Any fans of Douglas Adams' work know all too well the bitter sweet feelings when one of his works is made into a movie or television adaption. On the one hand there is joy that his work continues to inspire and evolve... and of course entertain. On the other... the fear they will depart too much from the source material.
With this latest Adams' adaptation, unfortunately it not only departs from the source material, it barely even acknowledges it, and where it does, it completely misunderstands it.
Dirk is a bumbling fool, but he is not Mr. Maker on speed. He doesn't pop up like a jack-in-the-box waving his finger in the air, instead he just quietly lurks onto the scene, only to be noticed at precisely the wrong point at which whatever plan he had completely unravels, only saved by the obvious fabric of happenstance, more to Dirk's annoyance than reliance.
Well... forget that. Landis' Dirk IS Mr Maker on Speed, and he does pop up like a jack-in-the-box, speaking at a million miles an hour, because if he slowed down for one second we'd realise the words he is saying and the script he is working off are plainly terrible.
The reliance on Occam's Razor to lead to the inevitable absurd conclusion is dispensed with in favour of obvious up-front exposition and degenerates into a procedural, almost fish slapping, comedy. I use comedy loosely.
You see, again touching on the source material, Dirk Gently (the source material) is not a comedy. It is a story about a man who uses an excuse that everything is fundamentally interconnected to explain away his lack of purpose in life and level of shamateurism barely above a weak con man, when in fact even though Dirk doesn't truly believe it himself, in his world everything IS interconnected. The comedy comes into play in that it just happens to be funny. It also happens to be tragic, sad, and at times a fair bit creepy.
Sigh... instead we get this. Which is nothing Adams intended.
The final scene (spoiler) in the first episode clinches it, where Todd watches the numbers come out on the lottery ticket one by one, to discover he has won the lotto. In Adam's Gently, the final number would have been as furthest possible away from the number Todd needed. Because Adams torments his characters who only win in the end through steely resolve and a bit of dumb pig headedness, he doesn't offer them up instant wins.
The previous TV Adaption starring Stephen Mangan and Darren Boyd was much more representative of the original work in Spirit and was also much closer to the source material.
This isn't Dirk Gently. This is horrific... and sad.
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