Novels to TV

I've just started reading Sawyer, and one of the things I thought about was how well his books would translate to the visual medium. I struggled to get through Flash Forward, however, so I would actually welcome this treatment of the idea.

Surprised they gave a nod to Bones and not Dexter.

Well, here's some more information on the potential series.

While the novel is a well-structured meditation on gender, family, Greek-Americans, and the history of Detroit, I don't think that structure would hold up well as a movie. It's too sprawling, and the details that make it such a rewarding work would be sacrificed.

But as a series? It could be seriously amazing, especially with a Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright behind it. Eugenide's book is full of rich characters that could easily be expanded upon and backstories that could easily be broken into vignette-style standalones. The book has it all: the conflict between Greece and Turkey, the beginnings of the Nation of Islam, gender identity crisis, high school melodrama, incest... the list goes on.

Imagine a Lost-style structure that balances two stories occurring at different periods, but less disjointed and more organic. And, no matter how many eras the show tries to represent, casting Cal, the hermaphroditic chief protagonist, should be fun. Not really a spoiler, but the gender Cal identifies as changes over the course of the novel.

The only other book I've read on the list is Carter Beats the Devil. It was fine, but I don't think it necessarily needs to be a movie (to which it's more suited, as mentioned in the article), much less an ongoing series.

I'll once again bang the futile drum for a cable-only mini-series for The Talisman. And by "cable-only", I mean "no fucking Mick Garris."

I'd love for Don Winslow's The Dawn Patrol to be a series.