Watching the first four episodes of the Sci-Fi Channel’s now cancelled The Dresden Files, about a wizard working in modern day Chicago where magic is real but still not readily acknowledged, I realized I might have screwed the pooch a little by having read the first several books in the Jim Butcher novels the program is adapted from. I doubt I would have thought the show great anyway, because it’s not really that hot to start with. However, it’s such a bad adaptation of the books that it was hard to judge it even on its own merits.
Here’s the thing: I fully understand that changes have to be made when going from one medium to another, as with taking a novel or a comic book series and making a movie or TV show out of it. Different mediums have different strengths and weaknesses, for instance the fact that a movie allows for the presentation of much less material than a book does. Often you have to radically boil things down to make things fit into a new framework. I get that.
The thing is, though, that bad adaptations change things for no apparent purpose. The Dresden Files was like that. The novels’ main character, Harry Dresden, for example has a spirit familiar named Bob that resides in a skull. Bob is a vast, ancient repository of magic knowledge. The show, in contrast, allows Bob to appear in an immaterial human form rather than stay in the skull. Understandable. He is Harry’s sidekick, in a way, so it makes sense that you’d manifest him for the TV viewer.
However, they change a lot of things about him that they didn’t need to. The Bob of the books is a brash, jocular Oscar Madison sort of spirit, lewd and crude. The program’s Bob retains some of the spirit’s horniness, but otherwise he’s a fairly prissy British Felix Unger type.
Actually, that didn’t bug me either. The program’s Bob is a pretty amusing character, and probably the best thing about it. However, there’s one big problem: The show’s Bob can directly do magic. Why? Got me. There’s a vast difference between Harry tapping Bob for knowledge of how to do certain kinds of magic, or to make specific magical potions or whatnot, and having Bob actually perform spells.
Harry is a wizard, so why would have he to have something else do the magic for him?In fact, that’s the most annoying aspect of the show. It’s not so much that the actors don’t resemble the characters in the book (although they don’t, to an annoying extent), but that the show changes nearly everything about them. Harry wears different clothes. He drives a Jeep instead of his well-established VW Bug. He hangs out in a diner rather than a neighborhood bar. His house is different. The way his magic aura, or whatever, naggingly interferes with electronics and mechanical systems is dropped. Worse of all, his ‘voice’ is different. He doesn’t sound or act like the Harry in the novels. That Harry can be a real badass when he needs to be. This guy is a schlub.
No, in fact, that’s not the worst change. The worst is that the show’s conception of magic is completely altered. Harry doesn’t actually seem to be a wizard very often. Instead of doing magic, and often some pretty powerful stuff, he generally relies on magical items. The Harry in the book uses such things too, but they are tools and generally used to channel his own magic abilities. There’s little of that in the series, at least in the first four episodes.
This basically amounts to a severe dumbing down of the material, and that’s hopelessly stupid. Fans of material like this crave and demand (or should demand) a consistent system for magic. What bad adaptations of genre material don’t realize is that neither magic nor super-science is an excuse to just do whatever the hell you want. Instead, for every step into fantasy you ask the viewer to take, you have to back it up by making damn well sure that internal consistency is firmly established and rigidly observed. I got little sense of that here. Instead, the magic just seems to be whatever the script needs it to be.
Most obnoxious is that every change homogenizes the characters, makes them what is obviously meant to be more “TV friendly.” The novels aren’t great literature, but they are nice, fun light reads. Sort of like Laurel Hamilton’s Anita Blake books before that author came down with the worst case of Heinlein-itis* since Heinlein himself. [*Heinlein-itis: A condition in which a writer’s bizarre sexual obsessions and predilections completely overwhelm their work.]
The show’s Harry is a much more conventional character than the books’. He’s weird, but he’s TV weird, weird in a safe, familiar fashion. He’s less of a distinct individual than he is in the books. Butcher’s Harry would strike most people meeting him as a bit of a weirdo. The program’s Harry is much more conventional, and wouldn’t stand out much in a crowd. At best, he has some safe, familiar, Monk-like tics. (I’m not blaming the actor playing Harry, by the way. He doesn’t rise above the material, but instead adequately does what he is asked to do. And that’s the problem.)
Probably the factor I found most obnoxious is that the show boasts the dreaded Treacly Scoreâ„¢. During emotional scenes we are hammered by maudlin music that frickin’ underlines what is frankly drawn with too broad of a brush already. This is tantamount to announcing, “Hey, you’re pretty stupid, so we’ve really worked hard to make sure you ‘get’ what we intend you to get, despite your tiny little brain.”
I find this sort of thing increasingly annoying as time goes along, maybe because there’s so much truly fantastic TV on right now (Deadwood, Battlestar Galactica, The Shield, etc.) that the middle of the road stuff now seems unbearably grating. Agian, it’s not that The Dresden Files is an awful show. It’s that the bar has been raised, and we shouldn’t be satisfied with mediocre TV anymore, especially when genre shows are having a bit of a heyday.
By the way, my single favorite bit of stupidity? The books have a White Council of Wizards that is pretty hidebound, and Harry has a generally antagonistic relationship with. However, in the series they take it further, establishing that the Council doesn’t allow Harry to reveal the existence of magic to anyone who hasn’t experienced it first hand. So Harry says things like, “Magic? No such thing.” Except that he still advertises himself as a Wizard for hire!! I mean, the word “Wizard” is painted on his friggin’ office door! Huh?!
Here’s the thing: If a channel like Sci-Fi, presumably catering to hardcore genre fans, doesn’t feel like it can actually offer them a show with eccentric characters and an actually intelligent, rigorous attention to the internal consistency of the fantasy elements, then what’s the point of shows like this? Sci-Fi needs a much smaller audience share than a network show does, and presumably the channel attracts people who actually enjoy this sort of programming. How about trusting us next time? After all, playing it safe didn’t do this program much good.
Before I gave up on the ho hum commentary on the first disc, I learned one interesting fact (the actor who plays Harry is British, the one who play Bob isn’t, so they switch accents when filming), and had one big laugh. This is when the producer speaks of the character who’s been most radically altered from the books, and refers to the “subtle changes.” (!!!) Uh, that word ‘subtle.’ I don’t think it means what you think it does.
Perhaps the show improved as things went along. Perhaps, if I hadn’t already read some of the novels, I would have enjoyed it more for what it itself was. I know the show had its fervent fans.* (See the customer reviews on Amazon, for instance.) However, I’ll not be mourning the program’s demise myself. There’re better shows out there, and better shows get cancelled, too. Those, I’ll worry about.
[*One legitimate gripe the show’s partisons have is that apparenty the episodes were broadcast in the wrong order, with the eighth telecast episode out of twelve being what was originally meant to be the pilot (!), and that after having 40 minutes shaved out of it. Sadly, the DVD keep the shows in the same order, nor is the putitive pilot episode restored to its original length.** To the extent this is true, it’s another way Sci-Fi ill served the show and its audience.] [[**The ‘new’ first episode features Harry protecting a child. This sort of plot is often used in first TV episodes or movies in an effort to demonstrate the main character’s ‘heart.’ (Blech.) See the brutally bad movie V.I Warshawski for another example of this sort of stupidity. Meanwhile, the program’s analog of the novels’ incredibly tough female cop character is assigned a previously nonexistant child, again apparently to ‘humanize’ and ‘soften’ her. Morons.]]