Adaptation Expansion / Live-Action TV

Adaptation Expansion in Live-Action TV.

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Series with their own pages

• A Series of Unfortunate Events
• Game of Thrones

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• 12 Monkeys: Necessary, given the transition from a 2-hour feature film to a multi-season television season. The significant expansions include a conspiracy surrounding the Army of the Twelve Monkeys and the assassin known as "Pallid Man", and the mysterious Big Bad known as "The Witness", greater exploration of the post-apocalyptic future, and many more time-travel missions for Cole.
• 13 Reasons Why expands greatly on the novel. In the novel, Clay listens to the 13 tapes explaining Hannah's suicide in one night and has minimal interaction with the subjects of the tapes, with much of the story being flashbacks. The show expands this to weeks of him listening to the tapes. It also adds more depth to the subjects of the tapes as well as a subplot about them trying to stop Clay from releasing the information to the public and Hannah's parents suing the school for neglecting to notice the bullying. The show also received three additional seasons, which are all original content (since the book's plot was wrapped up in the final episode of the first season).
• The 100 TV series was never the most faithful adaptation, but what plot points it did take from the book were covered within the first few episodes, most of them just within the Pilot. Naturally, the show proceeded to create its own plots and characters from there on out.
• Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. does this for Skye/Daisy Johnson/Quake. In the Secret Warriors comics, all that's ever really revealed about Daisy is that she's the long lost daughter of Mister Hyde, and that she's the personal protégé of Nick Fury. Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. essentially provides a season and a half worth of background info, explaining her parentage in greater detail and exploring her life before she was revealed to be one of The Inhumans.
• All Creatures Great & Small (2020): A lot of plot lines are added which didn't exist in the books.
  • For instance, James' choice to euthanize a mortally injured horse is controversial here, with his reputation on the line until Siegfried's autopsy confirms his assessment, and he gets called "horse killer" by another farmer mockingly. Neither of these had occurred before — rather, only the corrupt farm manager was angry about it, with Siegfried also backing up his decision immediately.
  • Also, Helen never got engaged to anyone else, and their relationship proceeded far more smoothly (she only briefly dates anyone else before the two get married).
  • Mrs. Hall's personal life never gets delved into at all, while here she's suffered past domestic abuse and is estranged from her son. This was both to add more drama and, much more importantly, give the women (specifically Mrs Hall and Helen) deeper and more well-rounded characterization.
  • James and Helen get pregnant intentionally. The books however had James tell Helen they should wait as the war had started, though she got pregnant anyway. He was also set to serve in the RAF then, as another reason to wait, which isn't the case here. Her pregnancy in the books also was never threatened by a possible infection, but went smoothly.
• Similar to the above, Angel, another Joss Whedon work, has a Bolivian Army Ending, but it gets a comic expansion to help sort out the loose ends.
• Filipino Cop Show Ang Probinsyano (lit. The Man from the Province) shared very much the same premise as the 1997 Fernando Poe, Jr. film, i.e. a twin brother assumes the role of his fallen cop sibling who was betrayed and killed by corrupt police officers in a drug sting operation, but further expanded and modernised the plot, often incorprating comic relief, Slice of Life and real-world references to locally-occuring crimes and other such incidents into the mix.
• Ashes of Love has sixty-three episodes, while the novel Heavy Sweetness, Ash-Like Frost is short enough to be read in a few hours. Several characters' arcs are expanded to increase the series' length. Liu Ying and the Demon Realm are given arcs that stand alone, while changes to Run Yu's storyline and characterization altered the dynamics from the original novel significantly.
• The Being Human (US) has more episodes per season than the original, with more plots added alongside the original's. This happens often - the main reason British shows are remade rather than aired straight is that American television has more episodes per season. (Syfy seasons are short by American standards and Being Human has gone up from six to eight episodes per season, so it's no longer a huge example of this.
• The first season of Big Little Lies was an adaptation of the source novel. When the show proved popular enough to justify a second season, new plots were created.
• The Boys (2019): The show gives much larger roles to The Seven beyond Homelander and Starlight, many of whom got very little character development in the comic (particularly the Deep and A-Train).
