Sandbox / Spiritual Adaptation Live Action TV

• Penny Dreadful, a sprawling Victorian fantasy saga starring Victor Frankenstein, Dorian Gray, and an aging Great White Hunter as part of a crossover between Public Domain Characters, may as well be a better live-action adaptation of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen than the 2003 film based on the comic series. In a rather uncanny coincidence, it even stars a former James Bond actor, Timothy Dalton, as Mina's father Malcolm Murray. ^note  The original League graphic novel series involved James Bond's grandfather, Campion Bond, as a major supporting character; in something of a Casting Gag, the film adaptation cast Sean Connery in the lead role of Allan Quatermain, and it was rumored that the producers also wanted to cast Roger Moore as Campion before the character was cut from the movie.
• Player could be called a South Korean adaptation of both Ocean's Eleven and Leverage. (Amusingly Player was made in 2018, a year before the actual K-drama adaptation of Leverage.)
• The first season of The Politician, a Netflix series about a calculating, nakedly ambitious teenage overachiever running for Student Council President, is about as close to an adaptation of Election as you can get without actually licensing the film, albeit with its Tracy Flick expy Payton Hobart being male and the show being told from his point of view. Later seasons promise to be the sequels that Election never got, following Payton as he enters real politics. (This wouldn't be the first time that Ryan Murphy has drawn from Election while crafting a teen show; see Glee above.)
• Power Rangers RPM: There's a reason why this show was dubbed Terminator: The Power Rangers Chronicles.
  • Taken to its logical conclusion.
• Pushing Daisies could be called the TV series Tim Burton never made.
• Relic Hunter, a show about a sexy Action Girl treasure hunter, wears the influence of the Tomb Raider games on its sleeve, right down to its similar title.
• Revolution:
  • Set in a world where all electricity has stopped working and humanity has gone back to the Dark Ages, this show is pretty much S. M. Stirling's Dies the Fire adapted to television.
  • The series is loaded with references to the work of Stephen King, especially The Stand and The Dark Tower. Particularly with with a man named Randall Flynn (Randall Flagg) and the Tower (Dark Tower). In case you're wondering, Stephen King is not involved with the show, but J. J. Abrams is a big fan of King's work.
• Riverdale, as a Darker and Edgier reimagining of Archie Comics, has been compared by some people to a TV adaptation of Ed Brubaker's Criminal (2006): The Last of the Innocent, though Riverdale doesn't get quite so deconstructive.
• And on that note, Saved by the Bell (like the aforementioned Glee) is probably closer to the original-brand Archie Comics than Riverdale is, which draws most of its inspiration from the 2015 reboot.
• Sliders beats out Back to the Future and Rick and Morty for the title of the best Back to the Future TV show.
• Star Trek: The Original Series: The earliest episodes owe a hell of a lot to Forbidden Planet.
• Stranger Things is a Genre Throwback and homage to countless pop sci-fi and horror stories, especially from The '80s, though a few in particular are likely to stick out to viewers.
  • The show's creators Matt and Ross Duffer were originally planning on doing a new adaptation of It, but they couldn't get the rights. The influence of both that miniseries and Stephen King's work in general shines through heavily, such that one fan mashed up the trailer for the 2017 adaptation of It with the theme to Stranger Things, the two going together almost perfectly. And to bring it full circle, said adaptation was noted by many critics as having been heavily influenced by Stranger Things, most notably with the Setting Update to The '80s and with Finn Wolfhard starring in both.
  • The Upside Down is a Dark World filled with monsters, fog, and crackling radio transmissions that has begun leaking into a small, ordinary American town. Among the players are a well-meaning police officer, a parent searching for their child who's starting to doubt their own sanity, a young girl with Psychic Powers who opened the portal between this world and our own, and The Conspiracy searching for this girl. It should be no surprise that the Duffers described it as having been heavily inspired by the Otherworld from the Silent Hill games. It makes for a damn good translation of the Otherworld to television (even if it was the product of science rather than the occult), the comparisons growing even more apparent with the second season portraying it as downright Lovecraftian (that author having been a major influence on the games, along with King).
  • Eleven's arc in the first season is probably the closest we're ever going to come to a live-action adaptation of Elfen Lied (albeit with interdimensional monsters instead of gorn), right down to calling Dr. Brenner "Papa", with the Duffers citing the show as an influence.
  • Eleven's background, as a young girl subjected to experiments by the government in order to turn her into a weapon, also shares a number of similarities with X-23, the main difference being their power sets and what the government planned to use them for (X-23 has Wolverine Claws and a Healing Factor and was created as a Super-Soldier, while Eleven has telepathy and telekinesis and was intended to serve as a super-spy). Millie Bobby Brown, Eleven's actress, even auditioned for the role of Laura/X-23 in Logan shortly before getting this one instead.
  • A Government Conspiracy rating high on the Scale of Scientific Sins is looking for a Psychic Child who's been subjected to brutal experiments all her life and is key in stopping a potentially world-ending disaster caused by said conspiracy, who continue to study the disaster long after the fact. Sounds like something out of the SCP Foundation. The working title for the series was even Montauk!^note In the SCP Foundation universe, one of the items (SCP-231-7, a little girl with a demon growing inside her) needs to be subjected to a procedure known as 110-Montauk in order to prevent the monster from getting out. It's never made clear what 110-Montauk is, but it is very heavily implied to be rape. The Demogorgon is also basically a slightly less malicious version of SCP-106, albeit only in the sense that it produces less Body Horror.
