Television and Adaptation

Given the current popularity of adaptation studies, and the public acclaim for a new “golden age” in television, it seems odd that there should not be a more extended analysis of where the two might meet. Indeed, both adaptation and television are taxed with similar grievous faults, being more commercial than their “purer” brethren ¹ —the cinema in general for television, and the art film in particular for film adaptations—or being too tightly tethered to their texts (whether it be the adaptation’s source text or the reign of the writer/producer in television) to take full advantage of their visual media. The hybrid nature of adaptation, the difficulty adaptation scholars have had in defining what constitutes an adaptation, an allusion, or a simple use of intertextuality, is similar to the heterogeneous nature of television, which was always the repository for film, news, variety shows, or talk shows in addition to the panorama of different types of television fiction we’ll be discussing here. The intersection of these two areas of study, then, center around some of the same issues, which may be either compounded or transformed when television broadcasts adaptations, providing new challenges and surprising innovations for those whose interests lie in either of these disciplines.