Cautiously optimistic?

April 28, 2020 4:52 AM

Terry Pratchett novels to get ‘absolutely faithful’ TV adaptations.
posted by Literaryhero (41 comments total)

I am optimistic because Rhianna Pratchett is involved. I really liked her decision to not write more Discworld books.
posted by Pendragon at 5:23 AM on April 28, 2020 [13 favorites]

There's been a lot of relatively faithful adaptations that have nevertheless been lacking, while the Good Omens adaptation takes some surprising liberties (although I still think they needed to go a bit further - nuclear Armageddon is a very 80s fear).

But then given The Watch, which took some exciting liberties and then kept taking more and more until it's become a vaguely-inspired steampunk thing that looks very unpromising, I can see why announcing a more faithful adaptation would be what the current copyright holders want.
posted by Merus at 6:29 AM on April 28, 2020 [8 favorites]

I was a fan of Going Postal, which I thought got it pretty much exactly right.
posted by overhauser at 6:32 AM on April 28, 2020 [13 favorites]

When I saw the first pictures of The Watch, I thought they had just decided not to set it on Discworld at all. Taht seemed like a decent choice, honestly... you don't NEED Discworld to tell a story about fantasy characters living in cities. But when they said it was still on Discworld, just one furnished with stuff from our world.... that was less cool.

I'm still interested in how they tell the stories, but would still love to see more faithful stuff. Just give us the Wee Free Men that Jim Henson Shop is supposedly working on, and the animated Bromeliad!
posted by skullhead at 6:34 AM on April 28, 2020 [2 favorites]

Like Pratchett himself would say, I'll believe it when they are on the screen and I am in front of them. But with Rhianna Pratchett and Wilkins involved, it seems that they would rather not do something at all than do it poorly, so if it does show up, I am going to want to trust it.

I think Small Gods would be a very good stand-alone book for adaptation, with sword-and-sandal appeal, but it doesn't give the viewer the feel of Discworld as a whole, which they might prefer. Nation would make a terrific movie, but then that isn't Discworld.

"... However, they of course wish The Watch all the best."

"I will observe your future endeavors with considerable interest."
posted by Countess Elena at 7:00 AM on April 28, 2020 [10 favorites]

Can anyone recommend a Discworld adaptation that doesn’t embarrass you when other people watch it and are like wait, this...this is the thing you love?

I ask because I fear it’s just that the books aren’t adaptable. They’re sort of fantasy cozies that lean heavily on Pratchett’s authorial voice, and every single element of that is difficult, if not impossible, to adapt to a visual medium. Maybe they just aren’t cinematic books. I’d love to see a counterexample if only to see how they did it.
posted by schadenfrau at 7:17 AM on April 28, 2020 [19 favorites]

I was a fan of Going Postal, which I thought got it pretty much exactly right.

Heh, I was going to say maybe the Moist von Lipwig conman stories are the only really cinematic ones...hey it’s streaming on Amazon, too!
posted by schadenfrau at 7:20 AM on April 28, 2020 [2 favorites]

I think the dialogue is a bit of a problem if it's filmed word-for-word. It works well on the page but it doesn't sound much like actual speech.
posted by TheophileEscargot at 7:27 AM on April 28, 2020

Hmm, here in Canada on Amazon prime I still need Acorn.tv to get Going Postal. Whatever that is. Luckily there is a free trial of that.
posted by PennD at 7:30 AM on April 28, 2020

Guards! Guards! has a Rosencranz and Guildenstern Are Dead feel. Maybe Tom Stoppard can be wrangled to write the script.

As for adaptations I recommend a "wall of dialogue" (and I think of Stoppard as a wall of intelligent dialogue).

I hope "faithful adaptation" allows for the transition to film. Stephen King's The Shining the Miniseries is a faithful adaptation of the book. Kubrick's The Shining was not. (That is an extreme example)
posted by dances_with_sneetches at 7:31 AM on April 28, 2020

Guards! Guards! would be my choice for an adaptation.

