Oh, heh, I said that after the first one or two eps? It’s drastically different in tone, which kind of carries into everything else? It’s just a different piece of media altogether.
In the books, Carson Drew is a well-respected and successful lawyer, Nancy’s mom died when she was young but her dad and the housekeeper Hannah Gruen raised her as a loved, well-adjusted, well-liked kid. Bess is a bit overweight, a bit timid but very nice, George is increasingly tomboyish over the decades the series continued, her hair getting shorter and shorter and very recent adaptations have straight up made her into a lesbian. The Sarah Shahi adaptation CBS didn’t pick up a few years back because it was “too female” had Vanessa Ferlito playing George as a lesbian too.
You can see some of that in this show, right? Bess is still the scaredy cat, George is tough, Nancy is Nancy. But the books had the conflict coming from outside. They were already such a well-oiled unit, who loved and trusted each other, it was just a different kind of plot when the drama didn’t need to rely on friction between the main characters. And you could say this is an origin story, they’ll end up becoming the trio, but I don’t think they ever really can? This show? It will always need to rely on interpersonal drama. It was an interesting move to start Nancy/Nick as an established couple but they’re still gonna give them jealousy and random other relationship drama and break them up. Bess and George were cousins in the books, but really, they just all genuinely liked each other so much.
But anyway, back after the first eps, I think what I didn’t care for was that George wasn’t gay, that she didn’t seem particularly tomboyish, in fact, their, what, subversion of the tomboy into the girl who had a reputation for sleeping around and having an actual affair with an older man, like haha, how unexpected, she’s THAT straight! Bess isn’t overweight. I don’t remember any Ace in the books. Why is there this guy in the middle of the trio?
Some changes, you can consider kind of cosmetic, in that they don’t change anything crucial or make things interesting, like, they’re all working together now (in the books they tended to kind of be on eternal break but always having money, or one of them would be working at a place where suddenly there was Crime and Nancy would have to investigate), people don’t like them, the supernatural thing is interesting, not sure about Bess as a homeless kleptomaniac, but okay. Everyone having secrets now and this tortured past, like, it changes things but for a TV show, it helps.
I’m taking it mostly on its own merits now and the main thing that annoys me is the drama sometimes feels forced but some of the things they changed, from a couple of paragraphs above, those were arbitrary and more conservative than the original. And tbh, the fact that it’s so hard for these three girls to get along, that’s not particularly bold either. As a whole I guess I enjoy it, I like the casting and it’s ambitious, at least. Or kinda, I mean, going along the same lines as Riverdale and Netflix Sabrina and Charmed season 2 seems more of an alignment to a formula someone thinks is working than it is about trying new things. But you know what I mean, heh.