Thoughts on Adapting Narrative Formats

Screenshot from Hometown Cha-Cha-Cha (2021).

It is part of being human to crave stories, but the format for presenting and receiving them has evolved with technology.

Before the invention of writing, stories were told as long narrative poems or songs, or else presented in plays and puppet shows. The ability to read and write was held to an educated few for a long time. The invention of the printing press (1436 in Germany but a century earlier in China and Korea) made mass-produced books possible, and that eventually led to generally literate populations who could read the mass-produced books. The first novel was Pamela (1740) — fittingly, a romance.

The invention of electricity begat the invention of the electric light and, soon thereafter, the movies were born. Black, white, and silent at first, the technology improved until they offered color, sound, and spectacle.

After World War Two, television sets brought filmed narratives into people’s homes. The prime-time comedy or drama was king — a 30 or 60 minute show broadcast at the same time every week, every episode self-contained but with a recurring cast. Another popular offering was the soap opera, which aired in the afternoons. Those were ongoing melodramas that never reached a conclusion. And, of course, movies originally made for theatrical release came out of storage for showings on television. Movies continued to be made, including low-budget “Made for Television” movies. TV had a lot of hours to fill.

But then television created a new format for storytelling — the miniseries. BBC Radio actually serialized stories first, but ABC made history with its blockbuster Roots in 1977, broadcast on eight consecutive nights. The 1985 miniseries North and South remains one of the top ten miniseries in US television history. Japan broadcast its first serialized stories in the 1950s, and South Korea introduced their version, the multi-episode drama, in the 1980s.

Many novels have been made into movies, but they’re pretty much always inferior to the book.   You can’t get a decent book into a two-hour movie without leaving a lot out.  Back stories, characters, and entire sub-plots have to be eliminated.  What’s left is an eviscerated, Cliff-Notes version that is rarely satisfactory.  However, telling that same story over the course of multiple hours and episodes can deliver a much richer experience.

Then came cable, and then came streaming. Netflix popularized the notion of binging a series by dropping all episodes at once. Masterpiece and MHz provide a wide selection of British and European dramas. These streaming services, and others world-wide, are desperate for content. Sources include not only novels but also comic books and webtoons. 

Older formats don’t disappear. Plays and novels are still around, and movies are still around, too — but the limited series is taking the stage.  It’s a whole new world!

Of course, you can be sure that — in its turn — this format will one day be surpassed by something newer, too.