Yesterday the news broke that Playtone Productions, which is part-owned by Tom Hanks, will be producing a TV series based on Neil Gaiman’s Hugo-winning novel, American Gods. Forbidden Planet International has more details here.
Quite often us bookish types complain that we don’t want to see a whole novel squashed down into a 3-hour movie. In this case, however, we have a single novel being turned into six 10-12 episode seasons. Each episode is an hour, so we are talking 60+ hours of TV (though “hour” may mean 45 minutes when ad breaks are taken out). Compare that to A Song of Ice & Fire in which each book is only one season. Interesting. I see that Neil is on board as executive producer and writer, so maybe there will be additional material.
What I really want to see, however, is the Hugo logo in the credits.
Meanwhile Salman Rushdie has been talking to The Guardian about his plans for a science fiction TV series, which he is writing instead of a new novel. Part way through the interview Rushdie comes out with this:
“It’s not exactly sci-fi…”
Wait for it…
“…in that there is not an awful lot of science behind it”
Well played, Mr. Rushdie, well played.
Nice to see this is becoming a trend. Allow anime fandom a moment of smugness, though, that we’ve been able to watch this sort of thing for years. 🙂 And series that really try to be hard sf. (In fact, I’m about to write up something for the Hugo recommendation LJ which is an example of both.)
For horror, imagine if Syfy had done A Game of Thrones.