Dirk Gently’s Holistic TV Series

?Um… I still refuse to read Eoin Colfer’s And Another Thing, like any good nerd who so loves anything so much he refuses to accept other permutations into his heart, but if the book is responsible for this week’s slate of good Douglas Adams-related news, I may have to begrudgingly accept it. From UK humor (humour?) site Chortle:

The BBC is developing a TV comedy-drama based on Douglas Adams’s Dirk Gently detective novels.

Literary
agent Ed Victor, who represents the author’s estate revealed the news
at a Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy celebration in central London.

He
said he had seen ‘a great script – not just a good script’ for the
planned adaptation, but warned: ‘With the BBC, it can take forever’.

He
said the producer attached to the project – thought to be former Cosby
Show executive Caryn Mandabach – described the novels as ‘the greatest
storytelling opportunity for television since Star Trek’.

However,
Victor revealed that Adams’ estate had cancelled plans for a radio
series based on the unfinished third Dirk Gently novel, A Salmon Of
Doubt, saying ‘there was not enough of Douglas’ in the project to make
it worthwhile.

Huh. Now, some of you complained that Adams’ Dirk Gently novels were kind of crap, and all I’ll say is that they were better in theory than execution. A TV series that takes the character and the premise into a basic detective procedural sounds like it could be awesome.

Now, before some of you go insane at what appears to be my inconsistency regarding my positive feelings for a Dirk Gently TV adaptation and my hateful, murderous feels regarding Colfer’s Hitchhikers book: I know. I don’t know that I could give you a hard a fast law why I feel one is okay and the other isn’t. I know that Adams’ had a such a singular writing style that adapting his work into another medium gets some leeway. Likewise, the Hitchhikers series was so wonderful, so utterly Adams’ that it seems to take a lot more hubris for some just jump into the franchise, as opposed to the lesser and lesser-known Dirk Gently. Dirk Gently was a character, but the Hitchhikers series was its own universe, man. Characters can be adapted. But universes can never be replicated.