His Dark Materials on the BBC

I'm a big fan of Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy. All three books are great individually and together they are amazing. If you haven't read them I encourage you to do so.

The BBC is in the process of making a television adaptation, and the second series (which mostly follows the story of The Subtle Knife) has recently finishing airing. I am generally skeptical of TV and film versions of books because they so often let the original down, but this one doesn't. Of course it isn't as good as the books, but I do like how it has been done.

Surprisingly, I am quite glad they didn't try to stick exactly to the books, though of course the departures from the main story are minor and of not much consequence other than to improve the screenplay. More interesting are the scenes from the perspective of the Magisterium and Mrs Coulter, which are either not present in the books at all or heavily expanded upon. They fit the TV format well and do contribute to the storytelling.

In general the atmosphere of the books is captured quite well, both in terms of the sense of adventure and the grander themes of religion, fate and coming of age. The world has had a lot of thought put into it, as have the bears and the dæmons, and so many of the characters are played just right. I also think Lorne Balfe has done a great job with the music.

Both the first and second series are available on BBC iPlayer at the moment, so I would recommend giving it a try if that's available to you.

His Dark Materials page at https://bbc.co.uk/

---------------------------

Callum Brown, 2020-12-24

Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0

Gemlog index