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The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is officially heading to TV, with Sky greenlighting an eight-episode series that adapts the iconic Stieg Larsson book. Amazon had been trying to develop a Dragon Tattoo show for a while, but it never got off the ground. Sky’s involvement, along with Left Bank Pictures, now ensures that production on the new series will get underway in Lithuania in the spring, though the show’s cast has not yet been revealed.
Adaptations of Larsson’s book have come and gone over the years, with varying degrees of success. A Swedish version, starring Noomi Rapace as Lisbeth Salander and Michael Nyqvist as Mikael Blomkvist, was well-regarded in 2009, while David Fincher’s 2011 effort starring Rooney Mara and Daniel Craig was critically praised but is often considered one of the director’s weaker films.
The book, originally titled Men Who Hate Women, follows a journalist and a hacker who begin investigating the disappearance of a girl 40 years ago, only to be drawn into a dangerous web of lies, misogyny, and systematic abuse. The new Dragon Tattoo series promises to bring the story “into the present,” but still “grounded in the characters and investigative DNA of Stieg Larsson’s Millennium novels, with themes that carry heightened relevance today.”
Inevitably, the show will give the story more room to breathe, whereas the movies had to compress everything into a couple of hours, but the mention of “themes that carry heightened relevance today” in the show’s description seems key, and also why a Dragon Tattoo series could finally do Larsson’s book justice. It feels like the right time to explore these themes, as they sadly haven’t dated.
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo isn’t just about bad men doing bad things; it investigates how violence against women is perpetuated by institutions and systems, which has only become more relevant. In the book, hacker Lisbeth Salander is highly intelligent and capable, but still placed under a legal guardianship which allows a man the freedom to control her finances and sexually assault her. This isn’t seen as a loophole, but rather as the system working as it’s designed, and the infuriating bureaucracy that surrounds these systems could be explored more thoroughly over eight episodes.
The same goes for the Vanger family storyline, which reveals the violence that lurks behind massive wealth, and the silence that helps disguise it. Crimes committed within elite families are still minimized today, and a long-form series could allow the book’s pattern of misogynistic behavior in wealthy families and institutions to emerge gradually rather than being reframed as quick twists.
A Dragon Tattoo TV series could bring everything in Larsson’s book up to date and show us how little things have changed. Hopefully, the team behind the show – Steve Lightfoot and Angela LaManna from Behind Her Eyes – will choose to adapt the material in a compelling and thoughtful way, rather than sensationally.
The post The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo Deserves a New Life on TV appeared first on Den of Geek.
