OSC, allow me to submit for your consideration. Ender the TV series. Smartly written, well funded and produced as a series for the Scifi channel or some other excellent network.
My premise you ask? Each book is one season and each chapter an episode. Every episode adapted as faithfully as can be done in the visual media, yet every wonderful detail, character development and subplot given the breathing room it deserves. All them done in chronological order.
Season 1: Ender's Game/Ender's Shadow Season 2: Shadow of the Hedgemon Season 3: Shadow Puppets Season 4: Shadow of the Giant Webisodes: First Meetings (sans Ender's Game) and other short stories from the Enderverse. Season 6: Ender/Bean's Son Novel Season 5: Speaker for the Dead Season 6: Xenocide Season 7: Children of the Mind Season 8: New Ender Novel
Look at that. An entire eight seasons of high quality television right there, just ready to go!
No snip and chop to try and fit a wonderfully rich and complex story into a foolishly short 2 1/2 to 3 hours or even 8 hours. What do I call this? Damn good TV.
The British have been doing this for years. Why don't we do the same? Heroes is also doing the book with chapters thing, except they don't really know where they are going and what the endgame is going to be. So who knows when and if they will jump the shark. Not a problem here. No shark jumping allowed, just stick to the story.
Okay so this is just copied over from my post on the "other" forum, but I'm not kidding. And not just the Ender series, but any good series of books. I hate the way movies chop up a good book to make it fit into the two hours or 3 hours for a movie. TV really is a better media for adapting novels because of the amount time that a story can be given.
Posted by Synesthesia (Member # 4774) on :
So true, but then the trouble with television is censorship. You'll have some nut-witted censor wanting to cut out everything that's cool. "No, you can't have a bunch of kids fighting in space, that's too violent! You can't show babies in mortal peril! The ratings will be awful, and such LANGUAGE." Prehaps cable wouldn't be a bad medium but how many of us have cable? I say they should make movies go as long as they have to to tell a story. They should just split really long movies in half or something, two 3 hour long movies, extra money, sounds good to me.
Posted by the_Somalian (Member # 6688) on :
Excellent idea. The only problem is, there's no compelling need for the Ender series to be adapted in any form.
Posted by the_Somalian (Member # 6688) on :
quote:Originally posted by Synesthesia: Prehaps cable wouldn't be a bad medium but how many of us have cable?
Not a whole lot, it would appear.
Posted by mr_porteiro_head (Member # 4644) on :
I don't.
Posted by fugu13 (Member # 2859) on :
No cable here (well, cable modem, but no cable TV at all).
Posted by TheTick (Member # 2883) on :
Let me direct you to the TV on DVD section of the store, right this way...
Posted by the_Somalian (Member # 6688) on :
Post edited in light of the fact that I was wrong.
Posted by Tara (Member # 10030) on :
No need to post the same thread on both sides of the forum.
Posted by Teshi (Member # 5024) on :
How about a BBC-style miniseries or 12-episode series?