John Weaver asks what happened to the TV show, "Maximum Bob"?
Well,
John, it was a "miniseries," launched in the late summer, and
it ran
its course. Tom Shales gave it a bad review in the Washington
POST,
but I taped it anyway, missing (by oversight) just one
episode (the
3rd, I think).
It bears a passing relationship to the book, but turns
Leonard's
knowing characterizations into comic book caricatures, and it
somehow
resists getting any deeper than superficial throughout. By
the middle
of the series it's left the book back on the highway and is
cutting
across open fields and the occasional swamp. The sequences in
which
Bob runs for governor and the case of the woman on death row
being two
examples. By the end of the series I had no interest in
seeing it
continued; even the most interesting characters (Kathy Baker
and the
sheriff) had turned to cardboard, and the plots depended on
the
increasing stupidity of all concerned. Believability had
disappeared.
I saw the movie of "Get Shorty" recently. It struck me as a
similar
trivialization of the book, with a hasty ending. Novels don't
make
good movies. A movie can't work with anything bigger than a
novelette
without having to condense or get rid of some of the
plot.
--Ted White
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