Fans tuned in Little Disasters can be thrown for the amount of book to screen changes – starting with this ending.
based on sarah vaughanthe novel of the same name, Little Disasterswhich premiered on Paramount+ on Thursday, December 11, followed an accident and an emergency room doctor treating an unexplained head injury to the son of one of her best friends. She then had to face the dilemma of whether to make a report to children’s social services.
The six-part series made it seem as if Jesus (Diane Kruger) could have something to do with his daughter’s injury. In the 2020 novel, Betsey’s head injury was an accident caused by her son Frankie, who was then manipulated by Jess’ friend Charlotte into lying to cover it up.
“(On the show), I wasn’t actually the writer, I was an executive producer. So I gave notes on several scripts and learned a lot. The first thing we did was cut the background section of the book,” Vaughan exclusively said. Us Weekly. “It existed to give more understanding to Liz as a character. We decided we didn’t need that complication.”
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Vaughan addressed the option to change the villain, who in the show was Mel’s husband Rob (Stephen Campbell Moore).
“In the book, it’s Charlotte and not Rob. That was partly because we weren’t sure the audience would accept Charlotte behaving that way and also because we were developing Charlotte’s character a lot,” he explained. “In the book, she’s not particularly attractive. She’s described as a pretty woman, not a beautiful woman, and we have a hint that she might have proposed to Jess’ husband Ed. We thought if we ended Charlotte to allow a baby to fall off a table and not report it would make her look incredibly bad.”
Vaughan co-signed the change on screen. “We felt it was something we couldn’t accept from a woman,” he continued. “On the show, Charlotte is the only woman of color among the four women. That was an element as well.”
The Paramount+ adaptation allowed them to show more of Rob: including his dark side.
“Rob is a very minor character in the book and he was very developed here. There’s a lot more complexity you can get, especially in a six-part show as opposed to a movie. A six-part series gives you a lot of room to warm up and really dig into these characters in a way that a movie doesn’t,” the author continued. “We can understand so much more complexity and there are so many more subplots you can have.”
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Vaughan highlighted the “potential” for further development.
“It’s a lot more complicated than a movie. This book lends itself to a show because it has a lot of strong female leads and it was also written for a lot of different points of view,” she continued. “Especially when you look at the trial and the decisions that were made, you know what really happened to that baby. A book with a lot of different points of view obviously lends itself to that.”
In addition to Kruger, the limited series also stars Jo Joyner, Ben Bailey Smith, Shelley Conn i Emily Taaffe.
Little Disasters is currently streaming on Paramount+.