Atwood unlikely new darling of American TV
Adaptation of bestselling novelist’s work for screen has critics and audiences abuzz
If someone told me 10 years ago one of the biggest names in U.S. television in 2017 would be novelist Margaret Atwood, I might have reacted the way I did in 1999 when somebody told me the next big thing in food would come from Britain.
Right.
Well, as with Jamie Oliver and his pals, it’s time to take another think. Better still, go to YouTube and catch a glimpse of our national Peggy, flamboyant in red, at the 2017 Emmys after The Handmaid’s Tale won for best drama series, rushing to catch up with the show’s producers, directors and stars, all of whom awaited her arrival onstage not unlike minions at the palace.
Atwood beamed under the spotlights, maybe just as surprised as many in the audience were.
It is rare non-British novels get a second chance on film or television. While the works of Dickens and the Bronte sisters continue to provide fodder for generations in England, few remakes do so well in the American market, The Great Gatsby being perhaps the shiniest exception, having been made twice, in 1974 and 2013.
Atwood was ahead of the pack from the start. The Handmaid’s Tale, published in 1985, was an immediate hit, with award nominations and bestseller lists galore. It was made into a film in 1990, starring the late Natasha Richardson, Faye Dunaway, Robert Duvall and Aidan Quinn. The novel was adapted by Harold Pinter (pre-Nobel Prize but still, how’s that for pimping your prose?) and was directed by Oscar-winning German filmmaker Volker Schlondorff (The Tin Drum). It had its world premiere in competition at the Berlin Film Festival.
The reviews were not kind. As Leonard Cohen sang about Jesus, the movie sank beneath our wisdom like a stone.
Still, on that chilly morning in Berlin, when the cast and crew were introduced to the members of the international press, there was Margaret Atwood, taking her place onstage, as she well deserved to, along the other star names.
To say the times were different then would be a colossal understatement. The Berlin Wall had stood not far from the cinema showing the film and had only come down the year before. Its remnants were a stunning reminder of the novel’s themes of female suppression inside a fundamentalist regime, a joyless portrait of a dystopian society that felt then, in 1990, like the kind of story that could only unfold in the future. Welcome to the future.
It’s 2017 and not only have audiences opened up to the television version, the storyline and characters have entered into popular culture in ways few serious novels ever do. How about a homemade Handmaid’s Tale costume to “smash the patriarchy this Halloween?” When you hear the phrases “praise be” and “under his eye” in conversations between hip young women, you know that’s Atwood speak.
A more likely reason for the recent success is the difference between adapting a novel into a film versus adapting a novel into a TV series. It’s in the numbers. Telling a story in a movie that lasts two hours is not the same exercise as telling the same story in a 10-hour series.
Another major factor might be the difference between Pinter’s script, wherein his vision is imprinted on every scene, and the television version, where Bruce Miller, a working producer and TV writer with nothing in his CV to anticipate this kind of success, has let this be more about Atwood’s original vision than his.
An abundance of riches? How else does one explain yet another Atwood novel, Alias Grace, becoming a miniseries also currently on television?
A Canadian production on both the CBC and Netflix, Alias Grace has not garnered either the attention or the ratings of its creator’s earlier novel. Perhaps it suffers from too much of a good thing — too much Atwood.
But I wouldn’t be surprised to see Atwood running to the stage at the Canadian Screen Awards in March when they announce best dramatic series.
And why not? She did most of the work.