King and Maxwell, reviewed

David Baldacci is one of my favorite writers, and his Sean King/Michelle Maxwell series are among my favorite books. As disgraced former Secret Service agents (King's last "principal" was assassinated, Maxwell's was kidnapped), they've gone into business together as private investigators, who end up getting caught up in some pretty wild cases. So I was intrigued when I heard TNT was creating a King and Maxwell TV series, with Baldacci as a creative consultant. The series premiered yesterday night.

So far...I'm kinda underwhelmed. I like the leads. Jon Tenney and Rebecca Romjin do have good chemistry and are largely faithful adaptations of the characters. Where the pilot goes badly astray is trying to squeeze a 400+ page book into 47 minutes. The pilot is a (very loose) adaptation of Baldacci's lastest King/Maxwell book, The Sixth Man, and it compares very poorly to the book. The show has none of the story's emotional impact, and there's no character development whatsoever. Books shorter than that are nowadays often split into two 2+ hour long full length movies. The tone is kind of off, too. It's kinda lighthearted, and the books definitely aren't.

Whether or not the show succeeds will depend on if they decide to continue to loosely adapt Baldacci's novels or branch off into original stories. More adaptations are almost guaranteed to fall flat.

With the overwhelming success of Games of Thrones on HBO, and a slew of crime dramas based on novels on network television, it seems TV is the new frontier for adapting books. What are your thoughts on this? Sound off in the comments!

-Mike