Fall Literary TV
If your life follows an academic calendar, then August might awaken in you the circadian sense of back to school season. In my home of the American Midwest, foliage balayaging from lush green to crisp hues of reds and amber is a signal that it is time to get my ass to class. The scent of heaps of fallen leaves mixing with freshly sharpened pencil dust in my hair means that order and routine are the new norm, but it can also mean less time all around.
New schedules can feel overwhelming, and it’s normal for reading to fall off our radars. Even though I am not in school anymore, something about autumn makes me feel pressed for time, maybe a relic of my 23 years in the education system.
I like to keep on my literary game with screen adaptations. You can browse my list of book to screen adaptations, and here are four I am planning to watch this fall:
Shop them here: Nine Perfect Strangers, Dune, Cherry, The Pursuit of Love
Literary TV but not an Adaptation?
Unsurprising (but still a marvel) is the fact that Sandra Oh can have chemistry with anyone on the TV screen. The Chair is a genre divergence from Killing Eve, yet Oh still shines. Here are all the academic archetypes covered on the show.
As for my actual feelings about the show? Tepid at best. I was unsatisfied. It played in the arena of social justice, exposing the problematic sexism and racism in academia, yet never dared to skim deeper than the surface. Don’t take my word for it though, please read Brandon Taylor’s instead.
More on TV Adaptations:
I have strong feelings that I don’t need to read every book before I see the movie, and I also feel comfortable at times only watching the screen adaptation. Here is a timely article from the Atlantic about the Rise of Must-Read TV and how it has changed the literary landscape. The article asserts that yes: TV adaptations are a form of literary prestige but ultimately no: adaptations have not dumbed down literature for mass consumption. As the article points out, “episodic plots, ensemble casts, and high-production-value settings—these are the features that, although not at all new to the novel (as flipping through George Eliot’s Middlemarch will quickly remind you), are newly central to fiction’s anticipatory relationship to the realities of streaming TV.”
Personally, I tend to avoid blockbuster books, unsure why a screenplay needed a novelization. However, this episode of the The Stacks Pod gave me some new ideas - Traci interviewed THE Quentin Tarantino about his novel based on his movie Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. He made a good case for reading the novel along with the movie. While I remain ambivalent, I appreciate the thought that novels can add more backstory to the characters and mirror cinematic structure.
Check out more must watch literary TV here. Or check out the LitHub ranking of top literature-loving characters.