Lucky: A Tale of Two Formats

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It was my intent to write this post with @scrobble on the @scrobble.life platform, but there seem to be some limitations with that front end which forced me to write it in PeakD instead. Let me cover those first so that @acidyo might see them and make the necessary adjustments if he feels they are necessary.

You see, there is a book called Lucky by Marissa Stapley, but there is also a show right now on Apple TV+ that is called Lucky. While they both focus on the same character, as you will read in my post, they are two very different stories. I know this might be a fringe case, but in the Scrobble front end I wasn't able to pick both a book and a tv show as the format.

Which isn't a huge deal, but then when I tried to just pick a book, the book I am referencing wasn't available in the list of books to pick from. Which leads me to believe whatever database that drop down is pulling from, it isn't very current or thorough.

I don't intend this to be a criticism, just an explanation for why I didn't use the front end. If it costs me an upvote, so be it.

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You see, this all happened because I noticed there was the show on Apple TV+ starting Ana Taylor Joy. I remembered her from The Queen's Gambit and I rather liked her, so I thought it might be a good show to watch. I mentioned it to @mrsbozz and she suggested that I read the book first. It turns out she has purchased the book a while ago on our shared Kindle account and while she had read it, I had not.

So I added it to my rotation and finished it in about a week or two. Which for a normal person would probably be a couple of days, but I read slow. The book focuses on a young con-woman named Lucky who finds herself in a bit of a predicament. I'm not going to give away too much of the plot because that would ruin the fun, but the basic premise of the book is she is trying to extract herself from said predicament.

The book is one of those where it bounces back and forth from the present to the past highlighting Lucky's youth and her relationship with her grifter father that took her all across the United States as a child working whatever scam they could here and there.

I found the characters well developed if not frustrating at times, but I think that was part of the point. The frustration you felt as a reader was some of the same frustration that Lucky was feeling growing up in the situations she was describing to us.

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Then we have the limited series on Apple TV+. Like I said, Ana Taylor Joy was enough to pique my interest. Then the fact that Timothy Olyphant was in it as well had me totally sold. He was absolutely fantastic in Justified and if you haven't watched that show yet, do yourself a favor and go do so.

I was also happy to see that the author of the book Marissa Stapley was one of the executive producers of the show. Which normally would be a good thing, as we have seen far too many book adaptations where the author wanted nothing to do with it and it ended up turning into a burning pile of crap.

However, in this case, Stapely seems to have been wanting to flex her creative muscles and the show while entertaining, was about as far from the book as you could possibly imagine. One of the key plot points from the book was absolutely missing from show. In addition to that, numerous key characters were also completely missing from the show, while other characters who were never even mentioned in the book seem to be major players in the TV show.

The plot in general, is quite a bit removed from the book, and the frequent flashbacks I mentioned earlier are virtually non-existent. Which is a shame, because they really help you understand who Lucky is along with her father and how/why they got to the point they are.

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I had a small amount of hope that things would circle back around at the end and sort of come in line with how the book ended, but that never really happened. In fact, the series ended pretty much the exact opposite of how the book did. This is definitely one of those cases where I feel the book is much better than the tv show. However, I feel like they are both worth reading or watching, just don't expect one to be anything like the other.

It would be better to approach them as two totally different pieces of fiction just as they are two totally different formats. Ana and Timothy did a fair job with their parts in the show, but I kept expecting them to be more like their counterparts in the book, and unfortunately that never happened, though I do think Olyphant came close in the role of her father.

It's more likely most people will watch the show versus reading the book these days, but if you do watch the show and you like it, do yourself favor and dig into the universe Stapley has created a bit more and read the book.

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