• Buffy the Vampire Slayer was originally a movie, before becoming a seven-season TV series. Specifically, the show depicts what (supposedly) happened after the movie, when the Summers family moved from L.A. to a small California town. Then, the series spills over into a comic adaptation after concluding its TV run.
• Call the Midwife exhausted the source books in two seasons. Showrunner Heidi Thomas then sought out other people who were midwives in the 1960s, and used their memories as source material for later seasons.
• The Casual Vacancy expands upon Barry Fairbrother's interactions with other characters.
• The Chosen is this for The Gospels, taking many moments and scenes that were described in only a few paragrahps of the original source material and adapting them into whole epsiodes or even season spanning sub-plots.
• The Crowned Clown is a sixteen-episode adaptation of the two-hour-long film Masquerade (2012). It gives the real Gwanghae more screen-time, explores his backstory, and expands on the time Ha-seon spent impersonating him.
• The TV adaptation of Dalziel and Pascoe abandons Reginald Hill's novels after On Beulah Height, although there's a quick detour into Dialogues of the Dead.
• In The Dead Zone TV series, the Big Bad of the book and movie is still around, but rather than being obsessed with him, our hero is too busy solving the Mystery of the Week to worry much about The End of the World as We Know It.
• Dexter has gone down this route. The first season was a somewhat loose, but still faithful, adaptation of the original novel. The second season after that used some elements from the later books, but mostly went on its own. After that, the series has gone down its own path.
• Dirty Dancing: In addition to the Adaptation Name Change of both Baby and Penny, the show introduces a number of new characters and plot lines that don't appear in the film or stage versions.
• Doctor Who:
  • "The Lodger" is a 45-minute TV episode adapted from a nine-page comic strip. One of the few specific scenarios kept from the strip was the football (soccer) game, to allow The Cast Show Off.
  • Eric Saward's original plan for the Doctor Who S21 E4 "Resurrection of the Daleks" novelization, which only exists in outline form, had the events of the episode form only a fraction of a much larger story. When he finally did novelize the story years later, it was a straight novelization.
  • "Blink" is an episode loosely adapted from a short story by the same writer in the 2006 annual called "What I Did on my Christmas Holiday by Sally Sparrow". The original story didn't feature any enemies with the Doctor (with no companion) becoming trapped in the past when the TARDIS malfunctions and travels forward in time while the episode has the Doctor and Martha sent back by the Weeping Angels.
• Elementary expands Sherlock Holmes' addiction to an extremely relevant arc in the first season that is the premise of the show and changes Watson role from a mere foil/sidekick to Deuteragonist.
• Shelley Duval's Faerie Tale Theatre expanded on the story of Goldilocks and the Three Bears.
• Fellow Travelers: In the novel, the past scenes end in 1957, and lovers Hawkins Fuller and Timothy Laughlin never see each other again after that year. On the show, they continue to meet in 1968, 1979 and 1986.
• With the exception of Bob, Luc Besson's original Nikita did not spend a lot of time with the organization that kidnapped and trained the title character. We briefly meet some of the people there—the director, a tech, a quartermaster, Amande the charm school instructor—but the film is not, in the end, concerned about them. The 1997 - 2001 La Femme Nikita, in turn, expanded on all of these roles, making them into the series' regular cast.
• From Dusk Till Dawn follows the plot of the movie relatively faithfully, but at a much slower pace. At the same time it adds new characters and provides a backstory absent from the original film.
• Gossip Girl, based on an 11 (eventually 12 + spinoff) novel series by Cecily von Ziegesar, ended up airing for six seasons and more than 100 episodes on The CW.
• Gotham heavily expands on the death of Batman's parents (and subsequent investigation). It starts James Gordon on his quest to clean up the GCPD, precipitates a Mob War and the rise of Batman's enemies, and inspires Bruce to lead his first investigation into a conspiracy connecting his father's company to Arkham Asylum.
• The Handmaid's Tale: The series fills in a lot of the details on events which were only mentioned by the book. Among them are what happened prior to the regime taking over, and Ofglen's fate after she's taken away. The series also looks at the pre-Gilead backstories of Offred, Luke, Commander Waterford and even Nick.
