In re: "Adapted From the Bestselling YA Novel Series energy despite not actually having been adapted from a YA novel," this quote from the creator was—illuminating:
“I told [some producers] about this idea, and they immediately loved it. The thinking was, OK, let’s do a book series and then we’ll do movies. I did my best to try to create a book proposal and it was like 200 pages. People universally were like, this is a really spectacular idea, which was very encouraging, but nobody wanted to do the book. Then at one point, this wonderful producer, Kevin Messick, was like, ‘What if Motherland is a TV show?'”
So I mean this level of I wanted to do a book but a TV show turned out to be easier is a level of something-or-other I'd never before contemplated...
That makes a tremendous amount of sense. There’s a lot of contextual detail implied in the credits and in some scenes in a museum, and it seemed very strange to me that so little of this was ever really articulated in the series. But the idea that there’s this elaborate mythology sitting somewhere else explains a good bit about how betwixt and between the show sometimes feels. Thanks for this!
In re: "Adapted From the Bestselling YA Novel Series energy despite not actually having been adapted from a YA novel," this quote from the creator was—illuminating:
“I told [some producers] about this idea, and they immediately loved it. The thinking was, OK, let’s do a book series and then we’ll do movies. I did my best to try to create a book proposal and it was like 200 pages. People universally were like, this is a really spectacular idea, which was very encouraging, but nobody wanted to do the book. Then at one point, this wonderful producer, Kevin Messick, was like, ‘What if Motherland is a TV show?'”
So I mean this level of I wanted to do a book but a TV show turned out to be easier is a level of something-or-other I'd never before contemplated...
That makes a tremendous amount of sense. There’s a lot of contextual detail implied in the credits and in some scenes in a museum, and it seemed very strange to me that so little of this was ever really articulated in the series. But the idea that there’s this elaborate mythology sitting somewhere else explains a good bit about how betwixt and between the show sometimes feels. Thanks for this!