“If you haven’t read it, read it,” says the Guardian talking about Electric girls, Naomi Alderman’s novel that imagines a world where girls become able to produce electric shocks from their hands. We talk about it because the first episodes of The Power the series inspired by the dystopia created by the British author. The novel, which became a publishing case and was awarded the Baileys Women’s Prize in 2017, was adapted by Raelle Tucker, Sarah Quintrell and Alderman herself into a series over 10 seasons. The reviews, however, tend above all to speak well of the novel, a little less than the television adaptation.
The series faithfully follows the pages of the book. “The fans,” he writes variety, «will be relieved to find the text mostly intact, save for some minor cosmetic changes. Alderman, who co-developed the series with Raelle Tucker and Sarah Quintrell, stripped away the more literary elements of the novel, which is semi-epistolary and peppered with footnotes. But most of the story beats survive the transition, along with most of the main characters, of which there are quite a few.” The premises are identical: what if girls ruled the world? It may sound like the verse of a Beyoncé song, but the result is much darker and crueler and the strength of the novel lies precisely in this. It is a reflection on power, gender dynamics, anger, injustice, revenge and the use (or the possibility of using) of brutal force.
As in the book, the series also develops a network of characters and events that range all over the world. There is Allie (Halle Bush) who kills her adoptive father who abuses her, Tatiana (Zrinka Cvitesic), wife of an Eastern European dictator who tries to exploit the new order to her advantage, Roxy (Ria Zmitrowicz), daughter illegitimacy of a London gangster who watched men kill her mother in front of her. There is the Nigerian journalist Tunde (Toheeb Jimoh), who finds herself recounting the dawn of the girls’ revolution and Margot (Toni Collette), mayor of Seattle, grappling with politics while everything around is changing. The new power changes the fate of these subjugated and exploited women. “It’s really exciting to see how these underrated, forgotten and overlooked girls light up when they realize that they and their actions matter in the world,” she writes. the Independent. This mosaic pattern, however, tends to lead to confusion in the series. “It doesn’t work so well on screen,” writes the Guardian“it feels like we’re hopping around endlessly but, since we can’t figure out what’s going on until the third episode, we lumber and lumber towards each revelation.”
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As in the book, initially at the center is the anger that flows like electricity through the girls’ bodies. But then the gender roles start to reverse. In one scene Roxy sends an electric shock to a bodyguard who doesn’t want her to enter a club. Then she jokes: «I won’t come in until you smile at me» she tells him mischievously. “Here … you’re cute when you smile,” she adds when he agrees scared. The series, however, as he points out variety covers only a third of the book and chooses to focus on the revolution, on the reversal of the trend, on the joy of women’s revenge after centuries of oppression. The rest will come in later seasons. «This,” writes Joshua Alston, “is ultimately the problem of The Power in its first season: it sounds more like a prologue than a first chapter». The series focuses on teen girl power and only lets you glimpse the problematic turns of the story which, however, are also the most interesting part of the story.