• While NBC's Hannibal draws on the entire Hannibal Lecter franchise, is it most directly and specifically based on the novel Red Dragon. The series takes two and a half seasons to cover a handful of incidents briefly described in the novel's backstory — the Minnesota Shrike killings, Will Graham's spending time in a sanitarium, and Hannibal Lecter's incarceration — while majorly expanding on the relationship between Will Graham and Hannibal Lecter. The show only starts on the main story of Red Dragon (the Tooth Fairy killings) in the second half of season 3, and the added context changes the plot somewhat.
• Happy! added a number of new characters and plot lines to the story from the original comic. The first season adapts the entire comic, so all plots and new characters from there on out are original.
• Happy Together, the Russian remake of Married... with Children, is already longer than the original by 69 episodes... and more are to come.
• Some episodes of The Haunting Hour were based on short stories from Nightmare Hour and The Haunting Hour, so they had to be expanded quite a bit to work as full episodes. One interesting example in I'm Not Martin, which uses the basic concept of the short story as a backstory to drive the show's plot, which has a kid being taken back in time to a 1950's hospital where he is mistaken for a boy who's foot is going to be cut off.
• Haven is an expansion of one of Stephen King's lesser-known novellas, The Colorado Kid. It's pretty much In Name Only, including changing the location to the town from The Langoliers.
• Horatio Hornblower was first based on stories from Mr. Midshipman Hornblower. Numerous one-off characters are expanded and continue to appear in the telefilms based on the subsequent books Lieutenant Hornblower and Hornblower and the Hotspur. The first series also welded together elements from several of the stories, while the third took a few mentions of Irish unrest and made it into the overarching plotline. But the most notable example has to be the character of Archie Kennedy, who appeared in just two Midshipman stories as nothing more than a lighthearted fellow who joked with Horatio during a dull watch. The cast and crew liked Jamie Bamber's performance so much that they brought him back and made him Horatio's best friend and confidant. The Forester estate eventually ordered them to write him out because his presence was changing Horatio's character too much from the source, and so William Bush^note who first met Horatio in Lieutenant can take his canonical role as Horatio's best friend. (Which they did, after a transition period in which they formed a Power Trio and they gave Kennedy a memorable Heroic Sacrifice.)
• The American remake of House of Cards (UK) does this, in part because of the different political systems. In the original British version, it takes just four hours for Francis Urquhart to go from Chief Whip of the Conservative Party to being Prime Minister and ruler of his country. In the American version, it takes an entire season of thirteen 50-minute episodes (just shy of 11 hours) just to get Frank Underwood promoted from House Majority Whip to being tapped as the new Vice-President, and another thirteen to get him the rest of the way to the Presidency. Having an increased length is beneficial to the American version, considering that in real life, American politicians tend to rise more slowly than they do in Britain (in Britain, a leadership election can shift things in a fortnight; in the United States, there are no leadership elections. For the record, Barack Obama's rise from Illinois State Senator to President in four years was considered positively meteoric).
• Insecure is based on the Web Original Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl, and Issa Rae created/stars in both. However, pretty much the only thing that remains exactly the same is the basic premise. Some elements remain similar, such as Issa being a Token Minority at her job and being an amateur rapper (although in the TV series they're turned into imagine spots for the most part). Additionally, in the web series, we learn almost no backstory of characters other than the lead (named J in the original) whereas the TV series spends a lot more time characterizing Issa's friends and love interests.
• Done after the first eleven episodes of the Inspector Lynley mysteries, resulting in an Alternate Continuity so divergent with later books that the characters of the novel series and the characters of the television series are generally considered separate entities by the fandom.
• While the Inspector Morse series was already a mixture of adaptations and original plots, it now invokes this trope with Morse deceased and his partner Sgt. Lewis now having his own series.
• Interview with the Vampire (2022): This version of the story takes advantage of material from subsequent books in The Vampire Chronicles, and also adds some backstory for Daniel Molloy and how he met Louis de Pointe du Lac.
• The first two seasons of In Treatment are fairly faithful, sometimes word-for-word, adaptations of the Israeli original. The third season was written entirely from scratch.
