Adapting a book series is hard enough when the source material is finished. It gets trickier when a show’s pace outruns the novels, or when the author hasn’t completed the story at all. Some productions have had to invent their own endings, and others have taken a different route and kept going well beyond the final page.
The seven series below all moved past the plot of their source books in some way. Each case is different. Some used notes or outlines from the author, some relied on a writers’ room, and a few never had a finished book to follow.
Game of Thrones
This is the best known example. The HBO series began in 2011 and adapted George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire. By the fifth and sixth seasons, the show had passed the published novels, since The Winds of Winter and A Dream of Spring were not yet released.
Showrunners David Benioff and D. B. Weiss have said Martin shared the broad direction of the ending with them. The series wrapped in 2019 after eight seasons. Martin’s sixth novel, The Winds of Winter, remained unpublished as of my latest information, so the show’s finale and the books may eventually differ.
The Walking Dead
AMC’s drama started in 2010 from Robert Kirkman’s comic book series, which is a graphic story rather than a prose book. The show followed the comic’s early arcs, though it changed characters and events from the beginning. Over time it drifted much further away.
The comic ended in 2019 with issue 193, while the television series kept going until 2022 for eleven seasons. It then spawned spin-offs such as Fear the Walking Dead, Tales of the Walking Dead, Dead City and Daryl Dixon. That gave the franchise a life far longer than the original source.
Outlander
Starz’s Outlander adapts Diana Gabaldon’s novels, which began with the 1991 book of the same name. The show has generally followed one book per season, with some adjustments. Its pace has pulled it close to the author’s published output, since Gabaldon is still writing the main series.
Starz announced that the eighth season would be the last. The show has also developed material that isn’t in the books, including a prequel series, Outlander: Blood of My Blood, which explores the earlier generations of the families. So the franchise has already stepped beyond the strict boundaries of the novels.
True Blood
HBO’s True Blood premiered in 2008, based on Charlaine Harris’s Southern Vampire Mysteries, also known as the Sookie Stackhouse novels. The first season followed the first book closely. After that, the writers under Alan Ball took the story in very different directions.
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The show ran seven seasons and finished in 2014. Harris’s own series of thirteen novels ended with Dead Ever After in 2013. The television plot and the books resolved differently, and many viewers noticed that several characters played much larger or smaller roles on screen.
Dexter
Showtime’s Dexter drew on Jeff Lindsay’s novel Darkly Dreaming Dexter. Only the first season really follows that book. Later seasons were original stories, even though Lindsay continued to write further novels featuring the character.
The show ended in 2013 and returned with Dexter: New Blood in 2021, then the prequel Dexter: Original Sin in 2024. Neither revival simply retold a book, which shows how far the character has traveled from the page.
Pretty Little Liars
Freeform’s Pretty Little Liars, which debuted in 2010, adapted Sara Shepard’s young adult novels. The original book series had sixteen novels. The television show ran for seven seasons, ending in 2017, and its mystery about the identity of the stalker known as A diverged significantly from the novels.
Shepard’s books resolved the central mystery differently than the show did. The TV version also gave its characters more romantic arcs and different outcomes. Later spin-offs, including Ravenswood, The Perfectionists and Original Sin, explored new stories rather than adapting specific books.
The Witcher
Netflix’s The Witcher is based on Andrzej Sapkowski’s fantasy saga. The series began in 2019 and has used both the short story collections and the novels. It has also introduced original plotlines and altered timelines along the way.
Netflix has confirmed that the show is heading toward a concluding fifth season. The producers have discussed adapting more of the novels, though the series has not been a strict page by page version of them. It is a good example of a show that mixes source material with original material.
Taken together, these shows suggest that outrunning the books isn’t automatically a failure. Sometimes it brought new creative energy, and sometimes it left audiences divided about whether the story still felt true to the source. Either way, adaptations often take on a life of their own once the pages run out.
If you love a show based on a book, reading the source is a good way to see what choices the screenwriters made. The differences can be as interesting as the similarities.
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