I think this is a bad idea overall, regardless of what names are in the mix of production. CG is going to screw this up, I guarantee it. The charm of Pratchett is that you just accept the environments and the weird characters. His books started as parodies! They got vastly better when the parody side was pushed to the back and the tropes were just presented as matter-of-fact.

Goggling over CGI establishing shots and rendering details on trolls and goblins is going to make for a mess. Happy to be wrong, but I don't have much hope for this.
posted by SoberHighland at 7:44 AM on April 28, 2020 [5 favorites]

I can see how adapting Pratchett has the same problems you get with Douglas Adams. So much of what happens is in the narration. So you either end up burying the audience in voiceover, or you get a greatly diminished thing.

I thought the BBCs Hogfather nailed it pretty well. It won't appeal to folks who demand MCU-level CGI for everything, but it was never going to.

And dear god yes would I love a Nation movie.
posted by skullhead at 7:53 AM on April 28, 2020 [7 favorites]

Am I the only one who wasn't immediately put off by the first stills from The Watch. Ankh-Morpork is on the verge of getting their equivalents to steam trains and organized football and the telegraph. I never really pictured the Discworld as a late 19th-century steampunk world either, but judging by where Pratchett took the books it's much closer to the 19th century than to whatever medieval fantasy trappings people expect of it. Regency era at least.
posted by thecjm at 7:59 AM on April 28, 2020 [2 favorites]

They made Sybil thin. That was a death knell right there.
posted by pharm at 8:02 AM on April 28, 2020 [15 favorites]

Yep, Douglas Adams, Terry Pratchett, and P. G. Wodehouse all seem to fall into this "un-adaptable" bucket, where you can be scrupulously faithful in how you depict the events and dialogue of the source text, but still end up with something that's...mildly amusing at best. Because most of the humor is in the narrative voice, not the events themselves.
posted by Ipsifendus at 8:11 AM on April 28, 2020 [4 favorites]

Yes, the humor is in the voice. That's the thing with adaptations - there's no one right way to do them. The only right way is to have a hundred different storytellers making their own version of it, like Sherlock Holmes. We've all got our favorite versions of it, but they are all just interpretations.

I did love hogfather.
posted by rebent at 8:16 AM on April 28, 2020 [2 favorites]

given how many people simply won't read anything that isn't an interwebs rant, I choose to go with the aforementioned cautious optimism with regard to this news. Because we simply (complicatedly?) need to expose more people to the wit, wisdom, humanity, imagination, skeptical and hilarious magnificence that is Discworld.
posted by philip-random at 8:30 AM on April 28, 2020 [2 favorites]

If anyone can figure out how to make the footnotes work in a tv show, I'd love to see it.
posted by RakDaddy at 8:38 AM on April 28, 2020 [4 favorites]

Closed caption text for the footnotes?
posted by evilDoug at 8:50 AM on April 28, 2020 [1 favorite]

Yep, Douglas Adams, Terry Pratchett, and P. G. Wodehouse all seem to fall into this "un-adaptable" bucket

Hey, Jeeves and Wooster was a pretty great show! IMO the key to its success was it didn't try to replicate the authorial voice via a narrator. Narrators are far too blunt an instrument for conveying the voice of these writers. Instead, J&W conveyed the necessary tone by relying heavily on directorial choices (languid pacing, long wordless sequences of Jeeves preparing a tray or Bertie 'stealthily' following someone across a meadow) and taking advantage of the stellar cast's acting (physical comedy, close-ups of the little flickers of Jeeves's eyebrow or Bertie's bugged out eyes).

