Why The New 'Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy' Show Should Embrace Change
Never mind the fact that Douglas Adams' beloved series "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" has been released to the world as a radio series, as novels, as a television series, as a film and as a flummoxing adventure game; the series exists, Disney holds the rights to it, it has fans and, so, it is slated to be made into a television series again for Hulu.
From a certain perspective, "Hitchhiker's" might seem overdue for a reboot. The last time it loomed large in the public consciousness was when Disney made it into a feature film in 2005, working from a screenplay based on a draft Adams had been writing at the time of his death four years earlier. Another of Adams' creations, "Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency," has been adapted for television twice since then. So, the idea of a new television show is, at the very least, unsurprising.
Yet, I think it's important to note that Adams' "Hitchhiker's" series, for all its longevity, is also a product of its era — in particular, a time when thinkers like Adams started to grasp the potential of computers and computer networks, but well before they became an everyday part of life. The series is perhaps best known for timeless riffs on "life, the universe and everything," but it also trades in dated jokes about digital watches. The titular "Hitchhiker's Guide," the in-fiction electronic encyclopedia/galactic travel guide of questionable reliability, is itself a quaint concept today. "h2g2," an internet encyclopedia inspired by the series and established in 1999, is now about as old today as Adams' series was when it was launched. "We're gradually beginning to get some tiny, tiny inkling of how powerful a networked community sharing information really could become," Adams wrote on the site.
What would Adams think of how simultaneously ingrained yet disruptive the internet has become in our lives? How could an adaptation bring "Hitchhiker's" forward to a world where we're not staring mindlessly at digital watches — where we instead stare at "devices[…] that combine palmtop computers with cellphones with Internet devices with GPS systems" that keep us updated on the myriad ways the world seems to be crumbling all around us? How do you make "Hitchhiker's" a TV show today without making its manically depressed android the most relatable character?
How 'Safe' Changes Have Worked For 'Hitchhiker's'
The 2005 film, starring Martin Freeman, Zooey Deschanel, Mos Def and Sam Rockwell, never fails to bring a smile to my face, but audiences were split. The film adheres to the source material's basic story: Arthur Dent, a totally average man, is plucked from Earth moments before it's destroyed by aliens to make way for a hyperspace express route, which Dent later learns also put a premature end to the plans of pan-dimensional beings who built an organic computer — revealed to be the Earth — to formulate the ultimate question concerning the meaning of life. Unlike the new "Star Trek" movies that add a heavy pinch of space opera to the series' formula, the 2005 "Hitchhiker's" is still more like a farcical road movie in space than a typical sci-fi action adventure. The essence, and a generous number of Adams' jokes, survive intact.
According to screenwriter Karey Kirkpatrick ("Chicken Run"), who was brought in to build off of Adams' last screenplay draft, the changes and additions that do try to shape the shaggy "Hitchhiker's" story into a more conventional Hollywood narrative came from Adams himself. The most obvious change makes Trillian, another human who survived the destruction of Earth, into a love interest for Arthur. At the same time, Trillian's given a little more depth — though she happily chose to leave Earth when she did, the film version of Trillian is considerably distraught by the extinction of humanity and frustrated by her alien companions' obliviousness to this fact, effectively illustrated when she turns a weapon that forces its targets to see things from the wielder's point-of-view against them.
Then sprinkle in a couple new side characters, turn the alien fleet that destroyed the Earth into more of an antagonizing force, and let Sam Rockwell play Galactic President Zaphod Beeblebrox like a young George W. Bush; that's the film version. It worked for me, and still works, because I think great casting and lush design go a long way in helping both Adams' exceptionally dry and imaginatively goofy material make the leap from word to screen.
I think the bigger issue at play is that, especially in its book form, "Hitchhiker's" is structured first-and-foremost as a gag delivery device. In a book, Adams could comfortably stop the action for a funny aside from the narrator of "The Hitchhiker's Guide" with little to no bearing on the plot. The movie attempts to preserve the best of these bits, but even when accompanied by charming animations, bringing these asides more in line with the story changes them. They're not hilarious diversions anymore — they're colorfully delivered exposition.
The 'Guide' Has To Be There, But It Can't Be What It Was
The approach the film took to incorporating the "Guide" asides was more or less lifted straight from the original '80s television adaptation, directed by Alan J. W. Bell. The segments, for which animator Rod Lord won a BAFTA in 1981, might be the most delightful part of the series, but in terms of the show's pacing they create the same problem as in the later movie adaptation.