• Jeeves and Wooster added plenty of extra material to the short stories being adapted, including events that Bertie wouldn't have seen (and therefore couldn't have narrated).
• The first season of Jupiter's Legacy - consisting of eight 35–56 minute episodes, is adapted from the first two issues of the comic.
• The first La Femme Nikita TV series took the spy organization from the original film, which there existed largely to facilitate the plot, and deeply expanded the story's focus on both it and its associated characters. Most of the series' core cast, with the exception of Nikita and Michael, consists of characters who in the film collectively appeared for less than five minutes.
• The first series of The Last Detective was based upon Leslie Thomas' "Dangerous Davies" novels, but the next three were entirely original plots.
• The Last of Us (2023) expands on many story elements from the the original game, both in regards to its characters and its lore. Among these is the exact cause of the Cordyceps fungus outbreak and resultant collapse of society: the mutated Cordyceps strain was spread through wheat products manufactured in and shipped from India, which is Ground Zero for the outbreak. Another expansion is in the form of an explanation behind Ellie's immunity to Cordyceps infection: her mother, Anna, was bitten by an infected person shortly before Ellie was born. Essentially being born with Cordyceps in her body leads to Ellie and the fungus existing in symbiosis, with the Cordyceps not trying to take over her body because it thinks it's already taken it over, thus leading to Ellie being completely asymptomatic.
• In the original The Screaming Staircase, Lucy narrates her past as a child with her sisters and mother and the tragic incident that drove her to London and Lockwood & Co. in a few pages. On Lockwood & Co. (2023), this is about half of the first episode "This Will Be Us," and particularly viewers are introduced to Lucy's best friend Norrie White, who in the original novel is only mentioned once and isn't given a last name.
• The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power adapts elements of the source material about the Second Age that Amazon has the rights to, but there is notably less lore tied to the Second Age than the First and Third Ages (This translates to whatever Second Age details can be gleaned from The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. While The Silmarillion, Unfinished Tales of Númenor and Middle-earth, The Fall of Númenor, Beren and Lúthien, The Fall of Gondolin, The Children of Húrin...and other books and writings not technically included as part of the rights agreement that Amazon has, but are available to reference and partially depict as the result of some sort of unclear arrangement with the Tolkien Estate on a case-by-case basis, with it being unclear what the actual legal limitations are, aside from Amazon not being able to directly adapt Third Age stories as part of the Tolkien Estate's agreement with New Line Cinema). As such, the show's narrative takes inspiration from materials included in the condensed backstory, footnotes and descriptions, and a little dialogue, so expansion is required by default to turn it into a multiple-hour-long show. Elements that are expounded upon include entire subplots like the Elf-Human romance and everything else going on in the "Southlands", the early hobbits meeting a "meteor man", and Galadriel hunting Sauron to avenge her brother and ending up in Númenor.
• M*A*S*H was based on the same premise as the book and feature film of the same name, but even the earliest episodes had plots created specifically for the show, rather than drawing from the earlier versions. The longer the series went on, the more distance it gained from the source material; Season 4 replaced two characters adapted from the source material (Henry Blake and Trapper John) with characters original to the series (Colonel Potter and BJ Hunicutt respectively), Season 6 saw the replacement of Frank Burns with original character Charles Winchester, and with Radar's departure in Season 8, original characters outnumbered those who'd been in the book and movie.
• Marple: The series did this to several of the episodes, most notably The Blue Geranium and Greenshaw's Folly, both of which were originally short stories. In both cases, both the cast and the sequence of events were significantly expanded upon and, in the case of Greenshaw's Folly, several additional murders took place throughout the episode. Furthermore, in The Secret of Chimneys, elements of another short story, The Herb of Death, were introduced, making this episode a quasi expansion on that short story.
• In the Minority Report (2015) series, Dash and Arthur are main characters shown as much as Agatha is, whereas in the movie the Precog twins were only briefly seen.
• The Myth is a fifty-episode adaptation of the two-hour-long film of the same name. It removes most of the modern-day subplots and replaces them with more emphasis on the time-travellers' experiences in the Qin dynasty.
• The original British version of The Office ran 14 episodes and focuses on four main characters. The American adaptation runs about 200 episodes and features a much larger cast.
