Bringing classics to the small screen
Contemporary treatment of The Three Musketeers centres on LGBT sorority girls
When authors such as Jane Austen, Alexandre Dumas and William Shakespeare sat down to pen the pieces that would make them household names, there was no Internet and certainly no such thing as video blogging.
But do a few Google searches today and you’ll find their famous characters alive on YouTube, with some modern twists that are turning a whole new generation into lovers of classic literature.
To thank for the renewed interest in tales that teachers usually have to prod their students to read are literary web series — videos that have reimagined Romeo and Juliet as university students or Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre as a nanny enrolled in nursing school.
And the newest to join the phenomenon hails from Toronto, where Corus Entertainment and a pack of recent university graduates are toning down the swashbuckling in Dumas’s The Three Musketeers to make the book’s prolific adventurers into modern-day LGBT sorority girls.
Called All For One, their online series releases episodes three times a week on ABC Spark and YouTube for a total of 30 episodes in all, running so far at about five minutes each.
It debuted in early March, but already creator Sarah Shelson says, “We’re seeing a few viewers say they’re picking up the book to read along or if they’ve already read it, a few are telling others to get out there and grab it to read as they watch.”
The trend of using the web to let updated literary characters talk directly to the camera in video-diary styled episodes spanning only a few minutes each grew out of the Lizzie Bennet Diaries, a video blog series that updated Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, created by Pemberley Digital in 2012.
While its message was much the same as Austen’s original — casting Bennett as a debt-ridden grad student who lives with a mother so eager to see her daughter settled down that she prints the book’s famous first line “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.” on a T-shirt — it managed to attract a modern audience by doing away with the book’s dated language, pomp and circumstance.
When it aired on YouTube, The Lizzie Bennet Diaries received millions of hits and won an Emmy for original inter- active programming.
Two years later, Pemberley Digital helped Shelson launch The March Family Letters — a web series that transplanted the famous sisters from Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women into a 21st century, Toronto apartment.
“I had loved the story since I was little,” said Shelson, whose mom originally encouraged her to read the book.
The series was strung together as “a labour of love” with only passion, some support from Ryerson University and a budget of less than $50,000.
But that’s part of the beauty of the medium and why it’s expanding.
“All you really need is a book that you care about and that is (available) for use, a camera . . . and the need to create a good story,” says Lauren Evans, Shelson’s coproducer.
However, crafting classic characters with a modern twist who mimic their audience is a double-edged sword; some viewers will always “have their own attachments to and love for” the originals, says Shelson.
That’s why Aramis (Ariana) is still ambitious, Athos (Alex) is as secretive as ever and Porthos (Portia) remains the extrovert. And as with the original, they must rise up and fight a powerful body: the school’s student union.
“The heart of the story is there, but we take some liberties to make it a fun romp of a series,” Evans says.
And, interjects Shelson, “there’s a lot less bloodshed because you can’t exactly go around killing university students.”
“We take some liberties to make it a fun romp of a series.” LAUREN EVANS CO-PRODUCER