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.
The Long Song
This three-part miniseries based on Andrea Levy’s award-winning novel about the end of slavery in Jamaica follows July (Tamara Lawrance), an indomitable, young slave who works on a sugarcane plantation with her detestable mistress, Caroline Mortimer (Hayley Atwell). Their lives change with the arrival of a new overseer, Robert Goodwin (Jack Lowden) who sets out to improve life on the plantation.
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Premiering Sunday, January 31 at 10/9c
A series based on Andrea Levy’s award-winning novel about the end of slavery in Jamaica.
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More This three-part miniseries based on Andrea Levy’s award-winning novel about the end of slavery in Jamaica follows July (Tamara Lawrance), an indomitable, young slave who works on a sugarcane plantation with her detestable mistress, Caroline Mortimer (Hayley Atwell). Their lives change with the arrival of a new overseer, Robert Goodwin (Jack Lowden) who sets out to improve life on the plantation.
This three-part miniseries based on Andrea Levy’s award-winning novel about the end of slavery in Jamaica follows July (Tamara Lawrance), an indomitable, young slave who works on a sugarcane plantation with her detestable mistress, Caroline Mortimer (Hayley Atwell). Their lives change with the arrival of a new overseer, Robert Goodwin (Jack Lowden) who sets out to improve life on the plantation.
The Long Song Disrupts PBS Masterpiece s Typical Slate By Putting Black Characters First: TV Review
Caroline Framke, provided by
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Courtesy of BBC/Carlos Rodriguez
“The Long Song” knows what an audience might expect from a period drama airing on the BBC, as it did in the UK in 2018, or under the PBS Masterpiece banner, as it will in the US starting on January 31. The camera, helmed with a steady hand by director Mahalia Belo, pans across still life scenes of porcelain curios and rumpled silks in a manse surrounded by gently swaying palm trees. “The life of a white missus on a Jamaican plantation,” a narrator (Doña Croll) intones, “be surely full of tribulation from the scarcity of beef to the want of a fashionable hat.” Within seconds, the piercing screech of that “white missus” shatters the idyllic scene, and the acidic streak of sarcasm laden in the narrator’s words comes more clearly into focus. “If that be the story you want to hea
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.