Tell Them Stories: Exploring the 'Spirit' and 'Matter' of Television Adaptation in His Dark Materials

This thesis seeks to explore how literary adaptations to television can ‘evolve’ the stories of their source material using the BBC/HBO TV drama His Dark Materials (2019-2022), based on Philip Pullman’s novel trilogy of the same name. Situating the adaptation within today’s multiplatform television landscape (as one distinguished by internet distribution and online consumption), this thesis highlights literary adaptation as an increasingly popular strategy for the creation of new productions which help TV providers (both broadcasters and streaming services) meet the current international audience appetite for high-end serial drama. Amidst this industrial context, the ‘evolution of storytelling’ undertaken through adaptation does not necessarily deviate from a story’s preestablished beginning and ending, but rather finds spaces within the story to enable added depth and complexity through the medium specificities of TV drama. This thesis’ explorations of these generative expansions and retellings occur at two levels. The first is the foundational aspects of story; that is, how the worlds of His Dark Materials are established with consistent diegetic rules, lore, characters, conflicts, and reinterpretations of the key themes that drive the main story. The second level involves the narrative and aesthetic details that allow the story to function and unfold as a text. These two levels of analysis narrow to an examination of two major characters, Marisa Coulter and Mary Malone, whose characterisations are the site of nuanced, medium-specific, contemporary navigations of gender politics and power. As the most prominent adult women within the story, Mrs Coulter and Mary provide provocative examples of the simultaneous tensions and creative potentials of navigating the challenges of fidelity (to the original story), expansion (of the televisual story), and deviation (from the original story) in adaptation. Through these analyses, this thesis hopes to explore a reading of the relationship between the novels and TV drama that does not establish a hierarchy of texts, but rather leans into the rich, inherent, intertextual nature of adaptation. The success and acclaim achieved by His Dark Materials in both literary and television mediums speak to the merits of adaptation in the ‘multiplatform’ TV era. A good story has longevity, and in the right context, can be translated through time, place, and form to find a voice of its own.