Bookish Diversions: Lights, Camera, Bookmarks!

Shōgun, 3 Body Problem, Netflix, J.K. Rowling, TV as Religion, TV as Literature, More

¶ Both/and, not either/or. We often think of film and literature as two distinct categories. Our parents drilled it into us as kids. “Don’t watch TV,” they said. “Read a book.” Good advice. But these days the distinction between the two worlds is collapsing—and has been, depending on how you look at it, for many years.

In my teens I worked at a used bookshop in Northern California. When I first started, I was surprised to discover vast Star Wars and Star Trek book series set off in their own section. These were mostly slender paperbacks that filled out the cinematic and televised universes with side stories, prequel material, and so on. True fans would move from the screen to the page to travel deeper into the worlds they loved. That’s still a thing, though it’s exploded in the digital age to include fan fiction published online.

The merger between page-and-screen has only progressed, but curiously the content flow has reversed—from screen-to-page to page-to-screen. Today moviemakers and streaming services scour the shelves for content to produce as films and television series.

Shōgun promotional image via FX.

¶ From page to screen. Books have always supplied raw material for filmmakers; think Ben-Hur, Gone with the Wind, or The Maltese Falcon. Many of the classic novels I’ve reviewed here have been made into movies. These days, however, it seems more common than ever, especially when it comes to television.

FX’s hugely popular series, Shōgun, is based on James Clavell’s equally popular 1975 novel by that title. I shelved dozens of used copies at my bookshop more than a decade and a half later; people asked about it all the time. As testament to the book’s enduring popularity, this is the second time it’s been adapted for screen.

Netflix’s 3 Body Problem is based on Liu Cixin’s Hugo award-winning sci-fi novel by the same name, along with the other two novels in Liu’s trilogy. The show, which involves shifting chronology and a distant alien threat, “belongs to an all too rare breed,” says Inkoo Kang: “mainstream entertainment that leads its viewers down bracingly original speculative corridors.”¹

While the stories might not always be so philosophically interesting or speculative, Shōgun and 3 Body Problem have a lot of company these days. In fact, a third of Netflix’s top shows so far this year were developed from preexisting IP, mostly books, though also some toys, video games, and an academic nutritional study. These hit shows relied on, among other books,

• Harlan Coben’s thriller Fool Me Once

• David Nicholls’s romance One Day

• Trent Dalton’s coming-of-age-story Boy Swallows Universe

Not only has Coben’s Fool Me Once made it to the screen, so has his novel The Stranger, with more to follow; back in 2018 he licensed the streaming giant rights to fourteen of his novels.

And, of course, it’s not just the top shows. Plenty other Netflix offerings have been based on books, including Anne with an E, The Fall of the House of Usher, You, Maid, The Baby-Sitters Club, and others. And when you think of shows on other networks and platforms—e.g., Station Eleven, Pachinko, The Underground Railroad—you get a sense of the extent of the phenomenon.

“The year 2020 was the first time more books were turned into TV series than into films,” reports the Economist, and it will only grow: “The global market for video streaming is expected to exceed $400bn by 2030.”

James Clavell’s Shōgun, Liu Cixin’s The Three-Body Problem, Harlan Coben’s Fool Me Once, and David Nicholls’s One Day.

But don’t rule out traditional films. This phenomenon goes beyond streaming services, as evidenced by Dune: Part Two and Oppenheimer, based, respectively, on Frank Herbert’s sci-fi classic and Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin’s behemoth biography, American Prometheus. Emily Maskell has compiled a list of ninety books that made their way to screens both big and small in 2023 alone.

¶ Safe(r) bets. There are at least two reasons movies and TV rely on books, both of which have to do with reducing the risk of investment. Producing movies is not cheap, and all the money is raised and spent on spec: You have to make a movie to find out if your movie is worth making.

When the success of a book demonstrates audience interest, it signals reduced risk compared to a story with no preexisting audience. Every time Tom Clancy dragged poor Jack Ryan through the wringer producers cartwheeled in their offices. And once Harry Potter had proved his worth, J.K. Rowling had a profitable film property.

Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone came out in the UK in 1997 and in the U.S. (as Sorcerer’s Stone) in 1998 to blistering hot reviews and sales. When Rowling sold the rights to Warner Bros in 1999, she could command nearly $2 million because of the momentum behind the series. Only in retrospect does that amount seems small; if she came to them in 1996 she would have been lucky to get coffee.

