Douglas Adams’s classic Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy is getting a new adaptation. Streaming service Hulu is ordering up a new TV series version of the iconic comedy science-fiction story.
According to Deadline, Carlton Cuse and Jason Fuchs are set to both showrun and write the adaptation. Cuse is best known for being one-half of the showrunning team behind Lost, while Fuchs’s credits include Ice Age: Continental Drift, Pan and Wonder Woman.
The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy first started off as a six-part BBC radio series in 197-. An immediate hit, creator Douglas Adams would see the series spawn a second radio series of six episodes, a series of books that would mostly adapt the radio series before heading off in their own direction and a live action television version adapting the first radio series.
The franchise follows the adventures of hapless Englishman Arthur Dent who heads out into the galaxy to hitchhike among the stars with his friend Ford Prefect, an alien who had been living on Earth in disguise, after the Earth is demolished to make way for a hyperspace bypass.
Adapting Adams’s work is a tricky prospect. The original radio series and novels were very dependent on the specific verbiage that he crafted for them. An attempt to bring the books to the big screen the late 1980s that we reviewed here tried to paraphrase and parse that language and the results lessened the material substantially. Even the 2005 film adaptation which starred Martin Freeman as Arthur and had Adams working on the script still felt like it fell short of the lightening that the author had captured in a bottle back when he first created the story. As a diehard Hitchhiker’s fan, I’ll be watching this one closely.
