ABSTRACT

When works of literature are adapted for the screen, the chief tasks facing the film-makers involve embodying the characters in actors whose material attributes do not offer a violent contradiction to the images generated in the typical reader's mind and repackaging the literary work's diegesis to fit the limitations of the filmic medium. When a television series is produced in a big-screen version, the challenges are substantially different. The appeal of a television series lies less in its narratives than in its continuing characters and general situation. The appeal of the characters is to a greater or lesser extent constituted also by the actors who embody those characters. Therefore, an ideal filmic adaptation of a television series would retain the characters and actors but insert them into a diegesis enhanced by the various advantages that film possesses over television as a medium: larger, sharper visual field; bigger budget for settings, costumes, effects, guest actors; more time for plot development than the usual thirty- or sixty-minute episode (although, of course, far less than the multi-episode entire series run). Such an ideal is graspable for films produced simultaneously with the broadcast run of the series. When, however, the desire arose to adapt television series to the big screen many years after the shows had ceased production, the requirement to retain the originals' embodied characterizations was difficult (or impossible) to satisfy. This chapter will explore some of the strategies adopted by the industry to deal with this problem.