Something new and familiar

The Walking Dead just ended its second season on Sunday. It’s a fantastic show for two reasons: It knows that a zombie story is about more than just zombies, and an adaptation is more than just a repeat of the source material.

The first point is fairly self-explanatory. It’s not just about zombies, it’s about people and how they emotionally deal with the end of the world. There’s a human factor that a lot of people miss in stories. It’s part of the reason that some science fiction movies, some fantasy stories, some wholly unrealistic tales stand out to us – because we can still relate to the characters. It’s not just about surviving a horde of flesh eaters, it’s about surviving each other in a paradigm that has shifted so far it’s almost unrecognizable.

The second point, I like to think is rather self-explanatory too, but it’s something that I didn’t understand for a long time. I used to be that asshole telling you: “It was okay, but the book was better than the movie.” Now I see the truth, the book is different than the movie. It’s a different medium with different criteria. It’s like trying to compare recipes for pie and the pies themselves. You can’t judge one by the other’s standards.

If everything is lifted exactly from the source material, and I know the source material, why do I care about the adaptation? There’s not much of a draw to me if I know what’s coming next. The Walking Dead is a good example of this. It’s based on a fantastic comic book. Comic books are a weird medium for adaptation because there’s already a visual component. You could do something where you take shots directly from the book, like they did in Watchmen, but it isn’t quite the same. The same goes for trying to lift the dialogue.

The Walking Dead is a great example where they said, “We see what the comic has done, but we’re going to try new places and see what happens.” A lot of big points are hit from the comics, but the TV series has taken its own form. Hershel’s farm became a much larger setting in the show. Some characters lived longer in the series and some lived shorter. The point is that by the end of Season 2, I still cared because I wasn’t entirely sure what was going to happen, even though I know the original source.

The key to a good adaptation is trying to keep the same themes alive and keep the same feel to the story, but adjust how those ideas are presented for the medium you’re working in. A couple good adaptations in film: The Godfather, High Fidelity, Wonder Boys, No Country for Old Men, and the TV series, Justified. These all made changes to the source material, but they kept a great focus on the characters, their feelings, how they would react in different situations. It’s the same, but different. It offers more for the consumers, while still being that familiar thing we already love.