Contrast with, say, the narration in Good Omens. It was pretty spectacularly bad even though it was Pratchett/Gaiman verbatim, and the narrated bits were so much worse compared to any of the scenes that were just scenes of the actors doing their thing.
posted by MiraK at 8:59 AM on April 28, 2020 [9 favorites]

Came to defend the honor of the Wooster's and pleasantly surprised I was beaten to it!
posted by Carillon at 9:15 AM on April 28, 2020 [3 favorites]

The other issue with the narration in Good Omens is it makes no sense in the story: having God be both the warm bemused narrator as well as a distant capricious pseudo-antagonist is hard to reconcile narratively.
posted by Ian A.T. at 9:30 AM on April 28, 2020 [4 favorites]

Start with Strata.
posted by Chrysostom at 9:32 AM on April 28, 2020 [2 favorites]

Reaper Man. Done properly. Please. No twee bullshit. No David Jason.
posted by GallonOfAlan at 9:45 AM on April 28, 2020 [4 favorites]

It an entertainment ecosystem that seems obsessed with grim-dark — STILL — I'm not are how well Pratchett would fare. I think that GRRM and GoT set pretty high expectations for dramatic "adult" fantasy.

Pratchett, whom I liked, will come off pretty goofy and corny if the the humor was not well updated and worked by some really, really, professional comedic writers with an honest affection for the source material. You'd need nerd comics like Patton Oswald and Brian Posen - to assist in pulling off an adaptation. And that I'm afraid will piss off fans of the source material.
posted by Everyone Expects The Spanish Influenza at 10:54 AM on April 28, 2020

They made Sybil thin. That was a death knell right there.

Yeah, that hurt to see much more than the leathers and the closely cropped hair. Glad to see a PoC in that role and never want to distill characters down to their weight, but that's not Lady Sybil.
posted by thecjm at 11:02 AM on April 28, 2020 [4 favorites]

Far and away the best PG Wodehouse adaptations are BBC Radio 4's seven full-cast audio productions starring Richard Briers as Bertie and Michael Horden as Jeeves. These were recorded and first broadcast in the 1970s and (with the exception of The Mating Season which seems to have been lost) remain available on CD and Audible.
posted by Paul Slade at 12:30 PM on April 28, 2020 [1 favorite]

Here to cast another, ahem!, voice for radio or some other audio presentation. The best version of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy was the original radio series, the TV series and film were awful and the books unnecessary. The problem with TV or film is that someone has to interpret the images on the page and, because this is done to appeal to their notion of an audience, these never correspond to the images that I had to begin with.
posted by epo at 12:52 PM on April 28, 2020

Reaper Man. Done properly. Please.

I am sorry to inform you that Christopher Lee has shuffled off this mortal coil.
posted by bonehead at 1:23 PM on April 28, 2020 [3 favorites]

Yep, Douglas Adams, Terry Pratchett, and P. G. Wodehouse all seem to fall into this "un-adaptable" bucket, where you can be scrupulously faithful in how you depict the events and dialogue of the source text

Well, since in Adams case it's "source audio" not "source text", I think it's just a matter of how much you let the visual element interfere. It doesn't seem terribly hard to add say animation to the radio drama and have it turn out OK, although it's not really necessary either. In other words, it's already designed to be narration-heavy which is fine as long as you leave it that way.

(As opposed to Pratchett which is definitely a different kind of voice, I don't think written commentary translates to audio narration quite as smoothly)
posted by thefoxgod at 1:25 PM on April 28, 2020 [1 favorite]

MiraK: ...the narration in Good Omens. It was pretty spectacularly bad...

NOW HEY THERE
posted by computech_apolloniajames at 6:16 PM on April 28, 2020 [2 favorites]

I hope they don't whitewash TwoFlower again.
posted by King Sky Prawn at 6:26 PM on April 28, 2020 [1 favorite]

and the books unnecessary

As a books first (technically infocom game-first, though that was as you might expect a terribly confusing experience for several reasons) was my introduction to Hitchhiker's, I can't agree with this. I loved the radio series and while Arthur, Marvin, The Guide and Slartibartfast were perfect, Ford and Zaphod never really worked for me for some reason.
posted by Jon Mitchell at 9:41 PM on April 28, 2020

The books let the HHGG story reach a vast audience that didn't have access to the radio version, so I'm very happy they were published.
posted by Chrysostom at 10:53 PM on April 28, 2020

The best adaptation of a narration heavy story I’ve seen is the recent Netflix adaptation of A Series of Unfortunate Events, the choice to have the narrator on screen really worked there.
posted by Proofs and Refutations at 12:38 AM on April 29, 2020 [3 favorites]

They made Sybil thin. That was a death knell right there.

