Adaptation Podcast

Adaptation has a method and sticks to it. Take a source text. Read it closely. Discuss it in full, spoilers included. Then take the film or series built on top of it and hold the two side by side. Kendall Bryant hosts, opening each episode with the same line and then handing round the table to whoever is on the panel — Jennifer Hellis, Jessica Dunn and Dawn Rufer among the recurring voices. The panel has been doing this for years, which shows in how the conversations are shaped. Nobody is scoring cheap points off a bad movie. The recurring question is narrower and more interesting: which changes are defensible, and which ones break something. A discussion of Artemis Fowl lands on exactly that distinction — the casting was survivable, the plot changes were survivable, but the tone and meaning of the book were replaced, and that is the line the group will not cross. Range is wide. Roald Dahl's Matilda gets its own episode, then the 2022 musical film, then a full-length commentary track over the 1996 version. Leigh Bardugo's Grisha trilogy gets book-by-book treatment. Lightyear prompts a genuinely unresolved argument about whether it counts as an adaptation at all. The panel is comfortable sitting in that ambiguity rather than legislating it. Detail is where the show lives. Set design and color palette get real attention — one thread traces how a school's paper decorations read as warmth and poverty at once, against a family home that looks like an untouchable museum. Character psychology gets similar scrutiny, including a long exchange about a fantasy hero whose protectiveness curdles into something ugly before he grows out of it. Dahl's cruelty comes up too, and the group works through why illustrated, cartoonish violence lands differently on the page than on screen. Register is conversational and unpolished in a way that suits the material. People interrupt, backtrack, admit they forgot something, laugh at their own tangents. Barking dogs make it into the recording. Commentary episodes lean furthest into this, with the panel calling out shots and reaction beats as they happen. Every episode ends on the same structure and a different joke — a line from the source text, twisted. It suits a show built by people who clearly love these books enough to be genuinely annoyed when someone gets them wrong.