When HBO dropped its plan to adapt Jonathan Franzen’s bestselling novel The Corrections in 2012, the author was so relieved he says he performed his first and last cartwheel on the lawn of his home in Santa Cruz, California. There had been an attempted film adaptation before that, but he had been unsurprised by its failure, having warned that it was impossible to condense his densely plotted doorstopper of a novel into a feature-length film. This time, Franzen had signed up as co-writer, with filmmaker Noah Baumbach.
He says that HBO was “excluded from the development process. Mistake, because we didn’t know how to do TV.” Franzen himself hadn’t even owned a telly until a few years earlier and certainly didn’t have cable, so as he was wrestling with the script, he began renting box sets. Around three episodes into one drama series, he realised “we have no idea what we’re doing.
This is not how you do TV. This is bad,” he recalls. The result, he says, was “one of the worst pilots anyone has ever made”.
Franzen used to think TV was the “enemy” of the serious novelist. In a well-known 1996 essay for Harper’s Magazine about the decline of high literature he had complained bitterly about the “banal ascendancy of television”. But after the HBO series failed, he watched Breaking Bad, Nurse Jackie and Silicon Valley and loved them.
In the age of social media, AI and the endless scroll, TV has started to look like a “friend”, he says now. And The Corrections is finally being adapted into an eight-part Netflix series, with Meryl Streep playing Enid Lambert, the matriarch clinging to dreams of hosting a perfect last family Christmas, even as her husband Alfred is in terminal decline with Parkinson’s and dementia and their grownup children’s lives are falling apart in terrible, comical ways. Once Streep announced she was in, Franzen felt the “chances of making this show have gone up above 50%”.
He says he’s a month away from finishing the script. We are meeting at his home on the edge of Santa Cruz, in his office where the blinds are pulled down low against the bright sunshine. He is 67, tall and slightly stooped, and although his hair has turned white he still looks boyish when he laughs, wide smile and little snub nose, a wicked glint behind his trademark dark-framed spectacles.
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