The Long Song Book vs. Screen: How Close Was The Adaptation?
. Don t read it unless you ve finished the show.
The Long Song condenses approximately 75 years into three short hours. Although the bulk of the story focuses on July (Tamara Lawrance) in adolescence and young adulthood, the viewer also sees flashes of her as a child and as a grandmother. What are the changes screenwriters Sarah Williams and Andrea Levy made to bring Levy’s novel to the small screen?
Miniseries adaptations always have to consider screen time vs. detail in addition to formatting differences. July’s first-person narration was very easy to convert into voiceovers. The script for the series makes July’s dialect easier to understand as the text demands a phonetic spelling of the Jamaican patois dialect. The show scripts removed many instances where the n-word was printed and replaced them with negro. PBS also censored other curse words throughout the miniseries.
January 22, 2021
Masterpiece miniseries premieres Sunday, January 31 at 10 p.m. on THIRTEEN
Set on a sugarcane plantation during the end of slavery in 19th century Jamaica, the
Masterpiece miniseries
King Charles III), a young enslaved woman with an indomitable spirit, and her detestable mistress, Caroline Mortimer (Hayley Atwell,
The Avengers).
Their lives change with the arrival of the charming new overseer, Robert Goodwin (Jack Lowden,
Dunkirk), who sets out to improve the plantation. The drama unfolds during the transition from slavery to freedom in Jamaica and is an adaptation of Caribbean British writer Andrea Levy’s fifth novel, which won the Walter Scott award and was shortlisted for the 2010 Man Booker Prize.