10 TV Shows That Were Right To Deviate From The Source Material

Adaptation is a tricky thing, especially when the source material has a devoted army of fans with itchy Twitter-fingers. How best to take material written for one form and transfer it to another? After all, television, film, prose and comics all have their own individual quirks and tics. Quite apart from the differences in production, audiences will consume the product differently, and a set-up, character or concept that works in one medium will absolutely fall to pieces in another. Yet people still seem bound and determined to take characters, concepts and events that make a narrative work in one form, and cut n€™ paste them into another in order to find a new, wider audience. Often novelists will find that a book that has good word of mouth in the publishing industry may receive offers to option it for a cinematic adaptation before the bloody thing€™s even been published. That usually makes fans of the original narrative livid, convinced (admittedly, though long experience), that they€™re about to see their precious property carved into pieces and, like suspiciously cheap supermarket chicken, processed, reformed and packaged into a more homogenous form. They€™re not wrong - everyone who had a hand in the Halle Berry Catwoman movie clearly needs to be made to watch it every day for the rest of their lives as punishment - but this article is about the occasions when changes along the way to creating a television version of a property were eminently justified. After all, while film can often be about empty spectacle and pandering to the huge audience necessary to make a profit, television is a writer's medium - a storyteller's medium. These are the shows that were 100% correct to deviate from their source material.