ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the recent revolutions in television and the way that they demonstrate the paradoxical nature of adaptation, as both a story idea that transcends the barriers of medium, time period, or culture and at the same time, as a phenomenon that seeks to insist on the specificity of those cultures, time periods, and media. Thus justifying the process of adaptation in seemingly opposing ways, as either continuing a previous story, or as meeting the need for a new version of a known tale, more applicable in some way to its perceived audience than was the original. Novelization is a well-established form of transmedia adaptation, both for film and for television, and has rarely been associated with innovation, especially in commercial novelizations. The most successful of the transnational adaptations can be characterized by the attempts made to make these shows pronouncedly American, in what Raphaelle Moine refers to as 'cultural translation' into the Hollywood idiom.
