2 Novels That Should Become TV Shows

kraken novel A New Golden Age of Television is upon us, or so it seems. TV is coming into its own with recent classics such as The Wire, Deadwood, Breaking Bad, Friday Night Lights, Mad Men, etc. The list goes on and on, and even accounting for taste (personally I€™m not as enamored with Homeland, for example, as many people are) this is a good time for the medium. Partly this is the medium coming into its own storytelling-wise and attracting a growing number of big name writers, directors, and actors. It is also partly because technology has allowed TV to tell the kinds of stories that not so long ago would have required a movie€™s budget to do it justice. Television€™s new flexibility and scope has made it the perfect home for new ideas and adaptations. TV adaptations of novels aren€™t a new concept. The BBC, for one, has made an industry out of exporting a seemingly endless stream of Dickens, Austen, Brontë, and Collins adaptations. But with Game of Thrones we have one of TV€™s most popular shows adapted from a series of novels, and fantasy novels at that. This seems to have further opened the door with HBO is planning a 6-season adaptation of Neil Gaiman€™s American Gods, and after what seems an eternity spent trying to cut Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell down to a movie-sized script, the BBC and BBC America are now taking the sensible route of turning it into a miniseries. This, naturally, leads to the question of what other previously untapped novels could benefit from TV€™s new reach and its capacity for long-term storytelling. The possible answers could fill bookshelves (and TV Schedules). Here are 2 different and somewhat idiosyncratic suggestions...
 
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Antonio Urias is a New Yorker born and bred. He was raised on a steady diet of grapes and books, often fantasy, and spent an inordinate amount of time telling stories, often involving cowboys. Not much has changed in the intervening years. He still loves grapes. He still loves fantasy. And he’s still telling stories, though these days there are less cowboys.