State of the Romance Adaptation

Maxton Hall and My Lady Jane

In the dark winter of a dark year, Bridgerton bloomed on our screens. The contrast couldn’t have been more stark; it was December of 2020 in our living room. We were alone and scared, but on the screen it was 1810-ish and everyone was wearing sumptuously embroidered gowns, dancing to string versions of pop songs, and falling in delicious lusty love. The show was a phenomenon, one of those rare lucky ones that is able to take advantage of its moment to become far more successful than it might otherwise have been. I’ve written a lot about Bridgerton over the years because I think it signaled a shift in pop culture away from a cynical portrayal of romance to a more open-hearted acceptance of romantic tropes. We became a bit mushier inside in that long winter; we clapped for nurses out the window, we made sourdough, and we watched the crap out of Bridgerton.

And as a consequence, every studio and streamer perked their ears up. I’ve also written a lot about the romance publishing boom we’re in the middle of and the success of an adaptation like Julia Quinn’s Bridgerton series served as proof positive that that success could translate to viewership. Since then, a positively delightful number of my favorite romance series and standalones have been optioned for movies and series, including every book by Emily Henry and every book by Ali Hazlewood, two of the reigning queens of modern romance. But a lot has gotten in the way of us actually seeing more romance adaptations on our screen, one being just time (it just takes a while between realizing there’s a successful type of media and actually taking advantage of it, meaning a lot of streamers end up throwing their version of a trend up after it’s already past). The strike delayed everything, of course, and a general freeze-up in Hollywood has put a lot of projects in limbo. But this summer it finally feels like we’re getting the first robust round of responses to the Bridgerton boom.

The buzziest and most high-profile example is Blake Lively’s adaptation of It Ends With Us by Colleen Hoover. This is the first CoHo book to hit the screens (surely not the last) and has made very decent money at the box office, despite some negative press attention around the way the stars have handled some sensitive issues raised in the movie, namely domestic abuse. I haven’t see the movie yet and I haven’t read anything by Colleen Hoover (despite my absolute obsession with the romance genre, Hoover is a deliberate blind spot for me; I just don’t think she is my vibe). I will be seeing the movie soon, and if I have thoughts I’ll be sure to share them with you all. The main thing I want to note about It Ends With Us is this is probably the biggest and most mainstream romance novel adaptation since 50 Shades, and the fact that it is making money is a really good sign (even if I wish we’d gotten a different author’s adaptation first, as I think CoHo tends to give this genre a bad name but also don’t listen to me until I actually read/watch it).

The two adaptations I want to talk about today have both been successes for Amazon Studios, which has been a leader in this space, adapting Casey McQuiston’s 2019 romance Red, White, and Royal Blue and recently hitting it out of the park with an adaptation of Robinne Lee’s 2017 novel The Idea of You (Nicholas Galitzine starring in both, to everyone’s delight). Maxton Hall is a German-language an adaptation of author Mona Kasten’s 2018 novel Save Me. It is currently Prime Video’s biggest ever international debut and went to number one in 120 countries in its first week. The show is set in an English private school and follows the budding romance of poor but brave Ruby Bell and crazy rich but secretly sweet James Beaufort. There’s Cinderella vibes, forbidden romance, enemies-to-lovers, a guy who sketches his lover’s portrait, a tragic backstory, an evil father, a dress Queen Victoria wore, fuchsia uniform blazers, a sewing your ballgown montage. It’s perfect. These are only some of the reasons it succeeds, but it wasn’t necessarily primed to be a slam dunk. There’s a few things that make this adaptation unique and made it more of a big swing than that description might suggest.

First, this is an adaptation of a German novel that currently has no English translation (Berkley just won the rights to translate and publish the three-book series in English). This makes me wonder if Amazon had doubts about the success of the series in the U.S., as it is pretty standard to have a tie-in edition of the novel available (especially on Amazon, which loves to advertise their products while you watch their content. In fact, one might say it is the entire reason they have a movie studio). If they were going all in on this title, I imagine we would have seen a concurrent deal for the English-language version of the novel. My first move after watching the first episode was to eagerly seek out the novel, then deflate when I realized I quite literally could not read it. Amazon isn’t usually a fan of betting on products with this kind of user experience friction.

