Lessons in Adaptation (from the Disappointing TV Version of The Power)
Lessons in Adaptation (from the Disappointing TV Version of The Power)
April 20, 2023, 11:32 pm
Filed under: feminism, TV, writing | Tags: adaptation, back story, John Leguizamo, Naomi Alderman, Nice guys on TV, The Power, TV
For years now, I have been hotly anticipating the TV version of the novel, The Power. I would occasionally search for it on IMDB or Google, just to see when we might get a televised version of this book that kept me going in some difficult years. I was advised to read The Power by a friend around about the time dragons came into my life and I feel a kinship with Naomi Alderman and the world she created in her book. In case you haven’t read it, it’s the story of a power that teen girls develop which allows them to generate electricity from their hands. It changes the world and how it changes the world is illuminating. ⚡️ I bought a lot of copies of this book for many of the women in my life. It’s been an important book in recent years and I hoped the TV series would only further electrify me. ⚡️
I’ve only seen two episodes so far and so far it has not electrified me 🚫⚡️ and I’m writing this now to try and understand why and also give myself some notes, in case I ever get the chance to write a TV series.
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The first episode was written by the author of the book so I’m baffled by how it could be so disappointing. She wrote such a great book! How could she write such a bad TV episode? It was pretty much ALL exposition. Almost everything that happened pre dates the events of the book. It was just one back story after another, with no real sense of what was to come. It was set up, set up, set up, no pay off. Not much happened. A character, who isn’t that important in the book, accidentally set a couple of things on fire but those events were equally weighted with the posting of some Instagram comments. Another character (Roxy) gets dressed to go to a wedding, then she goes to the wedding, gets in some arguments, goes home and then her mom is murdered there. (This is pretty much the only thing that happens in this episode.)
And by contrast this murder scene is the moment that the novel really begins. There are a few preliminary literary prologues but then the novel opens with Roxy locked in the closet as the home invaders are killing her mo m. It is an inherently dramatic way to start a story. When it begins, we don’t know why this person is in a closet but we learn pretty quickly that she will get out and even more dramatic things will happen. It’s funny to me that a novel would be more dramatic than a TV show but it is, in fact the case. The author has undercut her own drama with “dramatic writing.”
Lesson for Me: Start in the middle of the action. The audience will catch up and it is much more exciting for them to not know things.
The first episode, aside from the murder, was pretty much all backstory. Maybe Alderman got excited to write it because it was the new stuff for her or maybe TV execs gave her “we need backstory” notes or maybe, given that there are quite a few playwrights in that writer’s room, they all got a little high on backstory. I don’t know what happened in this writer’s room but backstory is absolutely a trend in TV writing in these last several years. I haven’t read The Foundation books but I have it on reliable authority that the TV show is mostly invented backstory for the first twenty pages of the first book. That show, too, is stacked with playwrights. I don’t know why playwrights are so enamored of backstory these days. Maybe it’s something they get drilled into them MFA programs? But I am not a fan of the back story. Aside from slowing down the dramatic action, it kills a lot of mystery and intrigue. I don’t need to know why someone does something. I don’t need to understand why their childhood trauma made them stab someone or whatever. Just have them stab and let me wonder why they did it. If Othello were a contemporary American TV series, it would open with Iago as a child stumbling upon his mother’s affair with a “moor” or some shit. Can we not just let Iago be a villain who hates Othello for no good reason and goes too far?
Can we not have everything explained? If you absolutely have to put backstory in, please wait until we’re much further along in the series when I might at least find it an interesting explanatory flashback. But, truly, I’d be happy to have it disappear altogether.
Lesson for Me: If you feel tempted to explain why someone is the way they are — with backstory or a speech — don’t.
On a related theme, the TV series has already failed to do something that the novel did beautifully and that is, create mystery. The first thing in the novel (after an epigraph) is a letter from its “author” — a man whose name is not the name on the front cover of the book. That’s Mystery #1.