The books sold the movie, and then the movies sold the books. It’s an understatement to say Harry Potter now represents a multibillion dollar brand. While the dollars might differ, the same basic dynamic is at play with J.R.R. Tolkien’s novels, Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series, and Octavia Butler adaptations.

All you need to make a successful movie is a story and big enough audience to cover the production expense. Books can ease the risk of investment by offering proof of concept. And that relates to the second (though, in a sense, more foundational) idea.

A book demonstrates that a story exists—an actual story—not just the idea or proposal for a story, which is helpful when you’re talking about gambling tens or hundreds of millions of dollars. While Game of Thrones (also, of course, based on a series of books) saw wild success, filmmakers cast about for something similarly medieval and intrigue-ridden. They found it in Bernard Cornwell’s Saxon Series, which then gave birth to Netflix’s multi-season show The Last Kingdom.

Books represent the R&D phase in the creation of entertainment products; filmmakers can outsource or shortcut the process by buying stories that have already been proven. “There’s just no other substitute for the amount of work and creativity that goes into a book,” says Netflix’s Matt Thunell. “The reason I love books—especially a book-to-series translation—is that they often provide this incredible landscape, mythology, and opportunity for worldbuilding that’s really hard to come by in the everyday pitches I’m hearing.”

There’s still plenty more that can go wrong, and making movies is obviously more complicated than I’m representing, but the reality is working from sufficiently developed IP—especially if it already possesses niche popularity—is a safer bet for investors than working from scratch.

Why does this matter? For all sorts of reasons, potentially, but here’s one that should interest writers: When people say the future of storytelling is in television because people are reading less and watching more, they’re looking too far downstream. A novelist might be better served by keeping their focus on writing compelling books; there’s more than one way to work in television.

And that’s true even if you’re dead.

¶ The dead tell no tales? Of course they do, especially if you pay their estates. Netflix paid an estimated $700 million to Roald Dahl’s literary estate in 2021, according to the Economist, helping to “spur a gold rush to mine dead authors’ estates.” The trend actually began in earnest about fifteen years ago when agents began hustling for bits of the action from the estates of Ian Fleming, Vladimir Nabokov, and Evelyn Waugh. But as streaming has exploded in popularity the acquisitions have accelerated:

Voracious hunger for content from streaming services and film studios is driving this new interest in old books. Shrewd producers of TV and film, faced with bidding wars for hot new titles, have turned to more affordable options: novels written decades ago. . . . For example, “The Queen’s Gambit”, which is best known as a show on Netflix, was actually based on a novel published in 1983.

The financial opportunity is mind-boggling. Just contemplate that $400 billion figure cited earlier. One private equity-backed company, International Literary Properties, boasts a portfolio of roughly 50 literary estates, including that of Harlem Renaissance poet Langston Hughes, English novelist and playwright Somerset Maugham, and Belgian crime novelist Georges Simenon.

“There are so many wonderful, unappreciated novels from the past,” says ILP cofounder Hilary Strong. “What we are trying to do is open them up and bring them back for new generations to understand.” Strong was formerly the CEO of Agatha Christie Limited.

Roald Dahl, worth a cool $700 million after his earthly demise. Photo by Rob Bogaerts. Color by Palette.

If the money is right, just about anything is possible. Warner Bros is even committed to resurrecting J.K. Rowling, whose social standing died in some circles when she emerged as a critic of the trans movement, which perhaps leads to the most interesting take I’ve seen on the intersection of franchise media and the fans who support it. The devotion? It’s religious.

¶ Television as religion. Rowling’s situation provides a tipoff, according to

Robert Tracinski

in Discourse magazine. Rowling wasn’t so much canceled as excommunicated for heresy.

If you describe their complaint in ordinary terms—“an author I like expressed a political opinion I disagree with”—the intensity of this controversy makes no sense. But if you realize that the “wizarding world” of Harry Potter is one of our new stand-ins for religion, it makes more sense. To this breakaway sect, Rowling is like a prophet-turned-apostate who has betrayed the true religion.

Tracinski’s take is part of a larger observation on the cultural role played by franchise fiction—the various universes that spread across books, television shows, movies, and fan forums. Noting the trend towards secularism in the U.S. where religiously unaffiliated nones are on the rise, Tracinski says people are finding some of their spiritual needs met in participatory, multimedia art.

