Today’s TTT is TV shows or movies that would have made amazing books. But first, the teasin’.

It is pretty generally recognised in the circles in which he moves that Bertram Wooster is not a man who lightly throws in the towel and admits defeat. Beneath the thingummies of what d’you call it, his head, wind and weather permitting, is as a rule bloody but unbowed, and if the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune want to crush his proud spirit, they have to pull their socks up and make a special effort.

PG Wodehouse letter, as printed in P.G. Wodehouse in His Own Words

How much more alive were these Anglo-Saxons than are we moderns! They lived in a world that was harsh and hard, but at least it was real. We live in our computer-generated demi-worlds, centred on ourselves, utterly addicted to the artificial-life support machine which drips the anodyne into the anoesis of our comfortably numb minds. How can we experience the beauty of this Old English poetry if we have never heard a curlew, or a gannet, or a cuckoo, or a gull? How can we experience Keats if we have never heard a nightingale, or Shelley if we have never heard a skylark?

Literature: What Every Catholic Should Know, Joseph Pearce

Okay, now: the TTT.

(1) NCIS. During the original run of NCIS, one of the main characters was an aspiring novelist who wrote Deep Sixed: The Adventures of L.J. Tibbs, which was a thinly (very thinly) veiled attempt to take the NCIS crimes and drama and make them into a book. I always wished CBS had done a media tie-in and produced that book, the way JK Rowling turned various books in the HP universe into real-world books.

(2) Breaking Bad
(3) Better Call Saul
(4) The Sopranoes

These three are my favorite dramas, and I’m grazing from them constantly. They were all expertly written, bu if they were translated into book form there would have to be something to make up for the visual storytelling — the use of significant props in Better Call Saul, for instance, like the tequila top that Kim touches whenever her character is flirting with her dark side, or Tony being haunted by the image of Big Puss after he’s killed off.