This being Thursday, it's time for another edition of Thursday Movie Picks, the blogathon run by Wandering Through the Shelves. This being the final Thursday of the month, it's time for another TV edition, and this time the theme is one I think we've done before: book adaptations. I thought about what to pick such that it wouldn't be something I'd already done before, and then came up with the idea to do three miniseries. Well, technically since one is British I think it's more of a limited-run TV series, but the point is that I haven't used it before.
I, Claudius (1976). 12-part BBC adaptation of Robert Graves' 1934 novel focusing on Roman emperor Claudius, played by Derek Jacobi. This is one of those BBC productions that, like Upstairs, Downstairs before it, came to prominence in the US thanks to its being shown on Masterpiece Theatre.
North and South (1985). Actually, there were three miniseries based on the novels by John Jakes, set before, during, and after the US Civil War. Patrick Swayze played the main character in the first two, with Lesley-Anne Down his love interest. I didn't remember this until looking it up, but there were a whole bunch of small parts deliberately written for famous names, from Elizabeth Taylor to Wayne Newton and a lot in between. Jonathan Frakes (Will Riker from Star Trek: The Next Generation) met his wife while making the first two miniseries, and they've been married for 35 years.
The Tommyknockers (1993). Adaptation of a Stephen King novel that I haven't read, since I'm not that into Stephen King. I just remembered the title, and checked to make certain that it was actually based on a novel and not an original story that hadn't been novelized.
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