• While the Spooksville series had continuity, the stories were still generally stand alone. The TV show adds in a story-arc about Adam wanting to find his Missing Mom.
• Once Upon a Time is this to a large number of fairy tales and classic stories, including most things that Disney has adapted (but some that they haven't, like Rumpelstiltskin). The basic thrust of the series is that, rather than being the events of stand alone stories, all of these things happened as part of a single large story. As an example, the story of Rumpelstiltskin's encounter with the miller's daughter is closely tied to the story of Snow White and the Evil Queen. Rumpelstiltskin also figures prominently in the stories of Peter Pan, Frozen (and the fairy tale from which it was adapted), and The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, among others.
• One Piece (2023):
  • In the manga, Zoro's fight against the original Mr. 7 is only mentioned to have happened prior to the events of the story. In this show, the fight is actually shown.
  • Zoro's confrontation with Helmeppo in defense of Rika that results in his arrest is actually shown in this series rather than it only being mentioned by Rika in passing, though this is mostly due to the show combining this moment with the scene of Zoro eating Rika's rice balls from the manga.
  • The "Koby and Helmeppo's Chronicles of Toil" cover story is expanded from a series of no dialogue, single image panels that would appear at the beginning of chapters for a period of time to a full subplot coinciding with the events of the main story.
  • In the manga, Buggy's role in the East Blue saga is to serve as the Arc Villain for the Orange Town arc before returning for the climax of the Loguetown arc. In this show, he continues to pop up throughout the season and ends up playing a major role in the show's version of the Arlong Park arc.
  • In the manga, Sham and Buchi are just a pair of mooks who show up to help Kuro near the end of the Syrup Village arc and are quickly defeated by Zoro. In this show, they're upgraded to being Kuro's Co-Dragons who actively assist him in his infiltration on Kaya's estate.
  • Kuina and Koushirou's last name, Shimotsuki, was never stated in the manga and was unknown until Oda revealed their and Zoro's family trees in an SBS. In this show, their last name is outright stated by the characters.
• Our Friends in the North: The original 1982 stageplay was a three-hour production about a group of friends dealing with the fluctuations of British politics between 1964 and Margaret Thatcher's election in 1979. The 1996 TV version is nine episodes long (although it also drops an entire subplot) and continues to follow them through the Thatcher years and into New Labour. The 2022 radio version adds a tenth episode taking them into the 21st century.
• Out of this World (1962): "Little Lost Robot": This play adds a number of tiny character details, as well as expanding two roles, and adding in a brief Chase Scene, all of which are absent from the original story due to Isaac Asimov's Beige Prose style.
• Many of the first season of the black and white Perry Mason series are based on the novels, but from then on it overtook the series. In an interesting twist, the early novels had so many plot elements that the screenwriters had to edit some out, so some of these unused elements from novels adapted in the first season were reworked into new scripts.
• Percy Jackson and the Olympians: Rick Riordan has gone on record stating that he plans to expand the original source material of his novel series.
  • Riordan intends to expand the series over the source material:
    In terms of the plot, we stuck with it very closely. What I will say though, that I found really fascinating, is that we were able to look at the story, which I wrote back in 2005, and say, "What do I wish I had done at that time? What background can we give people that know the story backwards and forwards, but still have questions like, 'How did Sally meet Poseidon?' or 'What were Percy's experiences in school before we see him in the first chapter?'" We were able to dive into that and flesh out the history of these characters and the chemistry between them in ways that are completely faithful [to the book] but are also new.
  • The series opens with a flashback to Percy's youth and show that he's always been able to see through the Mist, filling up a whole notebook with illustrations of what he sees. It also shows that he and Grover bonded over the card game Mythomagic, which is the favorite game of Nico di Angelo.
  • The second episode introduces the concept of kleos — the Ancient Greek form of glory, which is earned by defeating monsters and completing quests. This was not present in the original novels.
