1979. Film. Sense and Sensibility. Ang Lee. Dir. 1995. Film. Serenity. Joss Whedon. Dir. 2005. Film. The Shining. Stanley Kubrick. Dir. 1980. Film. Shoot the Piano Player (Tirez sur le pianist). François Truffaut. Dir. 1962. Film. Showrunners: The Art of Running a TV Show. Des Doyle. Dir. 2014. Film. The Silence of the Lambs. Jonathan Demme. Dir. 1991. Film. Some Like It Hot. Billy Wilder. Dir. 1959. Film. Starsky and Hutch. Todd Phillips. Dir. 2004. Film. Star Wars Episode 1: The Phantom Menace. George Lucas. Dir. 1999. Film. Strangers on a Train. Alfred Hitchcock. Dir. 1951. Film. They Came Back (Les Revenants). Robin Campillo. Dir. 2004. Film. Thor: The Dark World. Alan Taylor. Dir. 2013. Film. Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me. David Lynch. Dir. 1992. Film. Vertigo. Alfred Hitchcock. Dir. 1958. Film. The Wizard of Oz. Victor Fleming. Dir. 1939. Film. X-Files: Fight the Future. Rob Bowman. Dir. 1998. Film. X-Files: I Want to Believe. Chris Carter. Dir. 2008. Film.

Books Cited Primary Sources and Literature Austen, Jane. Northanger Abbey (1817). New York: Knopf, 1992. Print. ———. Pride and Prejudice (1813). New York: Modern Library, 1995. Print. Bissinger, Buzz. Friday Night Lights: A Town, a Team, and a Dream. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley Pub. 1990. Print. Bloch, Robert. Psycho (1959). New York, NY: The Overlook Press, 2010. Print. Boileau, Pierre, and Thomas Narcejac. D’entre Les Morts. Paris: Denoël, 1954. Print. Bradbury, Ray. Fahrenheit 451. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1967. Print.

Works Cited

197

Brontë, Charlotte. Jane Eyre (1847). Oxford: OUP, 2001. Christie, Agatha. The Mousetrap (1952). New York: Dell, 1974. Print. David, Peter, Robert Q. Atkins, Al Barrionuevo, Carlos Rodriguez, Scott Elmer, Andy Owens, Carlos Rodriguez, Chris Sotomayor, and Cory Petit. Richard Castle’s A Calm before Storm: A Derrick Storm Mystery. New York: Marvel Worldwide, 2013. Print. DeLillo, Don. White Noise. New York, NY: Viking, 1985. Kindle edition. Dickens, Charles. The Adventures of Oliver Twist (1837). London: Oxford UP, 1949. Print. ———. Pickwick Papers (1836). London: Wordsworth Classics, 1992. Print. ———. Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations: Authoritative Text, Backgrounds, Contexts, Criticism. New York, NY: W.W. Norton, 1999. Print. Dumas, Alexandre.  The Three Musketeers (1844). New York: Dodd, Mead, 1941. Print. Fforde, Jasper. First Among Sequels. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 2007. Print. ———. The Big Over Easy. London: Penguin, 2005. Print. ———. The Eye of Zoltar. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 2014. Print. ———. The Eyre Affair. London: Penguin, 2001. Print. ———. The Fourth Bear. London: Penguin, 2006. Print. ———. The Last Dragonslayer. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 2010. Print. ———. The Song of the Quarkbeast. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 2011. Print. ———. The Well of Lost Plots. London: Penguin, 2004. Print. ———. One of Our Thursdays is Missing. London: Penguin, 2012. Print. ———. Shades of Grey: The Road to High Saffron. New York: Viking, 2009. Print. Fielding, Helen. Bridget Jones’s Diary, London: Picador, 1996. Print. ———. Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason. London: Penguin, 2001. Print. Flaubert, Gustave. Madame Bovary: Moeurs De Province (1856). Paris: Éditions Garnier, 1961. Print. Ford, Ford Madox. The Good Soldier (1915). New York, NY: W.W. Norton, 2012. Print. Franzen, Jonathan. The Corrections. New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001. Print. Gaiman, Neil. Neverwhere. New York, NY: Avon Books, 1998. Goodis, David. Down There. New York, NY: Gold Medal Books, 1956. Print. Grahame-Smith, Seth. Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. San Francisco, CA: Chronicle Books, 2009. Print. Hale, Shannon. Austenland. London: Bloomsbury, 2007. Print. Harris, Charlaine. Dead Until Dark. New York: Ace Books, 2001. Print. ———. Living Dead in Dallas. New York: Ace Books, 2002. Print. Harris, Thomas. Red Dragon (1981). New York, NY: Dell, 2002. Print. ———. The Silence of the Lambs. New York, NY: St. Martin’s Press, 1988. Print. ———. Hannibal. New York, NY: Dell, 1999. Print. ———. Hannibal Rising. New York, NY: Dell, 2006. Print. Highsmith, Patricia. Strangers on a Train. New York: W.W. Norton, 2001. Print. Hooker, Richard. MASH. New York: Morrow, 1968. Print. Hugo, Victor.  The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1831). New York: Modern Library, 1941. Print.

198

Works Cited

James, Henry. The Turn of the Screw and Other Short Novels. New York, NY: Signet, 1980. Print. Lewis, Naomi, Angela Barrett, and H. C. Andersen.  The Emperor’s New Clothes. Cambridge, MA: Candlewick, 1997. Print. Lewis, Sinclair. It Can’t Happen Here (1935). New York, NY: Signet, 2014. Print. Lindsay, Jeff. Darkly Dreaming Dexter. New York, NY: Vintage, 2006. Print. Loos, Anita. Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. 1925. Print. Mott, Jason. The Returned. Don Mills, Ontario: Harlequin MIRA, 2013. Print. Nobbs, David. The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin. New York, NY: Random House, 1975. Kindle edition. Perrotta, Tom. The Leftovers. New York: St. Martin’s, 2011. Print. “Richard Castle.” Heat Wave. New York: Hyperion, 2009. Print. ———. Naked Heat. New York: Hyperion, 2011. Print. Roché, Henri-Pierre. Jules et Jim (1953). Paris: Gallimard, 1979. Print. Saberton, Ruth. Amber Scott is Starting Over. London: Orion, 2012. Print. Shakespeare, William. Hamlet (1603). New Haven: Yale UP, 2003. Print. ———. Julius Caesar (1599). London: Penguin, 2005. Print. ———. Macbeth (1606). New Haven: Yale UP, 2005. Print. ———. Richard III (1592). New Haven: Yale UP, 2008. Print. ———. The Taming of the Shrew (1592). New Haven: Yale UP, 1954. Print. ———. The Tragedy of King Lear (1608). Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1992. Print. ———. The Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet (1597). New Haven: Yale UP, 1954. Print. Shelley, Percy Bysshe. Ode to the West Wind and Other Selected Poems. London: Dover, 1993. Print. Simon, Neil. The Odd Couple (1966). New York, NY: Samuel French, 1994. Print. Sterne, Laurence. The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy (1761–1767). Howard Anderson, ed. New York, NY: W.W. Norton, 1980. Print. Tessaro, Kathleen. Elegance. New York, NY: William Morrow, 2004. Print. Thackeray, William Makepeace. Vanity Fair (1848). New York: W.W. Norton, 1994. Print. Wallace, David Foster. Infinite Jest: A Novel. Boston: Little, Brown, 1996. Print. Wolfe, Tom. Bonfire of the Vanities. New York: Farrar, Straus Giroux, 1987. Print.

Secondary Sources: Adaptation Baetens, Jan. “From Screen to Text: Novelization, the Hidden Continent” in Imelda Whelehan and Deborah Cartmell. Eds. The Cambridge Companion to Literature on Screen. Cambridge/London: Cambridge UP, 2007. 226–238. Print. ———. La Novellisation: du film au roman. Brussels: Les Impressions Nouvelles, 2008. Print. Bernstein, Matthew. “High and Low: Art Cinema and Pulp Fiction in Yokohama.” Film Adaptation. James Naremore, ed. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 2000. 172–189. Print.

