The Bridgerton Effect

Netflix recently announced that Shonda Rhimes production Bridgerton is the most popular drama they have ever screened. The lavish period drama series has whetted many appetites for the series of books by Julia Quinn on which it's based. It got me thinking about how many great films and TV series have been based on novels or short stories. Not that surprising as both media are all about storytelling. We used to say the book was always better than the film but I gradually realised print and screen are very different media and comparisons are odious.

The fact is I have always been inspired to read the book if the screen version pleased or intrigued me and I'm sure this is true for many people. I read Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights, Stella Gibbons' Cold Comfort Farm and George Eliot's Mill on the Floss after seeing them screened on TV. Not to mention Winston Graham's wonderful twelve book Poldark series. A mean person who saw me reading The Mill on the Floss once tried to spoil it for me by telling me the ending but I was able to retort that I already knew how it ended having seen the TV serial version.

Then there's a sneaky thing I would do as a teenager when films I was too young to see would come to the cinema. You guessed it. I read the books instead. I read Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and Bram Stoker's Dracula due to this forbidden fruit aspect of the films. I wonder if this still goes on with the young nowadays. I do hope so. The books had more detail obviously and were sometimes much more explicit than the screen versions which suited me just fine.

So take note when watching the screen as the book that inspired the filmmaker is full of nourishment for the mind and heart. The books mentioned here are all available online from BorrowBox. 

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Submitted by Anne B in Central library.