It’s a mark of the artistic credibility TV now possesses that some of the most talked about literary adaptations of the next 12 months won’t be seen in cinemas but on the small screen. There’s a third series of the BBC smash Poldark, about the trials and tribulations of an often shirtless, wheat-threshing Revolutionary War veteran after returning to his native Cornwall. But there are also many adaptations of sci-fi and fantasy books this year. The acclaimed producer of Hannibal and Pushing Daisies, Bryan Fuller, is turning Neil Gaiman’s American Gods (Starz) into a lush spectacle starring Ian McShane as the god Odin in a mythopoetic US where deities like Loki, Anubis, and Czernobog still exist but try to blend in with ordinary people. Margaret Atwood’s dystopian novel about a future where women are only valued for reproduction, The Handmaid’s Tale (Hulu), arrives on the box with Elisabeth Moss as Offred, a handmaid who’s been assigned to bear children for a military leader. Len Deighton’s SS-GB, which imagines what would have happened if Britain had surrendered to Nazi Germany in World War Two, will be the BBC’s answer to Amazon’s The Man in the High Castle – it’s scripted by long-time James Bond screenwriters Neal Purvis and Robert Wade. And Netflix’s A Series of Unfortunate Events is based on the children’s book series by Lemony Snicket but has received major praise for its adult themes and unique Gothic absurdist tone. Then there’s a series that breaks all genre classifications: I Love Dick (Amazon), based on Chris Kraus’s 1997 novel-memoir hybrid, which brings Kathryn Hahn and Kevin Bacon to TV as an artist and the media theorist she’s obsessed with. Perhaps there is no greater sign of TV’s cultural ascent than the migration of movie stars in its direction: Nicole Kidman, Reese Witherspoon, Shailene Woodley and Laura Dern appear in HBO’s adaptation of Liane Moriarty’s 2014 novel Big Little Lies, about women who become friends and discover the ways in which violence has affected their lives.

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