Jon Stewart returns from the holiday hiatus this week, with two shows featuring authors:

Monday, Jan 5, Steven Brill

America’s Bitter Pill: Money, Politics, Backroom Deals, and the Fight to Fix Our Broken Healthcare System, Steven Brill, (Random House)

As we noted earlier, Brill’s book is  an expansion of Brill’s award-winning Time magazine story. Brill is scheduled for appearances  on CBS This Morning and on  NPR’s Fresh Air.

Tuesday, Jan. 6, Cass Sunstein

Wiser: Getting Beyond Groupthink to Make Groups Smarter, Cass R. Sunstein, Reid Hastie, (Harvard Business Review Press, 12/23/14)

Sunstein’s philosophy of “libertarian paternalism” has caused Glenn Beck to call him “the most dangerous guy out there.” Considered a major influence on President Obama’s political thinking, The Washington Post reports that, as the administration’s former “regulatory czar,” he “become a symbol of a central contradiction of Obama’s White House. In seeking bipartisan common ground, the administration has often embraced policies that disappointed its friends — without disarming its enemies.” He has written several other books including Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness (Penguin, Rev. Ed., 2009).

No Colbert Report

Sadly, the other Comedy Central show that has been very good for books, The Colbert Report, will not be returning. Host Stephen Colbert is headed to a new gig, replacing David Letterman on CBS’s The Late Show. We won’t know until he begins in May whether he will revolutionize late-night network TV by including authors.

Replacing Colbert is The Nightly Show With Larry Wilmore, hosted by the Daily Shows‘s former “senior black correspondent.” Debuting on January 19, it is created by book lover Jon Stewart, so we can hope Wilmore will also include regular appearances by authors.

The most popular drama in PBS history, Downton Abbey,  returns tonight, in its fifth season (there will be a sixth, and while there is speculation that it will be the final one, there are also rumors of a spinoff movie).

In celebration of the new season, the New York Times offers an episode-by-episode look at the historical context of the series with links to NYT stories (in 1913, British suffragist, Sylvia Pankhurst, addressed the question, “Shall American Women Become Militant?”).

Entertainment Weekly runs down the  “new faces of Downton Abbey” (as if anyone cares — all that really matters is whether Maggie Smith is still on the show and, happily, she is).

Trailer:

Tie-ins:

A Year in the Life of Downton Abbey: Seasonal Celebrations, Traditions, and Recipes
Jessica Fellowes, Julian Fellowes
Macmillan/St. Martin’s: October 28, 2014

Downton Abbey: Rules for Household Staff
by “Carson” (the show’s head butler )
Macmillan/St. Martin’s Griffin: November 25, 2014

The trailer for BBC’s adaptation of the first two books in Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall series was just released.

The six-part series will air as part of “Masterpiece,” beginning April 5 (it begins in the U.K. next month). It stars Mark Rylance as Thomas Cromwell and Damian Lewis, known to many American primarily as Brody in the first three seasons of Showtime’s Homeland, as Henry VIII.

After previewing the full series, author Mantel gave it the thumbs up, saying, “Every face seems to me one that Holbein would recognize,” referring to Henry VIII’s court painter. Earlier, she had warned the BBC against indulging in the kind of historical “nonsense” that marred what she called the “big, all-singing, all-dancing American TV series The Tudors” produced by Showtime in 2010.

It seems there is one deviation from history, however. The Wolf Hall cod pieces may be too small. We’re to be blamed for that as well, since the real size was considered a “little too much for American television viewers.”

Tie-ins:

Wolf Hall: As Seen on PBS Masterpiece : A Novel
Hilary Mantel
Macmillan/ Picador: March 17, 2015
9781250077585, 1250077583
Trade Paperback
$16.00 USD

Bring Up the Bodies: The Conclusion to PBS Masterpiece’s Wolf Hall : A Novel
Hilary Mantel
Macmillan/ Picador: March 17, 2015
9781250077608, 1250077605
Trade Paperback
$16.00 USD

The Royal Shakespeare Company’s theatrical adaptation opens on Broadway on March 20th, also with a tie-in (note: the Theater Arts Communication tie-in we noted earlier has been cancelled). The Daily Mail quotes Mantel saying that the TV version is very different from the play.

