Adaptations are tricky things. They are extremely subjective. Whether an adaptation is good or not depends on so many factors, including what you as a consumer know about the source material. What’s more, as consumers, what we take away from a piece of art is actually more a reflection of us, than what the writer intended. Now as for Si Spencer’s Bodies, the graphic novel on which Netflix has based their new show, showrunner Paul Tomalin and I have taken away wildly different things.
Netflix’s Bodies is an extremely competent and well-made piece of entertainment. Creating, writing, and shooting all of this during the pandemic, and coming out with such a stellar product should be applauded. Most everything is top notch, from the sets, to the costumes, cinematography, and acting. And that premise too is hard to beat. Four time periods, four detectives, one crime scene, one identical body. A perfect logline if I ever saw one.
But it’s how Tomalin chose to rationalise and then justify it that falls short for me.
A Sluggish Slog
The show starts out great, and had it stayed on that path and truly explored the journey of their four detectives, I may not have as many qualms. Instead, Tomalin chose to build the entire show around Stephen Graham’s character (who does not exist in the graphic novel!) and justifies it by saying that he needed someone as “an engine to keep things going in the direction we wanted.” By doing so, Tomalin has taken a story told from the perspective of marginalized characters, and centered it around an adult white male.
I believe that the show suffers because of this, especially in Act 2, when certain shoes start to drop. At that point, Bodies starts becoming sluggish and frankly unbearable. I would have given up watching if I didn’t hold out hope that the payoff would be worth it, but as the show dragged on, it seemed more and more hopeless that it would. And ultimately, for me, the ending was just too little too late.
The Tomalin Cut
Where Si Spencer’s Bodies is an intriguing magical realism tale more akin to the works of Neil Gaiman and Alan Moore, Tomalin’s Bodies reads like Zac Synder’s Batman vs Superman. Tomalin loses himself in the graphic novel’s vignettes and mind bending premise. He’s stripped Spencer’s Bodies down to a much simpler, harsher, and grittier version; one that is more mainstream and easily palatable. And at a time when audiences’ appetite for the horrors of crime and cults is at an all time high, it’s exactly what Tomalin and Netflix are banking on. They are preying on that itch, on that insatiable thirst, for gritty crime and human suffering from the safety of our comfortable homes.
Where Spencer wanted to talk about “belief, perspective and prejudice”, Tomalin boils it down to feeling unloved. A part of me understands where Tomalin is coming from. There is a method to his madness and there is a message that I get perhaps all too loud and clear. Tomalin, and his co-writer Danusia Samal, wrote this during the pandemic, at a time when everyone had to be isolated from each other and therefore might have felt just that little bit lonely and unloved. And that sense of being unloved and helpless does indeed permeate a lot of act 2 and act 3 in the series; potentially a little too much. Perhaps this would have worked better if created in a vacuum, or seen at another time, but given our current state of disorder and chaos, with populations in the grips of helpless circumstances beyond their own control, I lack the stomach for such bleak fare.
Si Spencer understood that when talking about deep dark themes, there is a need for it to be contrasted with levity. This show does not.
What Is This Spirit You Speak Of?
Frankly, I wouldn’t be as concerned that Tomalin diverged so much from Spencer’s book if he didn’t bring it up so much himself. Tomalin goes on and on about really wanting to stay true to the themes and characters, but then choses to centre the show around a character of his own creation. I really wouldn’t mind it if he’d taken the premise and just ran with it. But if you keep trying to reference “a spirit” to which you aren’t being true to, it just comes off as being a bit disingenuous.
But again, adaptations are tricky, and takeaways are reflections on us more than the creators.
So, is Bodies a bad show? No, not at all. But I prefer the graphic novel.
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