Works Cited

199

Bluestone, George. Novels into Films. Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins UP, 1957. Print. Boozer, Jack. “The Screenplay and Authorship in Adaptation.” Authorship in Film Adaptation. Jack Boozer, ed. Austin: U of TX Press, 2008. 1–30. Print. Cardwell, Sarah. Adaptation Revisited: Television and the Classic Novel. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2002. Print. ———. “Literature on the small screen: television adaptations.” The Cambridge Companion to Literature on Screen. Cambridge/London: Cambridge UP, 2007. 181–196. Print. Eder, Jens. “Transmediality and the politics of Adaptation: Concepts, Forms, and Strategies.” The Politics of Adaptation: Media Convergence. Dan Hassler-Forest and Pascal Nicklas, eds. London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2015. 66–81. Print. Elliot, Kamilla. The Novel/Film Debate. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003. Print. Gaudreault, André, and Philippe Marion. “Transécriture and Narrative Mediatics.” A Companion to Literature and Film. Robert Stam, Allessandra Raengo, eds. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005. 58–70. Print. Geraghty, Christine. Now a Major Motion Picture. Plymouth: Rowman and Littlefield, 2007. Print. Hunter, I.Q. “Post-classical fantasy cinema: The Lord of the Rings.” The Cambridge Companion to Literature on Screen. Deborah Cartmell and Imelda Whelehan, eds. Cambridge: CUP, 2007. 154–166. Print. Hutcheon, Linda. A Theory of Adaptation. New York/Oxon: Routledge, 2006. Print. Kantar, Maythee. Children’s Responses to Televised Adaptations of Literature. PhD dissertation. University of Minnesota, 1990. Print. Leitch, Thomas. “Adaptation and Intertextuality, or, What isn’t an Adaptation, and What Does it Matter?” A Companion to Literature, Film, and Adaptation. Deborah Cartmell, ed. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012. 87–104. Print. ———. Film Adaptation and Its Discontents: From Gone with the Wind to The Passion of the Christ. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins, 2007. Print. ———. “Hitchcock and his Writers: Authorship and Authority in Adaptation.” Authorship in Film Adaptation. Jack Boozer, ed. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2009. 63–84. Print. ———. “Twice-Told Tales: Disavowal and the Rhetoric of the Remake.” Dead Ringers: The Remake in Theory and Practice. Jennifer Forrest and Leonard R. Koos, eds. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2002. 37–62. Print. Letort, Delphine, and Shannon Wells-Lassagne. L‘adaptation cinématographique: Premières pages, premiers plans. Paris: Mare et Martin, 2014. Print. Loock, Cathleen, and Constantine Verevis, eds. Film Remakes, Adaptations, and Fan Productions: Remake/Remodel. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Martin, Amy. “A Battle on Two Fronts: Wuthering Heights and Adapting the Adaptation.” Film Remakes, Adaptations, and Fan Productions: Remake, Remodel. Katherine Loock, Constantine Verevis, eds. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. 67–86. Print.

200 Works Cited McCabe, Colin, Murray, Kathleen. Eds. True to the Spirit: Film Adaptation and the Question of Fidelity, Oxford: OUP, 2011. Print. McFarlane, Brian. Novel to Film: An Introduction to the Theory of Adaptation. Oxford: OUP, 1996. Print. Muller, Anja. “Introduction: Adapting Canonical Texts in and for Children’s Literature” in Anja Muller, ed., Adapting Canonical Texts in Children’s Literature. London: Bloomsbury, 2013. 1–8. Print. Naremore, James. Ed. Film Adaptation. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 2000. Print. Palmer, R. Barton. “The Sociological Turn of Adaptation Studies: The Example of Film Noir.” A Companion to Literature and Film. Robert Stam, Allessandra Raengo, eds. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005. 258–277. Print. Stam, Robert, and Alessandra Raengo. Eds. Literature and Film: A Guide to the Theory and Practice of Film Adaptation. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005. Print. Wells-Lassagne, Shannon. “De l’écran à la page: Castle and Richard Castle’s Deadly Storm.” Bande dessinée et adaptation (littérature, cinéma, tv). Benoît Mitaine, David Roche, Isabelle Schmitt-Pitiot, eds. Clermont-Ferrand: Presses Universitaires Blaise Pascal, 2015. 299–310. Print. Whelehan, Imelda, and Cartmell Deborah. The Cambridge Companion to Literature on Screen. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007. Print. ———. Screen Adaptation: Impure Cinema. London/New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Print.

Secondary Sources: Television and Film Aardse, Kent. “Alternate reality Game, Narrative Disbursement and Canon: The Lost Experience.” Fan CULTure: Essays on Participatory Fandom in the 21st Century. Kristin M. Barton, Jonathan Malcolm Lampley, eds. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2013. 106–118. Print. Anderson, Christopher. “Overview: Producing an Aristocracy of Culture in American Television.” The Essential HBO Reader. Gary R. Edgerton and Jeffrey P. Jones, eds. Lexington: University Press of KY, 2008. 23–41. Print. Bazin, André. Qu’est-ce que le cinéma? Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 2002. Print. Bennett, Tara. Showrunners: The Art of Running a TV Show. London: Titan Books, 2014. Print. Bordwell, David. “Rhetoric in Action: Seven Models of Psycho.” Making Meaning: Inference and Rhetoric in the Interpretation of Cinema. Boston, MA: Harvard UP, 2007. 224–248. Print. Buckingham, David. Children’s Television in Britain: History, Discourse and Policy. London: BFI, 1999. Print. Caldwell, John T. Televisuality. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1995. Print. Cardwell, Sarah, and Steven Peacock, eds. “Good Television?,” Journal of British Cinema and Television, 3:1 (2006). Print. Clarke, M.J. Transmedia TV: New Trends in Network Serial Production. New York, NY/London: Bloomsbury, 2013. Kindle edition. Corliss, Richard. Talking Pictures: Screenwriters in American Cinema. New York: Overlook, 1985. Print.

Works Cited

201

Cornillon, Claire. “Quand les personnages de série écrivent des livres: effet de réel/effet de fiction.” Fictions contemporaines, sérialité et transmedia. Paris: Honoré Champion, forthcoming. Print. Creeber, Glen. Serial Television. London: BFI, 2005. Print. Davies, Màire Messenger. Children, Media, and Culture. New York, NY: McGraw Hill, 2010. Print. De Vito, John, and Frank Tropea. Epic Television Miniseries: A Critical History. Jefferson, NC/London: McFarland, 2010. Kindle edition. Dunne, Anne. “The genres of television.” Narrative and Media. Rosemary Huisman, Julian Murphet, Helen Fulton, eds. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005. 125–139. Print. Eaton, Rebecca. Making Masterpiece: 25 Years Behind the Scenes at Masterpiece and Mystery! On PBS. New York, NY: Viking Penguin, 2013. Kindle edition. Ellis, John. Visible Fiction (1982). New York, NY: Routledge, 1992. Print. Evans, Elizabeth. Transmedia Television: Audiences, New Media, and Daily Life. New York, NY: Routledge, 2011. Print. Farr, Cecilia Konchar. Reading Oprah: How Oprah’s Book Club Changed the Way America Reads. Albany, NY: State University of NY Press, 2005. Print. Favard, Florent. “La promesse d’un dénouement: énigmes, quêtes et voyages dans le temps dans les séries télévisées de science-fiction contemporaines.” PhD thesis, Université de Bordeaux, forthcoming. Print. Fine, Richard. Hollywood and the Profession of Authorship. Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1985. Print. Forrest, Jennifer, and Leonard R. Koos. “Reviewing Remakes: An Introduction.” Dead Ringers: The Remake in Theory and Practice. Jennifer Forrest and Leonard R. Koos, eds. Albany, NY: SUNY UP, 2002. 1–36. Print. Francis, James Jr. Remaking Horror: Hollywood’s New Reliance on Scares of Old. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2013. Print. Gledhill, Christine. “Speculations on the Relationship between Soap Opera and Melodrama.” American Television: New Directions in History and Theory. Nick Browne, ed. London/New York, NY: Routledge, 1993. 123–144. Print. Greenhalgh, Susanne. “The Eye of Childhood: Shakespeare, Performance, and the Child Subject.” Turning the Page: Children’s Literature in Performance and the Media. Fiona M. Collins and Jeremy Ridgman, eds. Bern: Peter Lang, 2006. Print. Harvey, Colin. Fantastic Transmedia: Narrative, Play and Memory across Science Fiction and Fantasy Storyworlds. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. Print. Hatchuel, Sarah. Rêves et séries américaines: la fabrique d’autres mondes. Aix-en-Provence, Rouge Profond, 2015. Print. ———. Lost: fiction vitale. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2013. Print. ———. “Play Within Film.” Cambridge Shakespeare Encyclopedia. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, Forthcoming. Print. ———. Shakespeare and the Cleopatra/Caesar Intertext: Sequel, Conflation, Remake. Lanham, MD: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 2011. Print. Hellekson, Karen and Kristin Busse. Eds. Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet: New Essays. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2006. Print. Higson, Andrew. English Heritage, English Cinema: Costume Drama since 1980. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. Print.

