Outlander

I love the books and I love the TV show.

I joined a couple of "fan pages" on Facebook, and continue to be appalled at people.

First, the show is based on a series of books by Diana Gabaldon.  So far, there are eight books in the series and she is working on Number Nine.  They are big books that are impossible to put down.  Do you like romances?  It's a romance.  Adventure?  You bet.  History?  Well researched and brought to life.  Science fiction?  Oh, yeah.  Sex?  Yup.  Fighting?  In spades.  In short, these books have everything I like, and tell a rollicking good story.

So STARZ picked the series up and we are seeing the first book this season, with Season Two all ready to go.  Hopefully, the whole lot will make it to TV.

Fans of the books, though, have had issues with the transfer from page to screen.  When Sam Heughan was cast as Jamie, the shit hit the fan.  His hair was not red.  He wasn't muscly enough for some.  Not tall enough, either.  He looked too old.  He looked too young.  It's as if these people never heard of hair dye, or acting.  The problem with putting books on the screen is, as always, that each individual reader has his or her own mental picture of the characters, and mine will not look exactly like yours.  You have to trust the writer, who was consulted on casting, when she said, "Sam IS Jamie."  He may not have been your Jamie, or my Jamie, but he IS Diana's Jamie, and, as she wrote him, I GUESS SHE SHOULD KNOW.

And Claire.  Oh my god, the arguments about Claire.  Catriona Balfe was cast, and, horror of horrors, she doesn't look exactly like Claire in the books, either.  Claire's eyes are whisky-gold in the books, and Cat's are blue/grey.  She is slender, and Claire is described as having a bit of a butt.  Why is her hair more curly in some scenes or episodes than others?  This coming from people who obviously have never dealt with curly hair.

Now that the show is up and running, most of the grumbling over casting has subsided.  These actors are bringing these characters to life, and the fans are analyzing every frame of footage.  The grumblement has gotten just a little nit-picky.

In the book, it is Spring when Claire goes back in time, but when it came time to film, it was Autumn in Scotland.  While a lot can be done with makeup and hair dye on actors, there is really no way to transform Autumn into Spring for an entire landscape, so they changed the time to Autumn.  The Fans howled.  Claire was wearing a print dress in the book.  In the TV show, she is wearing a white dress.  Howling ensued again.

When she undresses after she marries Jamie, her shift resembles that white dress she wore in the beginning.  I see this as the costumer and the director showing the fans why the dress was changed to white.

Now, I've been seeing complaints that the damn shift wasn't wrinkled enough when she took off her stays.  And complaints that she doesn't seem to have armpit hair.

Armpit hair.

We are looking at some of the steamiest sex ever shown on TV, and there are people worried about armpit hair.

And that's not the only thing!  The wedding ring was not the same as it was in the book. The pearls are just pearls, and not the same as the necklace described in the book.  It seems as if some people are just looking for things to dislike.

As well, people are very unhappy because of voice-overs.  Claire's story, told in the first person. There have to be voice-overs, or how are we going to see her internal monologue?  We see her face, we hear her thoughts.  This is how transition from book to film works.

A book cannot be totally transferred to film.  Changes must be made; events and characters compressed or rearranged.  This is a TV series based on a book, not a documentary of events told in the book.

There is so much going on in the world that is actually worth complaining about that I just can't see wasting time and energy looking for things to hate in a TV show.

Life is too short.  Enjoy what you have.  Fix what you can.  Eat well, get enough sleep, and greet the day with joy, for it could always be your last.

Slainte Mhaith!