Hugin & Munin Journal

Promotional image for season one of Lockwood & Co. Used for review and commentary. Netflix’s Lockwood & Co. is the rare young-adult fantasy adaptation that feels older on screen than it does on the page. It keeps the haunted London, reckless young ghost-hunters, and sharp adventure plotting of Jonathan Stroud’s novels , but gives the premise more institutional weight. Ghosts are not simply things in the dark. They have become the basis of an economy, a bureaucracy, and a labour system that sends children out after sunset. The books are clever, atmospheric, and often very funny, with the elastic comic energy of a young-adult adventure. The television series lowers the volume without draining the life from them. Rooms are allowed to breathe; danger arrives through silence as often as spectacle; offices, uniforms, invoices, and regulations press against the supernatural. The adaptation does not so much age up the characters as age the world around them. That...

I remember watching the 1980 adaptation of Shōgun , starring Richard Chamberlain, and feeling a quiet disappointment—not because it was bad, but because it could not possibly match what the novel had already built in my head. Clavell’s rooms, rituals, political calculations and social rules had become part of an internal world assembled over hundreds of pages. That is one of the defining risks of adapting Shōgun . A screen version competes not only with James Clavell’s text, but with the edition memory has spent years compressing, rearranging and improving. It must reproduce a world that each reader remembers differently. The 2024 series comes closer to my remembered version than I expected, but its real achievement lies elsewhere. It changes who is allowed to understand the world. Blackthorne remains an important way into the story, but he no longer controls the limits of what the audience can know. Promotional image: FX’s Shōgun season one. Used here for purposes...

I came to Scarpetta from the wrong side of the morgue. I have not read Patricia Cornwell’s Kay Scarpetta novels, and forensic thrillers have never been my natural habitat. My crime reading has leaned more towards Arthur Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers, while Mindhunter and The Wire remain among my reference points for investigative television. I also watched Bones for years, at least until it drifted away from the qualities that had once made it sharp. So I approached Scarpetta not as a guardian of the books, but as a viewer curious to see a famous crime character receive the prestige-television treatment. The ingredients are formidable: Nicole Kidman as Kay Scarpetta, Jamie Lee Curtis as her difficult sister Dorothy, two timelines, a lavish production and decades of source material behind the forensic-thriller premise. The first season is beautiful, strongly acted and consistently watchable. It is also uncertain about what should organise all that talent. It...

Some novels resist adaptation despite appearing almost designed for the screen. Pierce Brown’s Red Rising has political intrigue, violent competition, Roman spectacle, secret identities and a conflict that expands from the mines of Mars into war across the Solar System. The difficulty lies beneath the spectacle. The Society is not merely divided into social classes identified by colour. It has engineered hierarchy into the human body. Golds must not simply dress better or occupy higher offices; they must appear built to rule. Reds should seem shaped by labour, and Obsidians should alter the atmosphere of a room before they have done anything at all. Most difficult of all, Darrow must cross that physical boundary while remaining recognisably the same person. His transformation is not a disguise placed over an unchanged body. The body itself becomes the instrument through which he enters, understands and begins to inhabit the ruling class. The production problem is no longer entir...

Crime fiction has never lacked brilliant investigators who are incapable of managing their own lives. They see patterns that escape everyone around them, violate ordinary social expectations and repeatedly injure the people closest to them. Very often, they also drink. Jo Nesbø’s Detective Hole returns to this familiar figure through Harry Hole, the Norwegian homicide detective played by Tobias Santelmann. The nine-episode Netflix series adapts The Devil’s Star , the fifth Harry Hole novel, with Nesbø serving as creator and showrunner. The series does not reinvent the broken-detective archetype. What it reveals, perhaps more clearly than it intends, is the bargain that has allowed the archetype to survive. Harry’s damage must be serious enough to make him tragic, dangerous and dramatically complicated, but it cannot be allowed to destroy the brilliance on which the mystery depends. Addiction may ruin the detective’s relationships, career and physical safety. His deductions remain ...

I had watched only the opening episodes of Young Sherlock when I first wrote these impressions, so this is not a verdict on the complete season. Even so, the series left me with enough to consider—especially its decision to introduce Sherlock Holmes and James Moriarty not as adversaries, but as friends. Sherlock Holmes has been adapted so often that every new version arrives already surrounded by ghosts. It must compete not only with Arthur Conan Doyle’s stories, but with more than a century of actors, costumes, catchphrases, deductions, deerstalkers, and attempts to explain why Holmes became Holmes. That last part is where Young Sherlock becomes both promising and dangerous. An origin story can add emotional weight to a familiar character. It can also explain so much that the character begins to feel smaller. Editorial update, September 2026: Prime Video renewed the series for a second season on 14 April 2026. By late July, season two was in production, with no release date an...

On February 5, 2026, HBO announced that it was developing a Baldur’s Gate drama with Hasbro Entertainment. Craig Mazin—the creator of Chernobyl and co-creator of HBO’s The Last of Us —is attached to create, write, executive-produce and serve as showrunner. The project is intended to continue the story after Baldur’s Gate 3 rather than retell the game directly. That makes it more interesting than a conventional adaptation, but also considerably more difficult. The central problem is not how to reproduce the Sword Coast, the monsters or the magic. It is how to continue a story that deliberately has no single ending. Image from Baldur’s Gate 3 showing Lae’zel. Game developed by Larian Studios. Used here for purposes of commentary. A Sequel to a Story with No Single Ending The reported plan is to introduce new protagonists while allowing characters from Baldur’s Gate 3 to return. That is probably the only workable approach. Recreating the game’s entire...

On January 28, 2026, Apple TV acquired adaptation rights to two of Brandon Sanderson’s major Cosmere series: Mistborn and The Stormlight Archive . Early coverage described the agreement as encompassing the Cosmere as a whole, but Reactor later corrected its initial report after Sanderson’s agent clarified the scope. The intended division makes immediate sense. Mistborn is being developed for feature films, while The Stormlight Archive is intended for television. More unusually, Sanderson has since confirmed that he is writing the Mistborn screenplay and will co-showrun Stormlight , while the deal reportedly gives him unusually broad creative approval. That level of involvement is genuinely encouraging. It is not, by itself, a guarantee. Cover image: The Way of Kings by Brandon Sanderson, published by Tor Books. Used here for purposes of commentary. Creative Control Is a Safeguard, Not a Solution Hollywood adaptations of popular fantasy and science ...

Back in the late 1990s, long before streaming services ruled television, fans of Robert Jordan’s The Wheel of Time spent countless hours dream-casting a hypothetical adaptation. It was an enjoyable exercise precisely because few of us genuinely expected it to happen. The fourteen-volume main series contained an enormous cast, several cultures, multiple interlocking forms of magic and a plot that could move with tremendous force before wandering into extended stretches of repetition. Adapting it faithfully seemed impossible. Adapting it selectively risked removing the very accumulation that made its best moments work. Then Game of Thrones arrived and changed the commercial calculation. Expensive fantasy television no longer looked like an eccentric gamble. Properties such as The Shannara Chronicles , The Witcher and eventually The Wheel of Time entered development in an industry newly convinced that epic fantasy could attract a mass audience. Promotional ima...