• Power Rangers:
  • The first season of Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers ended up trimming the 50 episodes of Kyōryū Sentai Zyuranger that Saban picked up from Toei into 40 episodes, with the "Doomsday" two-parter originally intended to be the finale. However, when the show proved to be a bigger success than expected, Saban had no choice but to contract Toei to shoot additional footage specifically for MMPR, since they were not ready to adapt the Super Sentai franchise's tradition of changing the team's costumes and robots every year. For the remaining twenty episodes of Season 1 and the first thirteen episodes of Season 2, MMPR used completely new action footage which featured the original Zyuranger costumes and robots with all new monsters that were not from any prior Sentai show.
  • Tensou Sentai Goseiger had Mons Drake, who was only the first Big Bad of three. However, his overseas counterpart in Power Rangers Megaforce, Admiral Malkor, was greatly expanded upon and instead serves as the overall Big Bad of said adaptation.
• Preacher is quite an extreme example of this. It spends its entire 10 episode first season telling a story that the original comics told in the first issue. They do this so that they can take the time to expand on and explore the core characters and mythology before moving onto the comics' main Myth Arc at the very end of the season and into the rest of the series.
• Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon adapted only the first arc of the manga, while adding in various new elements such as Sailor Luna, Zoicite's loyalty to Endymion, "Nephikichi", Darkury (in addition to Mamoru also turning evil), a teenage clone of Queen Beryl, and different Character Development for many of the characters, particularly Sailor Venus.
• The Pretty Little Liars TV series is doing this, adding plots for characters that weren't major in the book, and adding characters as love interests, probably because the book series only had 8 novels and most of the plot involved them trying to find A.
• Les Revenants, despite having fewer people coming back to life than the movie it's based on, has more time to develop both the plot and the characters.
• Sadakatsiz: Like most foreign remakes, Doctor Foster has been turned from a miniseries to a 141-episode long (each one having a 1-hour duration) series. The key plot points are kept but due to Gemma's counterpart falling out of love with her ex-husband, there are many storylines about him wanting to win her back while the mistress fights for the opposite. Combined with the added backstories for several secondary characters, the story gets inflated a lot without falling prey to constant flashbacks and reused sequences.
• Sherlock frequently makes feature length episodes out of short stories, sometimes by using them as a mere skeleton to hang a more complicated plot around, sometimes by creating a completely new story with a few of the same character names, and on at least two occasions ("A Scandal in Belgravia", "The Six Thatchers") by telling the original story in the first half, before saying "And then..." as the halfway twist.
• The Jeremy Brett Sherlock Holmes series extended short stories into hour episodes, either by including additional complications or by showing with more detail scenes that Watson only heard about second-hand. For example, the final episode, "The Adventure of the Cardboard Box", opens with the marriage of Mary and Jim, and includes a number of original scenes establishing the relationship between the three Cushing sisters, before Holmes gets involved (which he does earlier than in the story; Susan contacts him about Mary's disappearance before the eponymous box arrives). The brief reference to letting rooms to medical students until they became too rowdy becomes a scene of one medical student whose reason for being evicted ties back to the nature of the family. It also adds a subplot about grave robbing, and sets the events at Christmas to include scenes of Holmes and Watson celebrating both at home and with the police. While the story ends with the murderer's confession, the episode includes scenes of him in prison and Holmes and the police finding the bodies.
• She's Gotta Have It: As a series, the plot expands much further from the original film's, though it has the same core. Nola's parents enter the scene, and it adds a relationship with Opal that didn't exist in the film. Her friends also get much more attention and their own plots too. New plots also get introduced which the film couldn't cover in its runtime.
• When $#!+ My Dad Says was announced as an upcoming TV series, the Twitter feed it was based on had only 67 tweets. It's safe to say the show contains more words than that per episode.
• The Spiderwick Chronicles (2024): Season 1 expands on the franchise's human world more than the books and movie, such as showing how the magical world affects the town and how some of the townspeople respond to it, showing Mallory train as a fencer, describing Lucinda and Arthur's troubled relationship with Helen's mother more, expanding on Disappeared Dad Richard's background, whereabouts, and feelings toward his family, and having Simon's angry adjustment issues morph into more serious issues that have caused him to spend much of his life in therapy. That said, the magical world gets some Adaptation Distillation, at least for the time being (Thimbletack's scenes tend to be shorter, Mulgarath doesn't have as many minions, Hogsqeual is absent, etc.).
