Apple Greenlights New Sci-Fi Drama Series ‘Neuromancer’ Based On William Gibson Novel
Apple Greenlights New Sci-Fi Drama Series ‘Neuromancer’ Based On William Gibson Novel
deadline.com
Apple Greenlights New Sci-Fi Drama Series ‘Neuromancer’ Based On William Gibson Novel
I said this in another post but I'll repeat it here
One of two things will happen.
The show runners will stay true to the source material and a bunch of people will complain that it isn't original and Cyberpunk 2077/Bladerunner/[insert franchise here]* did it first. Completely unaware that Neuromancer did it first.
Or
The show runners will use Neuromancer as "inspiration" and write their own story, to better (Foundation) or worse (Ring of Power) results. Either way, fans of the original work will complain that the show isn't faithful to the source.
tl;dr: No matter what they do, someone will be vocally upset
ETA: *Ghost in the Shell, I couldn't think of it earlier
I would not consider Foundation to be an example of better results.
Visually impressive, yes, and Lee Pace is God's most perfect creation, but when you start with a book whose explicitly stated theme is "The actions of individuals are largely meaningless against the power of widespread political movements and socio-economic forces" and end up with a show whose explicitly stated theme is "All of history can turn on the actions of the right individual at the right place and time", you have seriously fucked up somewhere.
But you're right about how it's going to go with this Neuromancer adaptation, no argument there.
You're not wrong
Ok so I haven't watched S2, so grain of salt and all.
Taken in it's own merits, and without considering the source material, Foundation is very well done. As opposed to Rings of Power, which has all the re-watchability of Rise of Skywalker. (Less so, actually, RoS at least has better production values and middling banter.) I could only get through book 1 of Foundation, when I was… 18? 20? It was sufficiently dense enough to not garner further interest at that time. I'll give it another shot sometime though. The point being, I'm not as attached to the pre-existing narrative as a result.
However, I totally understand your viewpoint. Why name a show after something and then completely ignore a core concept of the novels? It's a core concept! That being said, i think there's a difference between doing that badly and doing it good…ly. Well. Doing it well. The difference being a well written story that's internally consistent. That was the biggest sin D and D made with Game of Thrones. They ran out of source material and couldn't write a story that was internally consistent with existing character motivations and personality.
On the other hand, it's virtually impossible to do a 100% faithful adaptation. Even if one could accurately and entertainingly convey internal monologues, there's just so much that can't be done with visual storytelling created from print media. The best I've seen are Lord of the Rings and The Expanse. Amazing art, but absolutely not 100% faithful. And how could they be? How do you present the Scouring of the Shire to an audience that expects to see classic Act Structure and knows the story is over when the Ring is destroyed? How do you turn Dominique Tipper into a 2 meter tall hollow boned belter? And that's okay
Sorry, i got a little distracted there. The point is, I understand your opinion and respect it. I also sympathize with screen writers caught between a fandom and producer. When I watch shows from an IP I love, I try to remind myself of the words of Maximus Decimus Meridius, and I ask myself: "Are you not entertained?"
Mostly youtubers with clickbait thumbnails, and people without intelligence of their own blindly parroting what the clickbait tells them to.
To be fair, the Sprawl and Blade Runner did it more or less at the same time (I think it was Burning Chrome, Blade Runner, Neuromancer, but it doesn't really matter).
They sort of condensed something that was floating in the zeitgeist, the collective subconscious, of the late seventies / early eighties, and managed to completely independently create stories that could almost, aesthetically and by their philosophy, be set on the same world.
(And, let's be fair to Mike Pondsmith too, his game, while published a bit later, was quite genre-defining, too, even if it had been clearly influenced by the former.)