202

Works Cited

Hopkins, Lisa. “Mr. Darcy’s Body: Privileging the Female Gaze.” Jane Austen in Hollywood. Linda Troost, Sayre N. Greenfield, eds. Lexington: University Press of KY, 2001. 111–121. Print. Horton, Andrew, and Stuart Y. McDougal, eds. Play it Again, Sam: Retakes on Remakes. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. Print. Irvine, Colin. “Why 30 Rock Rocks and The Office Needs Some Work: The role of Time/Space in Contemporary Sitcoms.” Time in Television Narrative: Exploring Temporality in Twenty-First-Century Programming. Melissa Ames, ed. Jackson, MS: UP of Mississippi, 2012. 218–231. Print. Itzkoff, Dave. Mad as Hell: The Making of Network and the Fateful Vision of the Angriest Man in Movies. New York, NY: Times Books, 2014. Jacobs, Jason, and Steven Peacock, eds. Television Aesthetics and Style. London: Bloomsbury, 2013. Kindle edition. Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture. New York, NY: NYUP, 2006. Print. ———. Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture. New York, NY: NYUP, 2013. Kindle edition. Jowett, Lorna, and Stacey Abbott. TV Horror: Investigating the Dark Side of the Small Screen. London: I.B. Tauris, 2013. Print. King, Noel. “The Last Good Time We ever Had’: Remembering the New Hollywood Cinema.” The Last Great American Picture Show: New Hollywood Cinema in the 1970s. Alexander Horwath, Thomas Elsaesser, Noel King, eds. Amsterdam: Amsterdam UP, 2004. 19–36. Print. Kleinecke-Bates, Iris. Victorians on Screen: The Nineteenth Century on British Television 1994–2005. New York, NY: Palgrave McMillan, 2014. Print. Kozloff, Sarah. “Narrative Theory and Television.” Channels of Discourse, Reassembled: Television and Contemporary Criticism (1992). Robert C. Allen, ed. 2nd edition, Oxon: Routledge, 2003. 67–100. Print. Lanier, Douglas. Shakespeare and Popular Culture. Oxford: OUP, 2002. Print. Lavender-Smith, Jordan. “‘It’s not Unknown’: The Loose- and Dead-End Afterlives of Battlestar Galactica and Lost.” Time in Television Narrative: Exploring Temporality in Twenty-First-Century Programming. Melissa Ames, ed. Jackson, MS: UP of Mississippi, 2012. 56–68. Print. Lavigne, Carlen, ed. Remake TV: Remake, re-boot, recycle. Plymouth: Lexington Books, 2014. Print. Marc, David. “In search of the radio sitcom.”  The Sitcom Reader: America Viewed and Skewed. Mary Dalton, Laura R. Linder, eds. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005. 15–24. Print. Martin, Brett. Difficult Men: Behind the Scenes of a Creative Revolution: From The Sopranos and The Wire to Mad Men and Breaking Bad. London: Penguin, 2013. Print. McCabe, Janet and Kim Akass, eds. Quality TV: Contemporary American Television and Beyond. London/New York, NY: I.B. Tauris, 2007. Print. Metcalfe, Greg. DVD Novel: How the Way We Watch Television Changed the Television We Watch. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC–CLIO, 2012. Print. Metz, Christian. Le Signifiant imaginaire (1977). Paris: Christian Bourgois, 2002. Print. Mills, Brett. The Sitcom. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2005. Print. Mittell, Jason. Complex TV: The Poetics of Contemporary Television Storytelling. New York, NY/London: New York UP, 2015. Kindle edition.

Works Cited

203

———. Genre and Television: From Cop Shows to Cartoons in American Culture. New York, NY: Routledge, 2004. Print. ———. Television and American Culture. New York/Oxford, Oxford UP, 2010. Print. Newman, Michael Z., and Elana Levine. Legitimating Television: Media Convergence and Cultural Status. NY, NY/London: Routledge, 2012. Kindle edition. Price, Steven. The Screenplay: Authorship, Theory and Criticism. London/ New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2010. Print. Rascoli, Laura. “Time travel and Film Spectatorship in 12 Monkeys and Strange Days.” The Science Fiction Film Reader. Gregg Rickman, ed. New York, NY: Limelight Editions, 2004. 355–368. Print. Rebello, Stephen. Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho (1990). London: Marion Boyars, 2013. Print. Roche, David. Making and Remaking Horror in the 1970s and 2000s: Why Don’t They Do It Like They Used To? Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2014. Print. Solomonson, Ed, and O‘Neill, Mark. TV’s M*A*S*H: The Ultimate Guidebook. Albany, GA: BearManor Media, 2009. Print. Stuart, Sarah Clarke. Literary Lost: Viewing Television through the Lens of Literature. London: Bloomsbury, 2011. Print. Thiellement, Pacôme. Pop Yoga. Paris: Sonatine Éditions, 2013. Kindle edition. Thompson, Kristin. Storytelling in Film and Television. Boston, MA: Harvard UP, 2003. Print. Thompson, Robert J. Television’s Second Golden Age: From Hill Street Blues. NY, NY: Continuum Publishing, 1996. Print. Tredy, Dennis. “The Origins Of The TV Sitcom: Transgressional Comedy in the Early 1950’s.” 2015. Presentation. Verevis, Constantine. Film Remakes. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2006. Print. Wasko, Janet. Understanding Disney: The Manufacture of Fantasy. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001. Kindle edition. Weissmann, Elke. Transnational Television Drama: Special Relations and Mutual Influence between the US and the UK. London/New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Print. Wild, David. The Showrunners: A Season Inside The Billion-Dollar, Death-Defying, Madcap World Of Television’s Real Stars. New York, NY: Harper Colllins. 1999. Print. Wood, Robin. “An Introduction to the American Horror Film.” Movies and Methods: Volume 2. Bill Nichols, ed. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985. 195–220. Print. Zanger, Anat. Film Remakes as Ritual and Disguise: From Carmen to Ripley. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2006.

Secondary Sources: Literary Criticism and Theory Baratz-Logsted, Lauren. “Introduction.” This is chick lit. Dallas, TX: BenBella Books, 2013. 1–6. Print. Barth, John. The Friday Book. Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins UP, 1997. Print. Barthes, Roland. “Introduction à l’analyse structurale des récits” (1966). L’aventure sémiologique, Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1985. 167–206. Print.