I forgot: not only did they make her thin, they made her much younger than the character as written to boot. A double blow. It would have been more honest to have ditched the character entirely & just said that they’d written her out. This way just screams "we don’t like having middle aged women in the media we produce". (I’m guessing it was a producer decision, it smells like it: A good writer ought to be delighted to get their teeth into a character like Sybil.)

Anyway, I agree with a lot of other commentary here that a lot of what makes Pratchett work is the tone & the narrative voice & it’s incredibly hard to pull that off in other media. Half of the "stuff that happens" is deliberately ironic - plot devices that exist purely because it’s traditional to have them, that kind of thing - and it’s really hard to write that kind of light ironical humour in visual media. It can be done, but it has to be baked in from the start & it needs a really talented writing team. Most of the adaptations I’ve seen so far have tried far to hard to be literal & just ended up as poor pastiches of the kind of thing that Pratchett was (lovingly) satirising in the first place. This is the same problem that plagues Wodehouse adaptations - the humour is in the tone & it’s really hard to translate that to a visual medium.

I continue to live in hope of a good adaptations that captures Pratchett’s unique voice though.
posted by pharm at 3:01 AM on April 29, 2020 [2 favorites]

"I am sorry to inform you that Christopher Lee has shuffled off this mortal coil."

Tʜɪs ᴄᴀɴ ʙᴇ ᴀʀʀᴀɴɢᴇᴅ.
posted by Evilspork at 3:30 AM on April 29, 2020 [2 favorites]

having God be both the warm bemused narrator as well as a distant capricious pseudo-antagonist is hard to reconcile narratively

the original strongly implies that God is aware of what's going on and is gently nudging things to a continuance. I don't have a significant problem with the adaptation encouraging that interpretation.

I forgot: not only did they make her thin, they made her much younger than the character as written to boot. A double blow. It would have been more honest to have ditched the character entirely & just said that they’d written her out. This way just screams "we don’t like having middle aged women in the media we produce".

The description of her role sounded like they'd radically reshaped the character - Lady Sybil started as a parody of posh English nobles in the late 20th century who have a lot of money and not a lot of responsibility but despair of the idea of being idle, so they throw themselves into something like gardening or horse breeding. That's why it's funny that she breed dragons, and that the dragons she breeds are pathetic. Lady Sybil the vigilante and last remnant of Ankh-Morpork nobility is straight-up incompatible with her book characterisation (and Anhk-Morpork as a whole, frankly - Vimes becoming a Duke to insult the rest of the nobility doesn't work if there's no entrenched nobility to be insulted).

The Marvel Universe has demonstrated how to do this properly - bring in another character who's closer to what you want instead of changing an existing character so wildly. If they'd cut Sybil entirely and named the character Susan Sto Helit, all the liberties they've taken with the character would be an asset instead of a liability.
posted by Merus at 6:19 AM on April 29, 2020 [3 favorites]

Maybe the younger Sybil makes sense given that the original book involves SPOILER ALERT lǝʌɐɹʇ ǝɯᴉʇ?
posted by PlusDistance at 6:43 AM on April 29, 2020

The linked article in The Guardian does a good job of summing up people's queasiness about The Watch. My favorite comment:

Like, I LOVE Discworld. I LOVE cyberpunk. But I also like windy days and fireworks, I wouldn’t try to combine the two.
posted by dannyboybell at 6:48 AM on April 29, 2020 [1 favorite]

I guess I'm just deeeeply cynical here, but I feel like someone took a look at all the Discworld books and realized that have a whole cinematic universe if they can make sure the adaptations basically look and feel the same.

(I will probably watch whatever I can get my hands on, but will probably watch it alone, because I don't know a lot of not-online people who read Pratchett and I'm not convinced these adaptations are ever "inflict this one someone else" level quality.)
posted by grandiloquiet at 6:53 AM on April 29, 2020 [1 favorite]