Looking for Alaska, a Hulu original series based on the John Green book of the same name, premiered at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival on Sunday.
Fans of the book, and of the vlogbrothers – an influential Youtube channel hosted by brothers Hank and John Green – are likely aware that this series has had a difficult journey to its premiere. To give you a quick summary, Paramount Pictures acquired the novel’s film rights in 2005, the same year it was written, but ultimately lost interest and postponed the process indefinitely. In 2015, the success of a film adaptation of another John Green novel, The Fault in Our Stars, revived interest in Looking for Alaska. Screenwriters, directors, and executive producers were announced. Casting got underway. But by the next year, the project had fallen apart again.
Two years later, the project came to life again, this time as an 8-episode limited series by Hulu. The question now is: what’s the story like after all these years? Many, if not most fans of the book, were adolescents when it came out. And many, if not most fans, myself included, formed a strong bond with the story and the way it delivered tragedy and the experience of young adulthood with profound resonance. Given the adaptation’s lengthy production delays, and its special place in the hearts of readers, the TV series faces high expectations.
Based on the premiere of the first episode, it’s safe to say that the question of whether or not those expectations are met is…yet to be answered.
It’s just too soon to tell. But I can at least say that the first episode sets up the rest of the series with great potential. The primary cast members fit their characters very well. Charlie Plummer brings a believable gangly awkwardness to Miles. Kristine Froseth embodies the beautiful, mysterious Alaska and delivers her high-brow quips and monologues naturally. Denny Love more than captures The Colonel’s humor and deep-seated intellectual anger with the world. We haven’t gotten to see too much of Jay Lee’s Takumi yet, but so far he seems as cool and collected as his book counterpart. As a fun plus, Lee’s skill as a magician has been incorporated in small ways into the series.
The dialogue is balanced, sometimes pulling quotes directly from Green’s novel, sometimes leaving it out. We end up with a first episode script that preserves a lot of the source material’s characteristic wit and tone, a trait I would consider foundational to any John Green adaptation worth watching.
We learned from the post-film panel conversation with John Green, executive producers Josh Schwartz and Stephanie Savage, and primary cast members about Green’s involvement with production. He is credited as an executive producer on the show and described some of his reactions to seeing his own writing reflected in the script:
“It’s also been so long since I read the book, that I would read something and be like ‘I’m not sure about this bit’ or ‘I don’t think this works out.’ And Josh would come back with ‘well YOU wrote it,'” Green said with mock incredulity as the crowd laughed.
This is one of the main reasons I’m hopeful for the rest of series – the care the executive producers took with the project. Schwartz and Savage have been deeply involved in the Looking for Alaska project since 2005. They have worked closely with Green throughout that time to capture the essence of the book in a screen adaptation.
They’re not the only ones with a longstanding bond with the book. Stars Charlie Plummer and Kristine Froseth both have personal connections to the story too. Both read it as adolescents and dreamed about playing these roles someday.
Plummer shared his experience auditioning for the adaption back when it was going to be a movie:
“I first auditioned for this when it was a movie, and then kept bugging my managers about the status and when we could get it,” he reflected. “When I finally got the part, I went back to a high school list of ten stories I wanted to tell before I died. And Looking for Alaska was on the list.”
Denny Love and Jay Lee, though they hadn’t read the book before auditioning for the series, have also come to relate deeply with its story and themes. Love in particular reacted strongly to the news of his. According to John Green, who was included on the call to Love, he said:
“Fuuuuck YES! YES! We are DOING this!”
The Colonel indeed.
All eight episodes of Looking for Alaska will be released on Hulu’s streaming service on October 18th. Check out the trailer below!