  • The above-described plot can also be described as an adaptation of Beyond: Two Souls, though Eleven remains a child throughout. To quote Tiago Svn and Ed Stevens of Cracked:
    Jodie and Eleven are both the result of horrific scientific experiments that left their mothers in a comatose state. They were then put in the care of snazzily dressed but amoral government villains who vaguely resemble '90s character actors. They're then subjected to similar neurological testing, right down to the weird sci-fi crown thingamajig. Also, remember how Eleven has a nosebleed after using her powers, but they never explain it? Here's the explanation: Beyond: Two Souls did it as well! By the end of both the game and the show's first season, the girls are running around sporting hospital gowns and buzz cuts. The same can be said about their respective netherworlds, which both involve terrifying journeys through ominous portals to the same desolate, depressing land where it's always snowing.
• Superhuman Samurai Syber-Squad can be seen as a live-action version of Transformers, before Michael Bay's film adaptation arrives. Given the source material being a collaboration between Tsuburaya Productions (Ultra Series) and Takara (one of the co-shareholders of Transformers with Hasbro), this isn't a coincidence.
• Super Robot Red Baron:
  • (And, by extension, its follow-up successor series Super Robot Mach Baron) can be pretty much considered a live-action version of Mazinger Z.
  • To the point that, in Spain, footage from Mach Baron was made into a theatrical movie and retitled "Mazinger Z, el Robot de las estrellas" (Mazinger Z, The Robot from the Stars) to benefit from Mazinger popularity. There was even a comic-book adaptation made by an Spanish artist that lasted some forty issues, and was known to a generation of spanish children as "El Mazinger Rojo" (Red Mazinger).
• Tales of the Gold Monkey is often cited as an early attempt to bring Indiana Jones to television; however series creator Donald P. Bellisario always denied this, and named Only Angels Have Wings as the main inspiration for Jake Cutter's adventures in the South Pacific.
• BBC Three drama Tatau (first broadcast April 2015) has elements in common with Far Cry 3: Young Western travellers in trouble in the South Pacific, tattoos, hallucinatory visions ...
• Threshold is quite possibly the closest television has ever gotten to an adaptation of X-COM. This licensing appears to be recursive, with The Bureau: XCOM Declassified taking quite a few cues from the series: fighting a covert war with aliens, alien substances infecting people, actively suppressing information from the public, reverse-engineering alien tech and using it against them all crop in the show.
• Total Recall 2070: Despite its name has more to do with Blade Runner than Total Recall (1990). The Word of God says the show is based on the original Philip K. Dick stories which were the source material for the aforementioned films.
• Twin Peaks was more or less David Lynch adapting his film Blue Velvet to the small screen, both being thrillers set against the backdrop of a warped vision of small-town America.
• Timeless is an NBC television adaptation of four different time travel related works of fiction: The Time Tunnel, Rewind (2013), The Ministry of Time and Timeline.
• The miniseries V (1983) is, for all intents and purposes, a Science Fiction adaptation of Sinclair Lewis' It Can't Happen Here. The similarities were originally even more overt; Kenneth Johnson's initial idea, titled Storm Warnings, lacked the sci-fi elements and had the villains be a homegrown fascist movement, and later became V when the network suggested that Americans would be more likely to be scared by the specter of Soviet Russia taking over (as was portrayed in the later miniseries Amerika). Johnson felt this would destroy the entire point of the source material, and instead chose to make the oppressors aliens, with heavy focus given to their human collaborators.
• Veronica Mars is the best Nancy Drew TV series ever made, albeit updated for the 2000s with a Darker and Edgier tone. Its creator Rob Thomas even explicitly compared the two. The influence appears to be recursive, as more modern adaptations of Nancy Drew (such as the Dynamite comic book and The CW's 2019 TV series) have been noted as drawing inspiration from Veronica Mars.
• The Walking Dead is the closest we'll ever get to a Night of the Living Dead (1968) TV show (minus some of the Anvilicious sociopolitic commentary) .
• Warehouse 13 has been referred to by many as SCP Foundation: The Series, albeit made Lighter and Softer (making it perfect for those who find the actual Foundation articles and associated stories to be too depressing).
• Westworld can be watched not only as a TV remake of the original film, but also as a modern day update of Karel Čapek's R.U.R., given its highly organic robots and themes related to bioethics and corporate short-sightedness.
• What We Do in the Shadows (2019) and Wellington Paranormal combined make for a fantastic Deconstructive Parody of World of Darkness, with the former being akin to Vampire: The Masquerade and the latter Hunter: The Vigil.
• The Woman in the House Across the Street from the Girl in the Window, an Affectionate Parody of 2010s Suburban Gothic mystery thrillers like Gone Girl and The Girl on the Train in which an actress best known for comedy (in this case, Kristen Bell) plays barely against type as somebody who gets caught up in a murder scheme, comes very close to translating the humor of A Simple Favor to the small screen.
• Xena: Warrior Princess, between its Action Girl protagonist, its basis in Classical Mythology, and its lesbian subtext, is the best live-action Wonder Woman show since the Lynda Carter series.
• Kid Nation has been called a reality show version of Lord of the Flies.
• Some of Toei's Metal Heroes series were largely inspired by american properties: Kyojuu Tokusou Juspion, with its sword-wielding villain in black armor, Small, Annoying Creature sidekick and cantina scenes, owes a debt to Star Wars. Kidou Keiji Jiban, a show about a dead cop ressurrected as a cyborg who still has memories of his family, is Toei's answer to RoboCop (1987).

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