Mystery # 2 is the letter in response to that letter from someone with the first name of the author on the front cover (Naomi) and a reference to “this world run by men you’ve been talking about.” This Naomi is titillated by “male soldiers” and “boy crime gangs” and we have to wonder, “what is this backwards world?” Then when the narrative begins — its title page says “Ten years to go” and as the novel goes on that number counts down. We don’t know what happens in ten years but we have the whole novel to wonder about it.
The TV show opens with Toni Collette at a press conference and then flashes back with a title card that reads “Six months earlier” — which is not a particularly curiosity-inspiring title card.
Lesson for Me: A little thing like a title can create a whole lot of mystery and continue to drive curiosity through a whole experience.
Sometimes I feel like I can see the TV executives’ notes as I watch a show. In the case of The Power, when John Leguizamo showed up as the Mayor’s husband, I saw the TV execs’ note that said, “We need at least one more good man in this. We need a man who’s doing the right thing. We just need a little balance. We’ve got a lot of bad guys. We need a good guy we can root for.” So we get this nice guy dad and we like him because he’s played by John Leguizamo, and he’s a doctor who cares about teenage girls, like his daughter — and he’s a good husband who wants to help his wife express her rage. Where would this mayor be without her nice husband? (Well, in the book she’s already divorced when the story starts, so we can see where she’d be. In a much more powerful position, truthfully.)
But because this Nice Guy character is not at all necessary to the story, they have to come up with nice guy stuff for him to do. They get the mayor mad by having the governor tell her to not get her panties in a bunch — something no one has actually said directly to women since the 80s, I think, and then they have Nice Guy™️John Leguizamo encourage her, a forty something year old politician, to express her rage.
First, you’re asking me to believe that Toni Collette (age 50) doesn’t know how to express her rage?! Sorry, no. And then you’re asking me to believe that it takes an especially enlightened nice guy doctor to teach her how to break a plate? That she’s never been mad before in all her 50 years? Did this character miss the entire Trump administration? Believe me, she’s broken plates before — and she did not need her nice guy husband to release her somehow. But they surely added this scene so Nice Guy™️ had something to do that shows he’s not like the other guys.
It feels like this whole character arc is remedial feminism — like, “Hey fellas, did you know women could get angry too? Sometimes it takes a little while or some help from a friendly man to express it but those ladies have a lot of anger stored up if you know how to see it!”
Lesson for Me: If anyone ever insists you put a Nice Guy™️ in your work to balance it out, please break a plate and tell them to go fuck themselves. ⚡️
The other note I can practically hear from the execs is to appeal to the young people more. They beefed up the part of the Mayor’s teen daughter and created some of the dumbest conflict between mother and daughter because somehow they thought it would be interesting to have the teen express her anger on an Instagram-like platform. (Don’t they know kids don’t use Instagram? That’s a Millennial platform! Kids are maybe still on TikTok. Even I know that and I don’t even have kids.) So — they’re, like, trying to appeal to teens — because I guess the two working class teen girls weren’t enough? They needed a weird argument where the privileged teen is mad her mom doesn’t spend enough time with her? What sort of teens are those? I know kids these days are closer to their parents than my generation was — but still? Do these writers not know any teens? They are not generally wishing their parents were MORE on top of them.
Also, they’ve weirdly added a teen boy to this family, seemingly so they can explore the ripped from the headlines’ madness of Andrew Tate and have some conflict between these kids! Cause kids like conflict? And they like to see stuff they saw on TikTok on TV shows? I don’t know. Seems dumb.
Lesson for Me: Has someone asked you to appeal more to teens? Don’t just write your idea of a teen, go talk to some teens, see what actually appeals to them (it’s not necessarily characters their own age) — and if you’re going to include social media, please use what they actually use.
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Believe it or not, I’ve got another thousand words to say about what I’m learning from this TV show so I’m going to do this in two parts. Meanwhile, I’m in the process re-reading the book, just so I can be accurate about the differences.
Short version of my re-reading experience so far: The book is still good. The TV show is still not. More to follow.
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Originally published at http://artiststruggle.wordpress.com on April 21, 2023.