“Secular art and literature deal with the same spiritual issues as religion,” he says, “and this includes mass popular culture with its franchises and fandoms, to which we are already transferring some of the sense of loyalty and personal identity that used to be the hallmarks of religion.”

About a dozen major cinematic universes already exist—Star Wars, Star Trek, Marvel, and so on. More are coming. Tracinski points out the philosophical and religious appeal of each. Fans can go all-in on one or choose overlapping allegiances, similar to how we pick and choose favored aspects of religious traditions based on whatever distinctives most appeal.

Humans can’t help but worship something.

¶ Great literature, streaming. While we’ve so far explored the merger between literature, film, and television, economist

Robert F. Graboyes

asks us to consider television as a form of literature unto itself, worthy of the same critical accolades as, say, the Nobel Prize for Literature. In fact, Graboyes recently made an intriguing case that the Nobel committee should seriously consider granting their coveted prize to television writers and producers Vince Gilligan and David Simon.

“Together,” he says,

these two conjured up worlds entire. The Gilligan canon includes Breaking Bad, Better Call Saul, plus the standalone El Camino. The Simon canon includes The Wire and Treme. . . . These works spawned two decades of multicontinental, multilingual, multicultural debates over profound and subtle ethical questions and literary techniques. Each episode presented by Gilligan and Simon spawned volumes of essays and videos and threaded discussions—branching off from the episode like the commentaries surrounding the core text on a page of the Talmud.²

Graboyes builds his case looking at aspects of character development, the cohesion and intricacies of plot, the ethical import of the crises and decisions presented, and the literary quality of the pair’s writing. I bet

Steven Johnson

would back him up.

¶ TV makes you smarter? As long as we’re here, let’s upset at least one more received opinion: that pop culture is somehow bad for you. I know: I’ve had parents, I am a parent, and I’m actually stricter and pickier about TV and video games than my mom and dad were. Should I be?

A recent and counterintuitive study reportedly demonstrates our ability to concentrate is actually improving, not declining as we probably assume. Steven Johnson helped explain this phenomenon—and in a sense predicted its ongoing improvement—two decades ago in a book entitled Everything Bad Is Good for You.

Steven Johnson, Everything Bad Is Good for You, 2005.

“By almost all the standards we use to measure reading’s cognitive benefits attention, memory, following threads, and so on—the nonliterary popular culture has been steadily growing more challenging over the past thirty years,” he says. Film and television, then only just beginning the upswing in depth and quality we take for granted today, form a key part of his argument; Johnson even cites a show by one half of Graboyes’ dynamic duo, David Simon.

“Television has slowly evolved into a more complex medium, with intricate storylines and multi-dimensional characters that provide a deeper level of engagement,” says Johnson. “Complex TV shows, like The Wire and Lost, challenge viewers to keep track of multiple storylines and analyze subtle character developments.”

The upshot? “The cognitive demands of modern media are training our brains to think in new and creative ways.” This is, he argues, reflected in measurements such as IQ and our ability to focus and concentrate.

¶ How television changes storytelling. Of course, all of this comes with some tradeoffs. The most basic: We all get 168 hours a week. I usually choose to give my discretionary hours to reading, not viewing. But there are deeper shifts and trades underway. As Alexander Manshel, Laura B. McGrath, and J.D. Porter explain for the Atlantic, the page-to-screen dynamic affects storytelling itself.

Ever since Aristotle, we’ve recognized that a narrative contains a beginning, middle, and end. But TV series, especially those intended to stretch for an indefinite number of episodes and seasons, have a curious characteristic—some intentionally don’t end.

When I do view, I prefer a movie since I know it’ll wrap up with nearly eschatological finality. When it’s done, I can get back to the rest of my life. But with television, the writers are intentionally avoiding the final reckoning, opening new loops the minute they tie up loose ends.

This has an inevitable impact on writing and publishing, since more writers and publishers view possible adaptation as part of their financial opportunity. “The rise of streaming and its love of literature,” say Manshel et al., have not only influenced which books are read, taught, and studied by scholars; they have also started to mediate the form fiction takes even if it’s never adapted at all.”

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1. The story might spawn an unanticipated true-crime adaptation of its own at some point after a Shanghai court sentenced lawyer and executive Xu Yao to death for the murder of video game mogul Lin Qi. Xu helped broker the film deal for Lin’s company, which owned the adaptation rights, but, after finding himself at odds with his boss, poisoned his tea.

2. There’s that religion connection again.