Simply lifting the "Guide" entries straight from the radio and book source material and presenting them on-screen cannot avoid this issue: either they're turned into lengthy jokes that visually break up the action and grind proceedings to a halt, or they're massaged into being amusing exposition/narration. In the interest of time and pacing, if the new show were to streamline this material, it would risk turning these asides into "Family Guy"-esque cutaway gags. Alternatively, the new show could try to embrace how disruptive the entries can be, ditching the in-fiction transitions for something akin to the explanations in Adam McKay's "The Big Short." In service of making the material work for a television show, approaches like these could go down smoother than simply plopping in chunks of Adams' words (as has more or less been done already, twice), but at the cost of beloved material.
The concept of the "Guide" itself also poses a problem: do you try to make it seem like it came from an advanced alien society, or do you go along with the fact that a digital book with nearly 6 million entries is pedestrian in 2019?1 I once threw together an Arthur Dent costume for Halloween by grabbing a bathrobe, a towel and my iPad with "Don't Panic" set to the lock screen — even the most futuristic aspect of the 2005 movie's "Guide" prop, a foldable LCD screen, is achievable today.
From every angle, the in-fiction "Guide" creates problems for adapting the "Hitchhiker's" story, but if the show is willing to significantly break from the source material, it could also be reinvented as something that at least reflects the state of technology today, or that speculates as to where it's going. Of course, where there's potential in any direction the new show could take a modernized "Guide" in, there's also the chance they could resort to using it as a vehicle for lazy jokes about Wikipedia, Yelp, Google or Facebook. I don't trust that an adaption wouldn't drop the ball on updating the idea of the "Guide," I just think they can't choose not to.
There's No Updating Adams Without A Little Politics
In thinking about how "Hitchhiker's" should be updated, I inevitably ended up looking back at what Adams had to say about technology and the internet.
I was thrown for a loop seeing him reference Richard Dawkins in this interview, but I shouldn't have been — they were dear friends, and one has to assume in good faith that what Adams found in Dawkins was a scientist and fellow atheist who genuinely wanted to advance human knowledge. To put it more bluntly, Adams passed away before Dawkins started routinely making headlines for Islamophobic statements (and before those times he whined about having his honey confiscated at the airport and when he bizarrely claimed to see "a dog and bitch indulging in full 69"), and I hope Adams wouldn't have followed down a similar path.
The "Hitchhiker's" series was the first thing that made many of its younger fans, including myself, begin to grapple with certain philosophical, religious and political questions, and as such it's fair to say it's something of a gateway — one with no exclusive destination, however. You can pluck gems prodding at various political, economic and religious "-isms" from Adams' body of work, and in a thorough assessment of all that and of his own real life advocacy, the chief takeaway is that he cared deeply about the environment. Since Adams' death, whether one acknowledges that climate change driven by human activity is real has only become more deeply politicized.
For this new adaptation, taking the stance that "Hitchhiker's" comes from a satirical tradition and that it has fans across the political spectrum simply won't suffice: the inciting incident, after all, is the destruction of Earth at the hands of cold, calculating bureaucrats who are described in the "Guide" in terms that couldn't be further from journalistically objective. These jokes have perspective to them. There is no "avoiding politics" in adapting "Hitchhiker's." Whatever the differences in commentary are between what Adams once wrote and what a new adaptation does, no matter how large or small, will be consequential.
This is not to say that this new Hulu adaptation will have to eschew lightheartedness in favor of serious reflection. It would do well to avoid the dreary technological doomsaying of today's top British sci-fi export, if only because we get it about the phones already. The show should be silly, it should poke fun at all kinds of people (hopefully without getting all blinkered and Gervais-y about it), it should still veer towards the poignant and existential every once in a while.
What it can't do is treat Adams' work and past adaptations like sacred, immutable texts. Since those were made, we've seen technology enable what the "Guide" represents, and we've seen good and bad come of it. We've witnessed what decades of pollution and inaction have done to the planet so far, and the idea of total disintegration by aliens plays differently when there's a good chance the place where you live will be uninhabitable by 2050.
As a kid, I wouldn't have proposed such leeway in adapting "Hitchhiker's." Now I'm even open to the thought of an Americanized "Hitchhiker's" series, knowing full well that attempts with other British sci-fi things I was raised on haven't worked out (and if they do go that route, they should cast William Jackson Harper from "The Good Place" as Arthur, just saying).
If you're also a fan of "Hitchhiker's," and you disagree that a television adaptation should freely reinvent swathes of the story as necessary, then I have good news for you. It won't matter whether or not this new show subscribes to the conservative notion that the source material can't be messed with: there's already a pretty good television show called "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy," with scripts Adams worked on and most of the original radio show cast starring in it. You can watch it on Hulu or Amazon Prime today.
