This Should've Gone Straight to TV, Not Stopped at a Bookshelf - A Review of The Suicide Exhibition

The Suicide Exhibition: A Novel by Justin Richards

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


Ever since film became a viable, profitable storytelling medium, there’s been a trend towards adapting stories told in other media. Stage plays were first, for obvious reasons, but moviemakers were soon adapting novels for the screen, in the same way that some novels had been adapted for the stage. Gone with the Wind began life as a novel before it was adapted for the silver screen and became a hit, proving that book-to-screen adaptations could be incredibly profitable. Jane Austen’s novels (particularly Pride and Prejudice) have received the box office treatment many times over the years. Most recently, adaptations of such entire series of novels, like The Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter and The Hunger Games prove that not just standalone novels, but entire series, could be turned into movies that could be both critically-acclaimed and incredibly popular.

The same trend occurred when television became popular. Since producers could run a series of episodes on TV instead of telling an entire novel’s worth of story in one film, TV became another avenue for adaptation, especially for entire series of short stories or novels. Mysteries, in particular, were well-suited to TV adaptation: the Sherlock Holmes and Ms. Marple stories, for example, have been adapted several times for the small screen, and were—and still are—immensely popular. A good example of the latest approach to TV adaptation is the HBO series Game of Thrones, an adaptation (at least as far as Season 3; more recent seasons might be more kindly and politely described as “revisions”) of George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire fantasy series has proven that it is possible to throw a movie-sized budget at a TV series, and have it do very well indeed. Since then, more and more studios are adapting books using talent drawn from the silver screen and the pacing of TV to tell the story. The latest example of this is the BBC’s adaptation of Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell.

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