Quote:
Originally Posted by taosaur
Agreed. Adaptation from books to screen isn't just a matter of transcribing the dialogue and passing it out to actors--the people making the show have to have their own vision if they're going to invest anything in the work. In the case of the Dresden books, there's no way to translate the stories anywhere near directly. There's too much going on in each volume for one episode, and too little for a season, and even spreading them out over two or three episode arcs would run through the existing novels pretty quickly.
That said, the novels definitely stand out more among genre books than the TV series did among genre shows. It was enjoyable, but a B- effort at best.
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I believe that they learned a whole lot from producing the pilot, which was based on
Storm Front. It, of course, never made it (as a pilot) to our TV sets and only served as a filler episode after much editing (gutting it by cutting out half of it to fit in an hour time slot). I think they learned from this experience that trying to fit a book with the richness of the books in this series as a source just wouldn't work. I give their subsequent efforts an A.
Quote:
Originally Posted by bizzybody
I figure the TV show brought a lot more people to the books than the books brought to the TV show.
I recall seeing ads on SciFi Channel for the show, never watched it, didn't know there was a book series until a friend got me reading them. I didn't make the connection until the same friend gave me a disc with the series on it. (Same friend also got me started on the Anita Blake series, which I bailed on when it degenerated into pretty much pure porn.)
Alternate universes *very alternate* universes. :P
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Those folks who viewed the TV series before reading the books were lucky in that they tend to appreciate both instead of rejecting the TV series out-of hand. Kind of the best of both worlds (ok, enough with the clichés).
By the way, Jim Butcher wanted to locate Harry Dresden in St. Louis but his agent told him not to because Anita Blake was located there. So he picked Chicago even though he was unfamiliar with the city.
The above is my personal opinion.
