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Fans tuning into Little Disasters might be thrown off by the amount of changes from book to screen — starting with that ending.
Based on Sarah Vaughan’s novel of the same name, Little Disasters, which premiered on Paramount+ on Thursday, December 11, followed an accident and emergency doctor treating an unexplained head injury on the child of one of her best friends. She then had to face the dilemma of whether to make a report to child social services.
The six-part series made it seem as if Jess (Diane Kruger) could have something to do with her daughter getting injured. In the 2020 novel, Betsey’s head injury was an accident caused by her son Frankie, who was then manipulated by Jess’ friend Charlotte to lie to cover it up.
“[In the show], I wasn’t actually the screenwriter but I was an executive producer. So I gave notes on various scripts and I learned so much. The first thing we did was we stripped out the book’s backstory section,” Vaughan exclusively told Us Weekly. “It existed to give more understanding to Liz as a character. We decided we didn’t need that complication.”
Vaughan addressed the choice to change the villain, who on the show was Mel’s husband, Rob (Stephen Campbell Moore).
“In the book, it’s Charlotte and not Rob. That was partly because we weren’t sure that an audience would accept Charlotte behaving in that way and also because we were fleshing out Charlotte’s character a lot,” she explained. “In the book, she’s not particularly attractive. She’s described as a handsome woman — not as a beautiful woman, —and we get a hint that she might have propositioned Jess’ husband Ed. We felt that if we’d fleshed out Charlotte then to allow a baby to fall off a table and not report that would make her look incredibly villainous.”
Vaughan cosigned the onscreen change. “We felt that was something that we couldn’t accept from a woman,” she continued. ”On the show, Charlotte is the only woman of color among the four women. That was an element as well.”
Paramount+’s adaptation allowed them to show more of Rob — including his dark side.
“Rob is a very minor character in the book and he was really fleshed out here. There’s a lot more complexity that you can get — especially in a six-part show rather than a film. A six-part series gives you so much scope for cliffhangers and for really delving deep into these characters in a way that a film doesn’t allow for,” the author continued. “We can understand so much more complexity and there are so many more sub plots you can have.”
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Vaughan highlighted the “potential” for more development.
“It’s much more complicated than a film. This book lends itself to a show because it’s got lots of strong female leads in it and it was also written for lots of different viewpoints,” she continued. “Especially when you’re looking at judgment and you’re looking at decisions made, you know what really happened with this baby. A book with lots of different viewpoints, obviously lends itself to that.”
In addition to Kruger, the limited series also stars Jo Joyner, Ben Bailey Smith, Shelley Conn and Emily Taaffe.
Little Disasters is currently streaming on Paramount+.
