7 TV Shows You May Not Have Known Were Based on Books

Call the Midwife
Well, you probably could’ve guessed that Call the Midwife is based on a book. After all, it’s a BBC production and it airs on PBS, where books come to life. Indeed, it’s based on the memoir of real-life World War II-era nurse and midwife Jennifer Worth (Jenny Lee on the series), published in 2002 as Call the Midwife: A Memoir of Birth, Joy, and Hard Times. Worth ultimately published three memoirs, upon which the first two seasons of the show pulled material. After that, the show’s writers had exhausted the material and came up with new stories.

Bones
The only thing in pop culture that’s been running longer than Fox’s procedural crime drama Bones is the series of crime novels that inspired the series. Kathy Reichs published her first entry in the Temperance Brennan series in 1997: Deja Dead. Since 1999, Reichs has written another one every single year. Both the book and TV series focus on an ultra brilliant anthropologist named Temperance Brennan who uses her vast knowledge to solve otherwise unsolvable mysteries. The main difference is that the books take place in Montreal (vs. Washington, D.C. for the show). And in a fun allusion to its source material, the character of Temperance on the show Bones moonlights as a crime fiction author. She has a bestselling series of novels about a character named…Kathy Reichs.

Homicide: Life on the Street
Before he created two of the most realistic, provocative, and critically acclaimed police dramas of all time—NBC’s Homicide: Life on the Street and HBO’s The Wire, David Simon worked for more than a decade as a city reporter for the Baltimore Sun. In 1991, Simon parlayed his reporting into the book Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets, a dark and fascinating look at the soaring murder and drug rates in Baltimore and police’s often futile efforts to stop it all. That became the basis for Homicide: Life on the Street, which debuted in 1993 after the Super Bowl. It aired to criminally low viewership levels on NBC for six years, but won Andre Braugher an Emmy.

Dexter
Some shows adhere pretty closely to their source material, while others eventually diverge and create their own creative path. Such is the case with Dexter. Jeff Lindsay has now published eight novels in his series about Dexter Morgan, a serial killer who only kills bad guys when he isn’t working as a blood splatter analyst for the Miami Police Department. The first Dexter book Darkly Dreaming Dexter inspired the series, but the pilot of the show used up all of the plot, so writers for the show created their own Dexter universe while Lindsay created his.

Boardwalk Empire
Bootlegging, murder, incest: HBO’s Boardwalk Empire brought one salacious moment after another. It sometimes felt like the events of the show were made extra salacious because it was on HBO, and that the real 1930s couldn’t have possibly been so dirty. But it’s all based on truth. Boardwalk creator Terence Winter adapted the series from Nelson Johnson’s 2002 nonfiction title Boardwalk Empire: The Birth, High Times, and Corruption of Atlantic City. A few changes had to be made, of course. In real life, Steve Buscemi’s Nucky Thompson was actually a guy named Nucky Johnson, for example.

Justified
Elmore Leonard is the undisputed king of kooky crime fiction. The stories of seedy bad guys and their often seedier good guy counterparts dancing around each other in detailed worlds inhabited by memorable and complex tertiary characters has made for some great film adaptations, such as Get Shorty and Out of Sight. The critically-acclaimed FX series Justified is also based on works by Leonard—with the bad guys and good guys transplanted to the modern American west, specifically New Mexico. Justified is based on his books Pronto and Riding the Rap, and various short stories involving the same characters. The success of the TV show actually led Leonard to write more stories about lawman Raylan Givens…and then the show used those plots, too.

Friday Night Lights
The pensive, atmospheric, and often profound 2006-2010 show about a high school football team and small town life is based on a pensive, atmospheric, and often profound book about a high school football team and small town life. Called the best football book of all time by Sports Illustrated, H.G. “Buzz” Bissinger published his account of Odessa, Texas’s Permian Panthers in 1990. Before it was a show starring Kyle Chandler and Connie Britton, it was adapted into a film in 2004 also called Friday Night Lights. It was also adapted into a TV show once before, a short-lived NBC drama in 1993 called Against the Grain.
Did we miss any great shows based on terrific books?