204 Works Cited ———. “La mort de l’auteur (1968).” Le bruissement de la langue. Paris: Seuil, 1984. Print. Bergson, Henri. Le Rire: Essais sur la signification du comique (1900). Paris: Payot, 2011. Print. Bloom, Harold. The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (1973). Oxford: OUP, 1997. Print. Brooks, Peter. Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative. New York, NY: Vintage, 1984. Print. Debord, Guy. La Société du spectacle (1967). Paris: Gallimard, 1992. Print. Doody, Margaret Ann. “Introduction.” Samuel Richardson. Pamela: Or, Virtue Rewarded (1740). London: Penguin, 1981. Print. Ferriss, Suzanne. “Narrative and Cinematic Doubleness: Pride and Prejudice and Bridget Jones’s Diary.” Chick Lit: The New Woman’s Fiction. Suzanne Ferriss, Mallory Young, eds. New York, NY: Routledge, 2006. 71–84. Print. Ferriss, Suzanne, and Mallory Young. “Introduction.” Chick Lit: The New Woman’s Fiction. Suzanne Ferriss, Mallory Young, eds. New York, NY: Routledge, 2006. 1–13. Print. Fielding, K. J. “Dickens and International Copyright.” Bulletin: British Association for American Studies, No. 4 (Aug., 1962). 29–35. Print. Fitzpatrick, Kathleen. The Anxiety of Obsolescence: The American Novel in the Age of Television. Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt UP, 2006. Kindle edition. Flint, Kate. “The Victorian novel and its readers.” The Cambridge Companion to the Victorian Novel. Deirdre David, ed. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2012. 13–35. Print. Foucault, Michel. “Qu’est-ce qu’un auteur ? (1969).” Dits et écrits I, 1954–1975. Paris: Gallimard. 2001. Print. Harzewski, Stephanie. “Tradition and Displacement in the New Novel of Manners.” Chick Lit: The New Woman’s Fiction. Suzanne Ferriss, Mallory Young, eds. New York, NY: Routledge, 2006. 29–46. Print. Horkheimer, Max, and Theodor W. Adorno. “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception.” Dialectic of Enlightenment. Redwood City, CA: Stanford UP, 2002. 63–93. Print. Hornby, Nick. Shakespeare Wrote For Money. San Francisco, CA: Believer Books, 2008. Print. Huyssen, Andreas. After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism. Bloomington, IN: Indiana UP, 1986. Print. Iser, Wolfgang. The Implied Reader: Patterns of Communication in Prose Fiction from Bunyan to Beckett. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins UP, 1974. Jameson, Fredric. “Postmodernism and the Consumer Society.” The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the Postmodern, 1983–1998. London: Verso, 1998. 1–20. Print. Lejeune, Philippe. Le Pacte autobiographique. Paris: Seuil, 1975. Print. Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim. Laocoon: An Essay upon the Limits of Painting and Poetry (1766). Ellen Frothingham, trans. Mineola, NY: Dover, 2005. Print. Lyotard, Jean-François. La condition postmoderne. Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 1979. Print. McRobbie, Angela. Postmodernism and Popular Culture. London: Routledge, 1994. Print.

Works Cited

205

Mizejewsk, Linda. Hardboiled and High Heeled: The Woman Detective in Popular Culture. London: Routledge, 2004. Print. Ricoeur, Paul. Temps et récit Tome 2: La configuration dans le récit de fiction. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1984. Print. Saint-Gelais, Richard. Fictions transfuges : La transfictionnalité et ses enjeux. Paris: Seuil, 2011. Print. Teague, Fran. “Shakespeare and America.” The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare. Arthur F. Kinney, ed., Oxford: OUP, 2012. Print. Whelehan, Imelda. Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones’s Diary. London: Bloomsbury, 2002. Print.

Articles Cited Baudry, Jean-Louis. “Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus.” Film Quarterly, 28, no. 2 (Winter 1974–1975). 39–47. Print. Bazin, André. “À propos des reprises.” Cahiers du cinema. No. 5, September 1951. 52–56. Print. ———. “Le cinéma comme digeste.” La Revue des lettres modernes. No. 36–38, Summer 1958 (Cinéma et roman). 201–207. Print. ———. “Remade in USA.” Cahiers du cinéma. No. 11, April 1952. 54–59. Print. Jost, François. “La promesse des genres.” Réseaux. Vol. 15, No. 81, 1997. 11–31. Print. Kerr, Paul. “Classic Serials—to be continued.” Screen, 23:1. 1982. 6–19. Print. Leitch, Thomas. “Adaptation, the genre.” Adaptation. Vol. 1, No. 2. 2008. 106–120. Print. ———. “Twice-Told Tales: The Rhetoric of the Remake.” Film/Literature Quarterly 18, no. 3 (1990): 138–149. Print. Mittell, Jason. “Narrative Complexity in Contemporary American Television.” Velvet Light Trap. NO. 58, Fall 2006. 29–40. Print. Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” Screen 16:3. Autumn 1975. 6–18. Print. Truffaut, François. “Une certaine tendance du cinéma français.” Cahiers du Cinéma. No. 31. January 1954. 15–29. Print. Wallace, David Foster. “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction.” Review of Contemporary Fiction. 13:2 (1993: Summer). 151–194. Print. Wells-Lassagne, Shannon, and Geraghty, Christine. “Introduction.” Dossier “Opening pages, opening shots.” Screen (Summer 2015). 56 (2). 234–237. Print.

Webliography “2000 DOMESTIC GROSSES.” 2000 Yearly Box Office Results. Web. Accessed June 2015. Adalian, Josef. “Community Creator Dan Harmon on His Big Plans for Season Two” Culture Vulture. August 13, 2010. Web. Accessed January 2011.

“Alice (TV Series 1976–1985)” IMDb. Web. Accessed July 2015.

206

Works Cited

“Alice (TV Series 1976–1985)—Full Cast & Crew” IMDb. Web. Accessed July 2015. Astruc, Alexandre. “Naissance d‘une nouvelle avant-garde: la camera-stylo” L‘Écran français. No. 144. March 30, 1948. Web. Accessed July 2015. Barone, Matt. “Last Night on ‘The Leftovers,’ Damon Lindelof Atoned for ‘Lost’s’ Nikki and Paolo.” Complex. July 14, 2014. Web. Accessed July 2015.

Barr, Merrill. “Are Marvel Studios and Marvel Television Suffering a Communications Breakdown?” Forbes. April 23, 2015. Web. Accessed May 2015. Bentley, Jean. “‘Gracepoint’ showrunner defends killer reveal, shares Season 2 plans.” December 12, 2014. ZAP2It. Web. http://www.zap2it.com/ blogs/gracepoint_showrunner_defends_killer_reveal_shares_season_2_ plans-2014–12. Accessed July 2015. Berman, Marc. “Syfy Renews Drama ‘12 Monkeys’ for Season 2.” TV Media Insights. March 13, 2015. Web. Accessed May 2015. Birnbaum, Debra. “‘Game of Thrones’ creators: We Know How It’s Going to End.” Variety, April 15, 2015. Web. Accessed April 2015. Bryant, Steve. “What The Leftovers can learn from Lost.” Esquire. July 16, 2014. Web. Accessed July 2015. Campbell, Christopher. “What TV Show Should Get a Prequel Series While the Trend is Still Hot?” Film School Rejects. Web. Accessed February 2015.

Cardwell, Sarah. “Television Aesthetics.” Critical Studies in Television, 1:1 (2006), 72–80. Web. Accessed May 2016. < http://cdn.cstonline.tv/assets/file/ user_92/s9.pdf.> Chapman, Cameron. “The History of the Internet in a Nutshell.” Six Revisions. November 15, 2009. Web. Accessed May 2015. Charles, Ron. “Who will miss Jon Stewart most? Book publicists.” The Washington Post. February 11, 2015. Web. Accessed July 2015.

Consoli, John. “ABC’s Struggling ‘The Gates’ a Hit Online” The Wrap. July 16, 2010. Web. Accessed April 2015. Crawford, Shawn. “No time to be idle: the serial novel and popular imagination.” The World and I, Vol. 13, No. 11. November 1998. Web. Accessed March 2015. Cuse, Carlton. Reddit AMA. April 30, 2015. Web. Accessed July 2015.

Works Cited

207

Debnath, Neela. “Don’t moan about spoilers for Game of Thrones, the books were published years ago.” The Independent. April 6, 2014. Web. Accessed June 2014. Donadio, Rachel. “The Chick-Lit Pandemic.” The New York Times. March 19, 2006. Web. Accessed July 2015. Duchateau, Christian. “5 questions for ‘The Returned’ author Jason Mott.” CNN. September 2, 2013. Web. Accessed July 2015. Favard, Florent. “The Yellow Umbrella Syndrome: Pledging and Delaying Narrative Closure in How I Met Your Mother.” GRAAT Online. No. 15. April 2014. Web. Accessed April 2014. Fforde, Jasper. “Questions and Answers for Caitlin.” Jasper Fforde.com. Web. Accessed March 2015. ———. “Questions and Answers for Hodder (UK Publishers) January, 2001.” Jasper Fforde.com. Web. Accessed March 2015. ———. “Questions and Answers for il Giornale.” Jasper Fforde.com. Web. Accessed March 2015. ———. “Thursday Next ‘First Among Sequels’ Sub-Index Page.” Web. Accessed March 2015. Fienberg, Daniel. “25 Anticipated TV Premieres, Returns and Finales for 2010: ‘Lost,’ ‘Dollhouse,’ ‘Caprica’ and more.” Hitfix. January 1, 2010. Web. Accessed January 2015. ———. “‘Game of Thrones’ mastermind George R.R. Martin talks Blackwater, TV changes and playing favorites.” Hitfix. March 20, 2013. Web. Accessed January 2014. ———. “Post-Mortem: Co-showrunner Dan Futterman weighs in on the ‘Gracepoint’ killer reveal.” HitFix. December 12, 2014. Web. Accessed April 2015.

