Alias Grace

That's awesome.

Yeah, because you know what I was going to do? I had Alias Grace, that story that was just on Netflix, and I had it all researched.

Don't act sad.

That's really rude.

Exactly.

In this instance, intense fidelity to the source material was part of the artistic point, but we see a totally different kind of fidelity, almost an adversarial fidelity in our next example of prestige television, Alias Grace from 2017.

Ugh, this one is fascinating.

Margaret Atwood wrote the novel in 1996.

Think about the viewer experience.

On a Tuesday night, a CBC viewer might sit down and watch Murdoch Mysteries, where every single bloody crime is eventually solved neatly and objectively through the power of Victorian science.

And then later that week, they tune into Alias Grace, where the fundamental resounding message is that human consciousness is a dark room, and some mysteries cannot and morally should not be solved by men with clipboards.

The doubt must survive for the adaptation to be faithful to the book.