IP Picks🔎: YA-Ready Murder, Anxiety & Secret Societies

➕ A cold case in Nantucket and ‘Scream’-meets-’High School Musical’

MISSION TO MARS Kristen Bell as Veronica Mars, the teen detective who ferrets out the lurid, corrupt and criminal goings-on in her hometown of Neptune. (Warner Bros. Television)

Welcome to The Optionist. Thanks for reading along!

I binged Netflix’s new wilderness-mystery series, Untamed, this week — just six episodes, so not that hard. And it looks like I’m not the only one. Right now, the show sits in the top spot of the streamer’s most-watched TV series (where it has been more or less since it debuted). I liked the Yosemite setting and having the main character, wonderfully played by Eric Bana, hail from an obscure, non-traditional agency, the National Park Service’s investigative branch.

I’ve long championed the wilderness procedural/thriller as a fresh spin on the genre. Some of the standouts that I’ve flagged in previous installments of The Optionist include this one about a female investigator for the NPS, which I envisioned as a conventional network series — think “NCIS for NPS.” There was also a Gabby Petito-like story, a Survivor-esque one with a reality-show twist, one set in Maine and another with a lighter, more Goonies-adjacent touch. And those are just the ones off the top of my head. If a wilderness white-knuckler is what you were looking for — or still are, for that matter — it’s right here.

Here’s something fun. The Atlantic ran one of those “here’s some films better than the books” lists. As always, there are a couple of choices I agree with and a couple that raised my eyebrows. The writer only picked six, which leaves a lot of room for debate. Not surprisingly, people on social media quickly weighed in with their own candidates (Jaws, The Last of the Mohicans, Forrest Gump, I Know What You Did Last Summer, Children of Men) and revived some longstanding barstool debates about others — especially titles where the book and the film were both great in their own way (The Godfather, Jurassic Park).

I’ve always been less interested in the question of whether a book or a film is better than I am in thinking about the cleverest adaptations — the ones that didn’t try to adapt the entire book, but pictured a full-blown movie in just one section of it. Two of my favorite examples of this are Quiz Show and Lincoln. In the case of Quiz Show, writer Paul Attanasio turned what’s really a slender story in Dick Goodwin’s memoir into an Oscar-nominated screenplay. With Lincoln, Tony Kushner brilliantly zeroed in on a small section of Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Team of Rivals that dealt with the passage of the 13th Amendment. That section of the book doesn’t take up many pages, but in Kushner and director Steven Spielberg’s hands, it contains worlds. (Yeah, I know it’s a weird coincidence that the two authors I thought of just happened to have been married to each other.)

I’ve always admired that skill — the ability to find the movie needle in the book haystack. When it’s done well, the approach seems obvious. But as anyone who’s tried this knows, what seems obvious in retrospect didn’t seem that way in the beginning. What about you? What’s on your film-over-book list? And do you have a favorite example of a great movie that was adapted from just a portion of a book?

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🔒 This Week: What are the kids up to?

On to this week’s picks! It’s summer, which means the kids are out of school and ready to hit the multiplex. So it’s fitting that we’re coming to you this week with a trio of YA books that would translate to the screen nicely. Don’t worry, we’ve also got a couple of choices for the grown-ups in the room. The full lineup:

🔪 A YA horror-mystery that’s series-ready and captures the spirit of great teen shows like Buffy and Veronica Mars.

🎭 A slasher tale set at theater camp that’s High School Musical meets Scream.

💊 A zeitgeisty coming-of-age story that’s perfect for today’s “anxious generation.”

💪 Right in the “manly” TV zone: A potential series-launching procedural about a grizzled state policeman investigating a three-decade-old case in a wealthy beach town hostile to outsiders.

🌎 A globe-spanning thriller in the spirit of Dan Brown, but with a feminist twist. Paging Phoebe Waller-Bridge!