How Does Mr Mercedes Book Differ From The TV Series?

The book ‘Mr. Mercedes’ is a slow-burn psychological thriller largely told from the interior perspective of the main character. The TV adaptation on the other hand is a visual story with a focus on pacing. It therefore condenses interior monologue to action, moves/merges plot to ensure adequate coverage within the episode, and focuses the characters in a different light to a TV drama.

Tone is another area that has shifted from the novel to the television series. The book is much bleaker and often very contemplative. The TV series on the other hand is all about the procedural of solving a puzzle as well as being very visually orientated and elaborate in terms of the sets. How some of the endings have been translated will also differ from viewer to reader in terms of satisfaction. Often television can offer a sense of closure via the visual that the novel cannot. In many cases I have found both to offer great entertainment – the novel to read late at night with a glass of wine and the TV series to watch with a big bowl of popcorn.

From my reading of the novel and the screen adaptation of The Maulers, it’s clear that they share the same fundamental structure (the “spine” of the story) but are presented in rather different guise. While the novel is a deeply psychological and reflective work that unfolds at a leisurely pace and is thus forced into externalization of its protagonist’s thoughts, the TV adaptation has to re-arrange scenes and plot strands in order to serve a more externally-focused format.

However, there are marked differences in how the book’s characters have been portrayed in the television show, compared to the written novel. There is a lot of room for internal nuance and the gradual reveal of plot points in a book, whereas external manifestations of both are utilized in a television program. There are scenes, which have been re-ordered for TV purposes and adapted, with some taking place earlier than in the novel, and others after. In addition, some ‘subplots’ from the book have been greatly elaborated upon to fit within individual episodes. Both, however, are extremely engaging and have the distinct qualities of their respective mediums that have made them enjoyable to experience.

A big part of my critical evaluation of film/television adaptations is picking apart the choices the director made to translate the novel to screen. In watching the TV series Mr. Mercedes, I saw a big contrast to the novel in terms of how the layers of the story were structured. The novel was made up of long, slow, and layered chapters that alternated between Hodges’ struggles with his depression, Brady’s growing insanity, and various domestic storylines of the protagonist and his friends and family. The TV series took the core of those storylines and condensed them into much shorter scenes and chapters, and in many cases, it merged timelines together and even created entire scenes that didn’t exist in the book in order to make the interior of the novel more externally visible.

While King’s prose managed to munge together melancholy and black humor with clinical interest in his villain, the television show opted for a more standard crime-thriller approach and foregrounded certain scenes and heightened their confrontations. The decorous descriptions of the truly gruesome aspects of Brady’s crimes were typically toned down for television and weren’t as pallid as they might have been. Moreover, the relationships of the main characters with their allies and with the characters on the periphery were re-balanced in order to serve the needs of individual episodes and, for the most part, seasons which functioned as relatively self-contained webs of narrative which referenced, in vague but meaningful ways, events in later books such as Finders Keepers and End of Watch. It was a successful adaptation that worked to produce a different sort of emotional impression than the novel, mostly one of visual tension and plot propulsion.