This article is the first in a series of hopefully many articles of its kind. The premise of "Should-Be TV" is simple, so I won't waste too much time with it. Here at TVOvermind, we love entertainment in all forms (though of course, television does take the cake). With this series of articles, we're going to be taking a look at non-television stories we like, which we think would make absolutely stellar television. That extends anywhere from movies to comic books, from real-world events to fictional novels.
This first entry centers around a novel, and a relatively new one at that: The Passage by Justin Cronin. Lit-heads have probably already heard of this book; it's been on the bestseller list since it came out in June. I was able to secure an autographed copy of the book a few weeks after it came out, and it had me literally captivated. I read for hours upon hours, finishing the 700+ page tome in about a week. At the end, I was emotionally exhausted in a way I hadn't been since Stephen King's Under the Dome. The book was brilliant.
As I sat back and let it sink in, I realized what a bad rap I had been giving vampires. My personal distaste for The Vampire Diaries and Twilight have been no secret at all, while my once-enthusiasm for HBO's True Blood is in its waning stages. Vampires have become a sad cliche of sexed-up violence, and if you've seen one show about them, you've seen them all, right?
Well, not exactly. Cronin's novel mixes vampires with another supernatural creature, zombies, to create these creatures called "virals." They possess many qualities of vampires like aversion to sunlight and superstrength, but their animalistic instincts and lack of thought makes them more akin to zombies.
Zombies will be coming to television in a big way later this year with AMC's The Walking Dead, and will probably become the new vampires before all is said and done. Books like Paul is Undead (a hilarious book about the Beatles as zombies) and Pride and Prejudice and Zombies have become best-sellers over the past year, and are quickly growing into a big genre. Could they replace vampires as the supernatural fad? It's unlikely, but if it were to happen, it would probably start with the vampire-zombie creatures from The Passage as a sort of compromise between the two.
The Passage is a sprawling epic that takes place over centuries. The first hundred pages of the book take place over one time period before the book fasts forward through an era to the main, apocalyptic setting for the book. It has the right amount of pacing for a television show, and a big enough cast of characters. The story is, essentially, about the characters and not the virals. It's how they react with being the last remnants of humanity than how cool the vampires are, and if you replaced the vampires with something else, the impact of the story would remain the same.
The Passage is my favorite book this year, and it's been optioned for a film, making a television series unlikely. But with the length and scope of the novel, a single film would not do the book the justice it deserves. No; in my eyes, a television series is the only way for an adaptation to go -- and I think it would be brilliant.
The book is the first in a planned trilogy, with the second volume due out in 2012. If you want to order The Passage through Amazon, you can do so here.
Let us know what you thought of this article and what non-TV stories you'd like to see covered by "Should-Be TV."