“Foreign Language.”  Movies at the Box Office. Web. Accessed June 2015.

Franzen, Jonathan. “Two’s Company.” The New Yorker. May 23, 2005. Web. Accessed March 2015. Frevele, Jamie. “The People At ‘Sesame Street’ Behind Those Amazing Parodies Tell Us How They Do It.” Uproxx. June 8, 2015. Web. Accessed July 2015.

Fuller, Todd. “Alice Season 1 DVD Review.” Sitcoms Online. Web. Accessed July 2015. “Gervais’ surprise at Globes win.” N.a. BBC News. January 26, 2004. Web. Accessed April 2015.

208

Works Cited

Greenwald, Andy. “Lost in Translation: Damon Lindelof returns to TV with HBO’s deeply dark ‘The Leftovers’.” Grantland. June 25, 2014. Web. Accessed July 2015. Goldberg, Leslie. “Marvel, ABC Set ‘The Inhumans’ TV Series.” The Hollywood Reporter. November 14, 2016. Web. Accessed November 2016. http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/live-feed/marvel-abc-set-inhumans-tv-series-947296. Hadas, Leora. “Authorship and Authenticity in the Transmedia Brand: The Case of Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.” Networking Knowledge. 7.1, 2014. 7–17. Web. Accessed June 2014. Halterman, Jim. “Bryan Fuller Breaks Down Homoerotic Charge of Hannibal.” Backlot. April 22, 2014. Web. Accessed April 2014. “Hardcover Fiction.” The New York Times. August 10, 2007. Web. Accessed July 2015.

Herring, Taylor. “Giant Mr. Darcy Launches Drama Channel.” N.d. Web. Accessed March 2015. Hibberd, James. “‘Gracepoint’ won’t get a second season” Entertainment Weekly. December 15, 2014. Web. Accessed April 2014. ———. “NBC’s ‘Hannibal’ contains ‘The Shining’ shout-outs” Entertainment Weekly April 4, 2013. Web. Accessed July 2013. Holmes, Adam. “How the Agents of SHIELD Midseason Finale Set Up The Inhumans.” Cinemablend. n.d. Web. Accessed May 2015. Hudelet, Ariane. “Un cadavre ambulant, un petit-déjeuner sanglant et le quartier Ouest de Baltimore : le générique, moment-clé des séries télévisées.” GRAAT Online. No. 6. December 2009. 1. Web. Accessed March 2012. Interview with David Foster Wallace on Charlie Rose (PBS, 1991–). May 17th, 1996. Web. Accessed March 2015. Itzkoff, Dave. “Jennifer Egan Discusses TV Plans for ‘A Visit From the Goon Squad’” The New York Times. April 21, 2011. Web. Accessed March 2015.

Jane Anders, Charlie. “The Real Reason Why Joss Whedon Named His Space Western Show Firefly” io9. July 31, 2014. Web. Accessed August 2014. Karni, Annie. “Hillary’s hair: She’s in on the joke.” Politico. May 28, 2015. Web. Accessed June 2015. Kipling, Rudyard. “The Five Nations/The White Man’s Burden.” Wikisource. Web. Accessed May 2015.

Works Cited

209

Lewis, Andy. “‘Castle’ Book Series Lives,” The Hollywood Reporter, May 20, 2016. Web. Accessed May 2016. “List of American television series based on British television series.” Wikipedia. Web. Accessed June 2015. “Lost Book Club.” Web. Accessed March 2015. “The Lost Book Club.” Web. Accessed March 2015. Lowry, Brian. “‘Gracepoint’ Finale Highlights ‘Broadchurch’ Remake’s Shortcomings” Variety. December 11, 2014. Web. Accessed April 2015. M, Heather. “Aaron Stanford, Travis Fickett, and Terry Matalas Talk 12 Monkeys [Exclusive]” TV Goodness. April 10, 2015. Web. Accessed March 2015.

MacDonald, Jay. “Jasper Fforde: Fantastic voyage.” Book Page. March 2004. Web. Accessed July 2015. “M*A*S*H TV Series (1972–1983)—Trivia.” IMDb. Web. Accessed July 2015.

McCabe, Joseph. “Exclusive: Producers Travis Fickett and Terry Matalas on Time Travel, Gender Swapping, and Syfy’s 12 Monkeys.” The Nerdist. January 17, 2015. Web. Accessed March 2015. McCormick, Casey J. “Making Sense of the Future: Narrative Destabilization in Joss Whedon’s Dollhouse.” Time in Television Narrative: Exploring Temporality in Twenty-First-Century Programming. Melissa Ames, ed. Jackson, MS: UP of Mississippi, 2012. 205–217. Print. McGee, Ryan. “Checking in on… Community.” Boob Tube Dude. February 22, 2011. Web. Accessed March 2015. McInnes, Paul. “Breaking Bad creator Vince Gilligan: the man who turned Walter White from Mr Chips into Scarface.” The Guardian. May 19, 2012. Web.

Memmott, Carol. “Chick lit, for better or worse, is here to stay.” USA Today. 21 June 2006. Web. Accessed July 2015. Methven, Nicola. “Top 10 memorable TV drama moments revealed with Mr.  Darcy’s lake scene in Pride & Prejudice topping list.” Irish Mirror. July 5, 2013. Web. Accessed July 2015. “Mhysa and Racism: The Great White Savior of Game of Thrones.” N.a. Disgruntled Critic. 24 June 2013. Web. Accessed January 2015.

210

Works Cited

Midgley, Neil. “Is Broadchurch just like The Killing?” The Telegraph. April 22, 2013. Web. Accessed May 2015. ———. “How British Television Fell Under the Spell of Nordic Noir.” The Telegraph. March 28, 2014. Web. Accessed July 2015. Minzesheimer, Bob. “How the ‘Oprah Effect’ changed publishing” USA Today. May 22, 2011. Web. Accessed March 2015. Mittell, Jason. “Forensic Fandom and the Drillable Text.” Web. Accessed January 2015. ———. “Sites of participation: Wiki fandom and the case of Lostpedia.” Transformative Works and Cultures, no. 3. 2009. Web. Accessed June 2015.

Moine, Raphaëlle. Remakes: Les films français à Hollywood. Paris: CNRS Éditions, 2007. Open Edition 2013. Web. Accessed July 2015. “Most Popular “Based on Comic” TV Series Titles.” IMDb. Web Accessed February 2015. “Most Popular “Based On Film” TV Series Titles.” IMDb. Web Accessed February 2015. “Most Popular “Based on Novel” TV Series Titles.” IMDb. Web Accessed February 2015. “Most Popular “Based On Play” Titles.” IMDb. Web Accessed February 2015.

Nededog, Jethro. “‘Community’: EP Dan Harmon explains Abed’s evolution” Zap2it. November 04, 2010. Web. Accessed January 2011. “The Odd Couple (1968).” IMDb. Web. Accessed January 2015. “The Odd Couple (1968).” Box Office Mojo. Web. Accessed January 2015.

Older, Daniel José. “Whitewashed TV isn’t just racist. It’s boring!” Salon. December 9, 2013. Web. Accessed January 2015. Oldham, Joseph. “Agents of Shield: Agency, Institutions and Transmedia Serialisation.” Critical Studies in Television Online. June 27, 2014. Web. Accessed September 2014.

