Adapting The War of the Worlds for Television

Abstract

In 2019, two TV adaptations of H. G. Wells’s classic The War of the Worlds (1898) were simultaneously released. The two shows make very different choices in the way they adapt the original novel, each trying in its own way to modernize the source material for contemporary tastes. One is a period drama set in Edwardian England while the other is a contemporary update set in both France and England. Both shows foreground female characters as their leads, although both fail to convincingly empower their protagonists and completely move beyond stereotypes. Similarly, the original anti-imperialist content from the novel is maintained by one but not by the other. Instead, it draws from Wells’s novel to reimagine it as a post-apocalyptic narrative about human cooperation and competition. Both productions exploit contemporary anxieties over societal collapse. They ultimately focus on the novel’s original interest in the limited first-person perspective of its protagonist and narrator, while concentrating on the family as the locus of their narratives and themes.