Looking for Alaska is the rare TV adaptation that improves upon the original work

Vulture

John Green's 2005 YA novel is a beautiful, poignant, and unsolvable puzzle, but it's stuck in its protagonist Miles' head, says Kathryn VanArendonk. Josh Schwartz and Stephanie Savage, who developed the Hulu TV adaptation, takes the show outside his head. "Of all the challenges that come with adapting a book for the screen, the question of what to do with a book’s narrator is often the most intractable," says VanArendonk. "Third-person narrators can sometimes be translated into a camera eye without requiring major story compensations, but first-person narrators present a specific variety of trickiness, and adapting them can be either a huge boon or an inescapable mire. Their particular voice and perspective is yoked to how the story feels, and in the case of a book like John Green’s novel Looking for Alaska, the narration by teen boy protagonist Miles 'Pudge' Halter is the book’s greatest tool and its most obfuscating feature; Miles, as the main storyteller, simultaneously enacts and short-circuits the book’s central ideas. Because of that trickiness, though, and because of the problems and opportunities of Looking for Alaska’s story, Hulu’s new miniseries adaptation is a rare thing, a screen adaptation where the chance to ditch the first-person protagonist is a real gift."

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• Looking for Alaska is nostalgic for itself, like it’s admiring itself in a mirror instead of making eye contact
• The miniseries format suits Looking for Alaska, giving characters and subplots from the book additional room to breathe
• In a sea of fizzle rocks-amped teen shows, Looking for Alaska is a cup of melancholy chamomile tea sipped while staring wistfully out of a window
• Fans of John Green, The O.C., and everyone in between will not be disappointed by this excellent addition to a genre of television that is notoriously difficult to get right
• The novel is brought to life with meticulously calibrated sentimentality
• Looking for Alaska stars say it's timeless despite the 2005 setting
• How John Green helped shaped the Hulu adaptation: He was on set during the production