Another unusual aspect of this adaptation is its setting/language combo. The novel and adaptation are both set in an English private school, but both are in German. This wouldn’t be odd to an English-speaking audience if it went the other way around, as we’ve all seen a million movies set in some other European country where everyone randomly speaks in British English. But since the setting is very English (Oxford is a key plot point) and there is a default English dub version on U.S. Prime, it can take a while until you realize that you’re watching something that has anything to do with German at all. I am pretty violently opposed to dubbed versions and would always rather watch something with subtitles, which is how I watched this series. I wonder how many people watched the English dub vs the subtitles, and if that contributed to the series’ success on Amazon.

It is very possible I am being too U.S.-centric in my analysis here; I wasn’t able to find any information on viewership by country beyond that it hit number one pretty much everywhere you can watch Prime. The book series is available in Spanish, Italian, and French as well as the original German, so for many viewers my first note may not present an issue at all and most international viewers have no problem with subtitles. But the U.S. remains the largest market for streaming and for book publishing, representing $44 billion and $12.6 billion respectively. For Amazon to consider this a win (which they do; Season two has already been greenlit) it would have to be successful in U.S. markets. This lush, romantic, highly produced series is both very good and very popular, proving the Bridgerton phenomenon can be more than just a glittery one-off.

The second series I want to speak to is this summer’s adaptation of the 2016 novel My Lady Jane by writing team Cynthia Hand, Jodi Meadows, and Brodi Ashton. This series is currently number two on Prime, next to ratings juggernaut The Boys and has received near-universally positive reviews from both critics and viewers (in contrast to Bridgerton’s third season, which had more mixed reactions despite steady viewership). The Jane in question is Lady Jane Grey, known to history buffs as “the nine-day queen.” She ruled England after the death of Henry VIII’s short-lived son Edward and her true story is pretty tragic. My Lady Jane, however, is a romantic alternate history that includes shapeshifters and presumably does not include Jane’s untimely beheading. It is extraordinarily fun to watch, something reviewers have picked up on as an un-alloyed positive. It is sort of a more refined version of Reign, a very silly show about Mary, Queen of Scots that lacked shapeshifters and didn’t commit enough to the alt part of alt history. This show has no interest in tragedy, saving pretty much everyone who we know for sure died bloody by stashing them in convents or turning them into horses or upending their glass of poison. It’s delicious.

My Lady Jane is the first in a series of loosely connected novels that alt-history different historical figures all named Jane or Mary (perhaps the next will shift to an Elizabeth or something; you can cover a surprising amount of ground sticking to just those three). I am personally rooting hard for an anthology series, as the other novels include such figures as Calamity Jane, Jane Eyre, the pirate Mary Read, Mary Shelley, and Mary, Queen of Scots. Does Percy Shelley survive his tragic drowning because he’s secretly a porpoise? Is the madwoman in the attic actually a mad tiger? I am absolutely salivating to find out.

These adaptations work because they’re committed to their genre. They are unabashedly soapy, romantic, melodramatic, and sweet. Some might describe them as undemanding of their audience, but I think that’s wrong. They demand different things of us than a realistic crime drama or a straightforwardly tragic Tudor series. They ask us to be open-hearted, uncynical, credulous. They demand suspension of disbelief and they reward swooning. These are not easy things to feel. One might even assert they are more difficult things to feel in this cynical age than the kind of emotions a show like Baby Reindeer or The Boys elicits (sorry for the strays, also both good shows).

They also work because the people behind their production are committed. They are both highly-produced, gorgeous-looking shows that were carefully cast. Everyone in My Lady Jane is at least mildly outrageous but the chemistry between characters feels genuine because they’ve cast actors that can handle the small and the very large.

There are many more adaptations on the horizon. Every new success makes it more likely they will make it to the small or large screen and the success of these two is hopefully a giant green flag to Hollywood. It is the perfect time to start reading romance, especially Emily Henry, Ali Hazlewood, Sarah J. Maas, and Rebecca Yarros, as those adaptations are set to dominate the small and large screen very soon. Beach season might be coming to an end, but beach reads are forever.