Works Cited

211

O‘Neal, Sean. “HBO won’t be making The Corrections into a TV Show after all.” The A.V. Club. May 1, 2012. Web. Accessed July 2015. “Opening Credits for Episodes.” Vimeo. Web. Accessed January 2014. Pasick, Adam. “George R.R. Martin on His Favorite Game of Thrones Actors, and the Butterfly Effect of TV Adaptations.” New York Magazine. October 20, 2011. Web. Accessed January 2012. Peters, Steve. “What the hell is Transmedia.” Steve Peters: Experience Design. May 18, 2011. Web. Accessed July 2015. Poland, Michael. “Full of Wholes: Narrative Configuration, Completion, and the Televisual Episode/Season/Series.” GRAAT On-Line. No. 15, April 2014. Web. Accessed April 2014. Prudom, Laura. “Carlton Cuse on ‘Bates Motel’ Ending: This Isn’t a Show That Should Run for 10 Years.” Variety. June 6, 2014. Web. Accessed June 2015.

———. “‘Gracepoint’ vs. ‘Broadchurch’: How Fox’s Adaptation Differs From British Original.” Variety. July 21, 2014. Web. Accessed April 2015. Radish, Christina. “12 MONKEYS Interview: Creators Terry Matalas & Travis Fickett and Showrunner Natalie Chaidez.” Collider. January 23, 2015. Web. Accessed March 2015. Rahman, Aamer. “Game of Thrones and Racist Fantasy.” Artthreat. June 15, 2013. Web. Accessed January 2015. Recycled Movie Costumes. Web. Accessed March 2015. Rice, Lynette. “‘Broadchurch’ coming to Fox.” Entertainment Weekly. August 1, 2013. Web. Accessed May 2015. “The Rory Gilmore Book Club.” Web. Accessed March 2015. Rosenblum, Emma. “Community Creator Dan Harmon on Reference Humor, TV Love, and Whether Joel McHale’s Going to Grow a Beard.” Culture Vulture. February 4, 2010. Web. Accessed January 2011. Rowles, Dustin. “Here’s why ABC is the best broadcast network on television.” Uproxx. May 8, 2015. Web. Accessed May 2015. Ryan, Maureen. “‘Bates Motel’ Review: Checking In To TV’s New Horror Hotel” Huffington Post. March 14, 2013. Web. Accessed June 2015.

212 Works Cited ———. “‘Game of Thrones’ Third Season: How Many Episodes Will There Be?” The Huffington Post. November 11, 2012. Web. Accessed January 2014. Sepinwall, Alan. “Comic-Con 2013: ‘Hannibal’ panel live-blog.” Hit Fix. July 18, 2013. Web. Accessed July 2013. ———. “‘Hannibal’ producer Bryan Fuller on cannibal cuisine, renewal and more: How did the ‘Pushing Daisies’ creator avoid cloning previous Hannibal Lecter adaptations?” Hit Fix. June 19, 2013. Web. Accessed July 2013. Stack, Tim. “EP Carlton Cuse: ‘Bates Motel’ is one part ‘Friday Night Lights,’ one part ‘Lost’ and one part ‘Twin Peaks’.” Entertainment Weekly. March 18, 2013. Web. Accessed July 2013. Stanley, Alessandra. “Imports Suffering Identity Problems.” The New York Times. October 8, 2008. Web. Accessed April 2015. Sterritt, David. “‘Twin Peaks’ is Auteur TV.” The Christian Science Monitor. April 25, 1990. Web. Accessed July 2015. Sullivan, Brian Ford. “Live at the Paley Festival: Sci Fi’s “Battlestar Galactica/ Caprica.” The Futon Critic. April 20, 2009. Web. Accessed January 2015.

“There’s a New Girl in Town Lyrics by Alan and Marilyn Bergman & David Shires.” Lyrics on Demand. Web. Accessed January 2015. VanDerWerff, Todd. “Abed’s Uncontrollable Christmas.” The AV Club. December 9, 2010. Web. Accessed January 2011. ———. “Bryan Fuller walks us through Hannibal’s debut season.” The AV Club. July 24, 2013. Web. Accessed July 2013. ———. “Hannibal’s Bryan Fuller on blending Busby Berkeley with murder.” The A.V. Club. March 8, 2014. Web. Accessed July 2013. ———. “‘Cannibalism isn’t that big of a deal’: Bryan Fuller on Hannibal Lecter, the perfect devil.” Vox. June 4, 2015. Web. Accessed June 2015. ———. “Community: ‘Debate 109’.” The A.V. Club. November 13 2009. Web. Accessed December 2009. ———. “Hannibal’s Bryan Fuller on blending Busby Berkeley with murder.” The A.V. Club. March 8, 2014. Web. Accessed March 2014.

Works Cited  213 ———. “Interview: Community creator Dan Harmon.” The A.V. Club. September 23 2010. Web. Accessed January 2011. Wallace, Lewis. “Review: Caprica Spins Religion, Race Into Worthy Galactica Prequel.” Wired. April 20, 2009. Web. Accessed January 2015. Weinstein, Shelli. “‘Gracepoint’ and ‘Broadchurch’ Star David Tennant: ‘It’s Not Just Repeating the Same’.” Variety. October 1, 2014. Web. Accessed May 2015.

Wells-Lassagne, Shannon. “Crossing the Pond: Adapting The Office to an American Audience” TV/Series. No.2, November 2012. 171–187. Web. Accessed November 2012. ———. “High Fidelity: Adapting Fantasy Novels to the Small Screen.” TV Series No. 6. Florence Cabaret, Claire Cornillon, eds. December 2014. 109–122. Web. Accessed December 2014. ———. “Review of Jonathan Bignell’s conference: “Adventures between TV and film, and between Britain and America” (Journée thématique GUESTNormandie Séries/cinéma, 21 novembre 2014, Caen).” TV/Series. No. 6, December 2014. Web. Accessed December 2014. ———. “Transforming the traditional sitcom: Abed in Community” TV Series. No. 1, June 2012. pp. 455–466. Web. Accessed June 2012. Whitmire, Kendra Ann. “The Uses of Shakespeare on American TV 1990– 2010.” MA Thesis from the University of Birmingham, 2011. Web. Accessed March 2015. Williams, Holly. “Broadchurch - Finally, ITV makes a Killing: An eightparter about small-town lives is just the imitation Scandi-noir we’ve been waiting for.” The Independent. March 09, 2013. Web. Accessed May 2015.

Willmore, Alison. “Can ABC’s ‘Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.’ Save Itself From Being the Blandest Part of the Marvel Universe?” Indiewire. October 11, 2013. Web. Accessed December 2014. Wood, Jennifer M. “Bryan Fuller on Pushing Daisies, Dead Like Me, and Being Cancelled.” Esquire. March 19, 2015. Web. Accessed June 2015.

Artwork Cited Hirst, Damien. Mother and Child, Divided. 1993. Sculpture. ———. Some Comfort Gained from the Acceptance of the Inherent Lies in Everything. 1996. Sculpture.

This page intentionally left blank

Index

10 Commandments 17, 194 12 Monkeys (film) 6–20, 27–30 12 Monkeys (series) 6–20, 27–30 ABC 17, 22–3, 94–5, 98–100, 104, 118, 119, 142–3, 206, 211, 213 Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. see Marvel’s Agents of Shield Akass, Kim 57, 202 Alice (series) 31, 34, 41–2, 56, 57, 191, 205–6, 207, 212 Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (film) 34, 41–2, 56, 195 All in the Family 34, 35, 90, 191 Altman, Robert 34, 35, 41–4, 196 Amber Scott is Starting Over 162–6, 182, 198 American Horror Story 49, 191 Angel 49, 191 Austen, Jane 24, 33, 160–7, 173, 175, 182, 183, 187, 196, 202 Austenland 162–3, 182, 183, 195, 197 auteur see authorship authorship 5, 10–11, 18, 23–4, 85–6, 97, 99–102, 105, 110, 117, 119, 123–152, 160–1, 168, 175, 179, 180, 188, 189, 199, 201, 203, 204, 208, 212; showrunner 4, 5, 6, 10, 11, 18, 23, 28, 29, 48, 49, 53, 54, 59, 80, 86, 107, 108, 109, 110, 120, 125–141, 143, 145, 146, 147, 155, 179, 180, 196, 200, 203 Baetens, Jans 119, 178, 185, 198 Barth, John 25, 157, 180, 203 Barthes, Roland 43, 57, 125, 145, 203 Bates Motel 23, 127–141, 144, 146, 147–151, 191, 211, 212 Battlestar Galactica: Blood and Chrome 9, 191