• The Story of Tracy Beaker, which had her repeatedly adopted by Cam/sent back to the Dumping Ground over the course of five seasons, along with lots of new material. (In the book, her adoption by Cam is the Happy Ending, and the later books in the series are about her living with Cam.)
• Tales of the Unexpected ran out of adaptable Roald Dahl short stories after a series and a half but ran on until series nine by adapting stories from other authors.
• Anthology horror series like The Twilight Zone often have episodes based on short stories which expand on the original stories considerably. In fact, the show itself got this treatment when some individual episodes were adapted into short graphic novels.
• The Twilight Zone (1985):
  • "One Life, Furnished in Early Poverty" places greater emphasis on Gus Rosenthal's poor relationship with his father Lou than the short story by Harlan Ellison. In the episode, the present day Gus meets Lou twice after he is sent back in time. On the second occasion, he reveals that he has always regretted never telling his father how much he loved him. For his part, Lou confesses that he has never been able to get through to Gus, though he loves him very much. In the short story, the older Gus and his father never come face to face and nothing is revealed of their relationship other than it being difficult.
  • "The Misfortune Cookie" goes into more detail about the kind of person that Harry Folger is than the short story by Charles E. Fritch. In the episode, Harry is a Caustic Critic and Immoral Journalist who loves to write terrible reviews of restaurants so that they will be closed down. Whenever this happens, he adds another matchbook to a model graveyard on his desk. In the short story, Harry is cheating on his wife with his old flame Cynthia Peters but nothing else is revealed about his personality and his profession is not given.
• The Umbrella Academy's first season (of ten episodes that each ran over 30 minutes) was based on a six-issue comic book. Fans of the former are generally confused when they read the latter, which- while good- is a lot less story-focused and doesn't explore certain characterizations or plot points that were vital to the TV series.
• The Untamed:
  • Wei Wuxian is seen interacting a lot more with the Jiang siblings and with Nie Huaisang. Additionally, he has more interactions with Lan Wangji prior to the Xuanwu Cave arc.
  • The Soul-Eating Goddess has a larger role in the plot, even appearing in the Flashback Arc and being part of the cause of Wen Ning's weak constitution.
• V (2009): Originally a two-part miniseries, now turned into a full fledged series.
• The live-action drama version of Wakako Zake expands heavily on the manga and anime source material, largely out of necessity: each episode of the drama is 25 minutes apiece, whereas the anime had 2-minute episodes and the manga's chapters were only 4-15 pages long.
• The Wheel of Time:
  • An entire sequence where Logain escapes briefly as his followers attack the Aes Sedai along with their Warders guarding him is added which doesn't occur in the books (this includes Lan nearly dying, with Nynaeve saving him by using the One Power to heal his wound).
  • Min says she got her first vision of the future when she saw Tam with baby Rand 20 years ago.
  • The show also seems to like giving channelers distinctive weaves, presumably to make them more unique. In the first season, Alanna fights mostly by using Earth to make the ground under an enemy explode like a land mine, while Logain can rapidly corrode metal. Neither are described in the books as having any sort of signature move (though Logain, being self-taught, would be expected to rely on a few standbys, which might be weird).
• Wire in the Blood was based on a few novels by Val McDermid, but quickly ran out of books to adapt and developed new stories.
• The Worst Witch has gone through this several times over. The TV movie padded itself with sequences including a "scaring contest" and an early sequence with Punk Charlotte Rae, and the later series would pad the same adaptation by using the "Ethel's a pig" sequence as the basis for an episode (introducing a whole new character in Mr. Blossom's nephew Charlie), while adding in a climactic chase through the school grounds. Bizarrely, it's otherwise managed to incorporate adaptations of the next three books as-is (although The Worst Witch Strikes Again was made into two separate episodes).
  
  Many of the episodes in the first two series have new plots not taken from the books, or expanded from small references in the books (e.g the main plot of first episode "The Battle of the Broomsticks" is based around a line mentioning that Mildred's Broom got broken after she flew it into some bins on her first day). The third series is entirely new material, as at that time the books only went up to the second year. Since then two books have come out covering Mildred's third year which are different to the third series.

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