In European folklore, a changeling is a human-like creature left in place of a human (typically a baby or a weird little kid) stolen by other fairies. Here’s my thing: why bother? You know what I mean? Why bother replacing the baby or weird little kid with a creature? Why bother with that step? Just kidnap the baby. If you want to send the parents mad with grief, take their baby. Putting a human-ish creature in the cot to drive them slowly crazy over time seems like a waste of magic and energy. Sorry to criticise the ancient fairies of Europe, but there’s such a thing as overdoing it, you know?
Which brings us neatly to The Changeling (from Friday 8 September), the new Apple TV+ show about – well, anyway. The Changeling is based on Victor LaValle’s 2017 book of the same name, and that’s very important to what the show turns into: heavily literary, with a narration by LaValle himself and a lot of complicated knots of story and chronology that couldn’t be taken from anything other than a book. Book-to-TV adaptations are not new – if I may use a literary phrase, “no duh” – but so often they suffer from the conversion, the stripping out of detail and weirdness and complexity, the softening of edges and the show-you-so-you-see-it obviousness of putting something on screen.