Battlestar Galactica (1978) 6 Battlestar Galactica (2003) 6, 9, 11–14, 19, 29, 30, 48, 58, 122, 191, 202, 212 Baudry, Jean-Louis 19, 30, 205 Bazin, André 12, 25, 29, 92, 114, 122, 152, 200, 205 Bergson, Henri 21, 71, 86, 204 Berkeley, Busby 138, 152, 212 Bloch, Robert 23, 128, 134, 135, 148, 150, 196 Bloom, Harold 24, 30, 158, 181, 189, 204 Bluestone, George 5, 26, 156, 199 Boozer, Jack 125, 145, 199 Bordwell, David 150, 200 Breaking Bad 17, 108, 146, 191, 206, 209 Brideshead Revisited (miniseries) 33, 191 Bridge, The 4, 22, 90, 191 Bridget Jones’s Diary 24, 159–165, 174, 178, 181, 182, 183, 185, 195, 197, 204, 205 Broadchurch 91, 107–8, 110, 120, 121, 122, 191, 209, 210, 211, 213 Brooks, Peter 46–7, 58, 204 Buffy the Vampire Slayer 32, 35, 49, 53, 58, 113, 127, 148, 191, 195 canon 21, 24, 27, 31, 33, 66–78, 85, 93, 97–8, 105, 117, 126, 134, 155–156, 165–166, 170–171, 182, 187, 200 Caprica 6–20, 27–30, 50, 191, 207, 212, 213 Cardwell, Sarah 27, 33, 46, 49, 55, 57, 58, 59, 183, 199, 200, 206 Cartmell, Deborah 5, 7, 25, 27, 71, 117, 198, 199, 200

216 Index Castle 72–3, 78, 86, 99–106, 119, 127, 143–4, 152, 191, 197, 198, 200, 209; Derrick Storm graphic novels 100–4, 119, 197; Nikki Heat books 100–106, 119, 143–144, 152, 198 Cheers 14, 32, 45, 191 chick lit 24, 159–170, 173–175, 178, 181, 182, 183, 203, 204, 207, 209 Clarke, M.J. 117, 119, 200 Cold Case 51, 191 Community 22, 79–83, 85, 87, 120, 192, 205, 209, 210, 211, 212, 213 credits 15, 18, 29, 42–4, 57, 74–5, 85, 91, 110, 113, 117, 150, 151, 164, 211 Cuse, Carlton 128–132, 147, 151, 180, 206, 211, 212 Dallas 11, 45, 192 Davies, Andrew 65, 67, 85, 162, 164, 167, 183, 201 Debord, Guy 158, 181, 204 Delillo, Don 157–8, 180, 197 Derrick Storm graphic novels see Castle Dexter 23, 127, 192, 198 Dickens, Charles 32, 33, 55, 68, 84, 88, 115, 156, 159, 197, 204 Disney 22, 23, 88, 95, 98, 99, 106, 117, 118, 142, 144, 152, 203 Dollhouse 28, 49, 59, 192, 207, 209 Double Indemnity 78, 195 Dynasty 11, 45, 192 Ehrin, Kerry 128, 129, 132, 147 Elliot, Kamilla 5, 26, 64, 69, 70, 84, 160, 179, 199 Ellis, John 173, 184 Evans, Elizabeth 152, 201 Eyre Affair, The see Thursday Next fanfiction tropes 97, 105, 106, 117, 118, 119, 200, 201 Fargo 20, 49, 63, 192 Favard, Florent 58, 201, 207 Fforde, Jasper 9, 24, 159, 161–2, 167, 169–174, 176–8, 181, 182, 183, 184, 185, 197, 207, 209 fidelity debate 5, 8, 10, 19–20, 26, 28, 29, 50, 64, 71–2, 78, 86, 90, 92–93, 104, 108, 112, 114, 188, 200, 213

Fielding, Helen 24, 115, 159–162, 174–175, 178, 181, 182, 197, 204, 205 film noir 13, 25, 29, 30, 78, 92, 116, 121, 167, 200, 210, 213 Firefly 49, 58, 192, 208 First Among Sequels see Thursday Next novels 159, 168, 172, 181, 183, 184, 185, 197, 207 Fitzpatrick, Kathleen 24, 30, 158, 178, 181, 204 Forbrydelsen 90, 120, 121, 192, 210, 213 Forrest, Jennifer 29, 56, 92, 116, 117, 151, 152, 199, 201 Forsyte Saga, The 50, 58, 192 Foucault, Michel 125, 127, 145, 204 Franzen, Jonathan 156, 157, 180, 197, 207 Fuller, Bryan 128–131, 136–141, 147, 148, 150, 151, 152, 208, 212, 213 Game of Thrones 4, 10, 13, 26, 28, 32, 36, 50–54, 59, 60, 109, 120, 155, 187, 192, 206, 207, 209, 211, 212 Gates,The 9, 28, 192, 206 Gaudreault, André 5, 90, 92, 116, 199 Geraghty, Christine 5, 26, 59, 64, 84, 86, 88, 98, 115, 199, 205 Gilmore Girls 157, 192 Girls 48, 192 Good Soldier, The 45, 197 Gracepoint 91, 107, 110, 114, 120, 121, 122, 192, 206, 207, 208, 209, 211, 213 Great Expectations 24, 32, 48, 55, 65, 181, 197 Hadas, Leora 94, 117, 152, 208 Hamlet 18, 65, 66, 69, 77, 84, 88, 179, 198 Hannibal 23, 127–152, 192, 208, 212 Happy Days 36, 65, 178, 192 Harris, Charlaine 28, 197 Harris, Thomas 128, 133, 134, 136, 140, 141, 148, 150, 152 Harvey, Colin 89–90, 92, 116, 201 Harzewski, Stephanie 160, 182, 183, 204 Hatchuel, Sarah 95, 108, 118, 120, 133, 134, 146, 148, 201 Heritage film 24, 46, 165, 183, 201

Index  217 hierarchies of culture see postmodernism Higson, Andrew 24, 164, 166, 183, 201 Hitchcock, Alfred 128, 134, 135, 137, 148, 150, 196, 199, 203 Homeland 22, 90, 192 House of Cards (UK) 66, 91, 113, 192; (US) 22, 66, 85, 91, 113, 192 Hudelet, Ariane 42, 57, 82, 87, 208 Hunter, I.Q. 92, 106, 117, 136, 199 Hutcheon, Linda 16, 29, 64, 84, 124, 145, 156, 179, 199 influence of radio 3–4, 25, 31, 34, 35, 56, 122, 202 influence of theater 3, 11, 36, 40, 41, 64, 69, 72, 73, 77, 178 Irish R.M., The 45, 182, 192 Iron Man: Armored Adventures 27, 192 Iser, Wolfgang 93, 117, 204 Jameson, Frederic 174, 184, 185, 204 Jane Eyre 24, 63, 161, 162, 167, 182, 197 Jenkins, Henry 22, 89, 94, 106, 116, 120, 178, 185, 202 Jetée, La 6, 26, 195 Jewel in the Crown 45, 192 Just Shoot Me 69–71, 78, 193 Kerr, Paul 165, 183, 205 Killing, The (US series) 4, 90, 120, 193 Killing, The (Danish series) see Forbrydelsen King Lear 69–71, 78, 198 Kipling, Rudyard 52, 208 Koos, Leonard R. 29, 56, 92, 116, 117, 151, 152, 199, 201 Kubrick, Stanley 137, 150, 151, 196 Laverne and Shirley 36, 193 Law and Order 11, 193 Leitch, Thomas 5–6, 7, 19,26, 27, 30, 35, 36, 56, 66, 84, 85, 130, 134, 148, 149, 199, 205 Lejeune, Philippe 49, 59, 204 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim 5, 51, 59, 88, 115, 204 Levine, Elana 125, 126, 145, 157, 203 Lone Ranger, The 77, 193 Lonesome Dove 33, 193

