The Books Briefing: Where Books and TV Intersect
The past decade’s reappraisal of the television series as a major artistic medium for storytelling has expanded the overlap between books and TV. Many showrunners, including those adapting novels and nonfiction into episodic formats, have been recognized as narrative innovators and titans of influence in the creative entertainment industry—worthy of as much renown as filmmakers and novelists.
Sunday’s Emmys will feature several shows that began their critical life as books, including the Hulu adaptation of Based on Margaret Atwood’s 1985brutally visualizes asystem that forces many women into reproductive slavery. An Emmy-nominated take on Joseph Heller’s classic novel about the silly paradoxes underscoring the devastation of war—does its best to capture all the nuance of the nonlinear book, reformatting it into four hours of drama- and satire-packed TV. Last year, Showtime’s , inspired by Edward St. Aubyn’s series of novels aboutthe afflictions of the title character, received several nominations for translating the books’ lovely prose into cinematic imagery.