Loock, Katherine 184, 199 Lord of the Rings, The (films) 92, 117, 199 Lost 4, 22, 24, 26, 28, 40, 48, 49, 51, 58, 68, 84, 89, 93, 95, 116, 117, 118, 129, 147, 151, 157, 180, 193, 201, 202, 203, 206, 207, 208, 209, 210, 212 Lost in Austen 167, 173, 193 Manhunter 133, 136, 196 Marion, Philippe 5, 90, 92, 116, 199 Martin, Amy 170, 184, 199 Martin, George R.R. 10, 28, 50, 54, 60, 120, 155, 207, 211 Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D 22, 95–9, 117,118, 127, 143–4, 179, 208, 210, 213 Mary Sue see fanfiction tropes M*A*S*H (film) 42–44, 196; MASH (novel) 42–4, 197; M*A*S*H (series) 42–44, 193 Masterpiece Theater 45, 58, 59, 106, 193, 201 Matrix, The 89, 93, 116, 195, 196 McCabe, Janet 26, 57, 200, 202 McFarlane, Brian 31, 43–4, 57, 64, 200 McRobbie, Angela 174, 185, 204 Metz, Christian 156, 179, 202 microadaptation 21–2, 63–87, 188 miniseries 20, 30–3, 45–6, 48–50, 55, 56, 57, 58, 63, 65, 162, 164, 165, 201 Mittell, Jason 4, 11, 26, 28, 29, 34, 45, 47, 48, 50, 57, 58, 59, 89, 93, 95, 96, 103, 104, 116, 124, 125, 127, 129, 130, 141, 145, 146, 147, 152, 178, 185, 202, 205, 210 Moine, Raphaelle 26, 113, 116, 117, 122, 210 Monty Python’s Flying Circus 169–170, 173, 193 Moonlighting 21, 32, 74, 75, 77, 78, 86, 193 Mork and Mindy 36, 193 Mulvey, Laura 183, 205 Munsters, The 23, 127, 129, 193 Muppet Babies 27, 66, 84, 85, 192, 193 Naremore, James 145, 152, 198, 200 New Hollywood 42, 43, 57, 202

218 Index New Wave, The 123, 124, 134 Newman, Michael Z. 125, 126, 145, 147, 203 Nikki Heat books see Castle Nobb, David 170, 184, 198 novelization 93, 100, 101, 103, 104, 119, 158, 178, 185, 187, 198 Odd Couple, The (series) 31, 36–41, 43, 56, 193, 210; Odd Couple, The (film) 34, 43, 56, 196, 198, 210; Odd Couple, The (play) 34, 43, 56, 210 Office, The (US) 4, 22, 29, 33, 91, 110–113, 121, 193; Office, The (UK) 4, 22, 29, 33, 91, 110–113, 121, 193 Oliver Twist 68, 78, 197 Once Upon a Time 22, 98, 99, 127, 142–143, 193 Oprah Winfrey’s Book Club 24, 156, 157, 180, 189, 193, 201, 210 Orange is the New Black 48, 187, 193 “Ozymandias” 17, 29 Ozzie and Harriet 35, 193 Pallisers, The 17, 50, 193 Palmer, Barton 25, 30, 200 paratext 93, 96, 97, 99, 114, 129, 141, 144, 145, 149 Pickwick Papers, The 32, 197 postmodernism 5, 79, 83, 159, 173–178, 181, 184, 185, 189, 204; hierarchies of culture 5, 6, 174, 175, 177 Price, Steven 123, 125, 145, 203 Pride and Prejudice (novel) 24, 33, 45, 160–161, 162, 167, 168, 175, 182, 187, 196, 204; Pride and Prejudice (BBC miniseries 1995) 24, 33, 45, 162, 163, 167, 183, 187, 193; Pride and Prejudice (1980) 33, 45 Psycho (film) 23, 94, 117, 128, 133–137, 150, 196; Psycho (novel) 23, 117, 128, 133–137, 150, 196 quality television 5, 21, 31, 44, 46, 56, 57, 84, 127 Raengo, Alessandra 26, 30, 84, 116, 199, 200 Rear Window 72, 73, 196

reboot 7, 9, 11, 12, 20, 58, 65, 88, 131–137, 148, 151 Red Dragon 133, 134, 136, 140, 141, 148, 150, 152, 196, 197 remake 7, 11, 12, 22, 26, 29, 35, 39, 56, 88, 90–94, 106–110, 116, 117, 120, 121, 122, 129, 139, 148, 149, 150, 151, 152, 175, 184, 199, 201, 202, 203, 205, 209, 210 Ricoeur, Paul 55, 60, 205 Rise and Fall of Reginald Perrin, The 170–172, 184, 192, 198 ritual 11, 40, 41, 64, 140, 203 Roche, David 119, 149, 151, 200, 203 Romeo and Juliet 65, 69, 84, 109, 196, 198 Roots 45, 193 Saint-Gelais, Richard 7–8, 27, 134, 149, 205 Salem’s Lot 45, 196 Sanford and Son 34, 90, 193 Scorsese, Martin 34, 41, 42, 43, 57, 195 seriality 21, 31, 44–55, 58, 95, 104, 144, 172, 189 showrunner see authorship Silence of the Lambs, The 136–137, 148, 150, 196 Sitcom 3–4, 12, 20–22, 24, 25, 26, 29, 31, 33, 34–44, 45, 47, 56, 65, 68–87, 90, 172, 173, 202, 203, 207, 213 soap opera 11, 28, 31, 45, 46, 48, 50, 55, 119 Sookie Stackhouse novels10, 28 Sopranos, The 24, 146, 180, 194, 202 spinoff 7, 14, 44 Stam, Robert 26, 30, 64, 84, 116, 199, 200 Star Trek 9, 128, 194 Starsky and Hutch 96, 100, 194, 196 Steptoe and Son 34, 194 Super Why 66, 67, 85, 194 Syfy 9, 11, 17, 28 Taming of the Shrew, The 21, 74–8, 86, 198 Thompson, Kristin, 4, 25, 35, 203 Thompson, Robert J 5, 25, 44, 46, 56, 57, 203 Thorn Birds, The 33, 45, 56, 194

Index 219 Thursday Next novels 24, 159, 161, 162, 167, 168, 169, 172, 173, 176, 184, 197, 207; Eyre Affair, The 161, 167, 182, 197; First Among Sequels 159, 168, 172, 181, 183, 184, 185, 197, 207 Till Death Us Do Part 34, 35, 194 transécriture 5, 26, 116, transfiction 7–8, 27, 89, 134, 149, 205 transmedia adaptation 8, 22, 27, 88, 89, 90, 92–107, 114, 115, 116, 117, 118, 119, 127, 141–145, 152, 179, 182, 185, 188–189, 199, 200, 201, 208, 210, 211 transnational adaptations 4, 22, 55, 89–92, 106–115, 116, 120, 121, 122, 159, 188–189, 203 Trapper John M.D. 26, 42, 194 True Blood 10, 194 True Detective 49, 155, 190, 194 Truffaut, François 124, 145, 195, 196, 205 Twilight Zone 23, 49, 127, 155, 194 Twin Peaks 96, 100, 126, 147, 148, 151, 194, 196, 212

Vampire Diaries 32, 194 VanDerWerff, Todd 85, 87, 147, 150, 152, 212 Vanity Fair (novel) 45, 101, 181, 198; Vanity Fair (1998) 45, 194; Vanity Fair (1967) 45, 194 Verevis, Constantine 56, 92, 94, 117, 150, 184, 199, 203 Vertigo 30, 63, 196 Wallace, David Foster 155–7, 173, 174, 179, 198, 205, 208, 213 Weisseman, Elke 92, 117, 203 Wells-Lassagne, Shannon 59, 87, 118, 119, 121, 199, 200, 205, 213 Whedon, Joss 49, 53, 58, 59, 95, 96, 113, 143, 195, 196, 208, 209 Whelehan, Imelda 5, 7, 25, 27, 71, 117, 161, 163, 164, 182, 198, 199, 200, 205 Wishbone 66–8, 85, 194 Wizard of Oz, The 85, 86, 196 Wood, Robin 134, 149, 203