Wolf Hall & Bring Up the Bodies: The Stage Adaptation
Hilary Mantel, Mike Poulton
Macmillan/Picador: February 24, 2015
9781250064172, 1250064171
Trade Paperback, $16.00 USD

As to when the third book in the trilogy, The Mirror and The Light will appear, Mantel has said it is “unlikely to be ready until 2016.” She is working under a bit of pressure. The BBC is waiting for its release so they can begin that adaptation.

Lawrence Hill’s novel, Someone Knows My Name, (Norton, 2008) has been adapted as a 6-part TV series, using the book’s original Canadian title, The Book of Negroes. Set for release in Canada in January, it will begin airing on BET in the U.S. on February 16, 2015.

The novel, a fictional slave narrative,  is based on the stories of American slaves who escaped to Canada after the Revolutionary War and were then recruited by British abolitionists to settle in Sierra Leone. The Washington Post praised its “heart-stopping prose” and noted that “Hill balances his graphic depictions of the horrors of enslavement with meticulously researched portrayals of plantation life.”

Directed by Clement Virgo, the movie stars Aunjanue Ellis, Louis Gossett Jr., Cuba Gooding Jr., and Lyriq Bent.

Gossett was interviewed about the series during its premiere at the  Toronto International Film Festival in November. He compares it to another TV mini-series he starred in, Roots.

Learn more at the Official Web Site.

Trailer:

Tie-in:

In Great Britain, people are celebrating Boxing Day while  analyzing the various Christmas specials, including the conclusion to Downton Abbey, season five.

Here in the U.S., season five begins on PBS Sunday, Jan. 4 at 9 p.m. To tide us over, we have a delicious spoof of the series, created as a fund raiser for the U.K. charity Text Santa:

Season six is likely to begin in the U.K. in September. No news on whether it will be the final one, but British news is atwitter with the possibility of a Downton Abbey movie.

One of the many people who helped say goodbye to Stephen Colbert during his finale show on Thursday was an author he often refers to after making an indelicate remark, “Once again, my apologies to Doris Kearns Goodwin” as well as an author he’s had on the show three times, George Saunders.

Colbert has been very, very good to books and authors, from shining a light on Amazon’s strong-arm tactics against publisher Hachette to featuring an average of two authors per week on the show.

New York magazine dubs him “Late Night’s Most Passionate Book-Nerd,” in an article that gives insight on what it was like to get the Colbert treatment. Poet Billy Collins compares it to getting a spinal tap, ” … it’s actually completely painless, but the anticipation of it is nerve-racking.”

The big question is whether the book nerd in Colbert will make the transition to broadcast TV when he replaces David Letterman on CBS’s Late Night.

The following brief clip from the BBC series based on Susanna Clarke’s 2004 best selling debut novel, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, can’t be accused of giving away too much, but it does give a sense of Eddie Marsan’s portrayal of Norrell.

No news on when the series will debut in the U.S., but the tie-in (Macmillan/Bloomsbury USA) is now showing a May release date, indicating it’s not expected until later in 2015.

ABC’s new comedy Fresh Off the Boat will premiere on Wednesday, Feb. 4  before moving to its regular timeslot on Tuesday, Feb. 10 at 8 p.m. ET.

Based on restaurateur and food show host Eddie Huang’s memoir of his childhood, Fresh Off the Boat, (RH/Spiegel & Grau; RH Audio; BOT), this will be the first Asian American family sitcom since Margaret Cho’s All American Girl.

The show stars Hudson Yang as the young Huang with Randall Park and Constance Wu as his parents. The show’s producer, the actual Eddie Huang, will do the voiceover narration.

The trailer for the show’s pilot, below:

NBC’s 8-part adaptation of the controversial award-winning novel, The Slap by Australian Christos Tsiolkas, (Penguin, 2010) has been scheduled to begin airing on Feb. 12.

Starring Uma Thurman (shown in some recent photos from the Brooklyn set), it is directed by Lisa Cholodenko, (HBO’s Olive Kitteridge and the movie The Kids are All Right).

About the repercussions of a man slapping an obnoxious four-year-old boy at a barbecue, the book was a hit in both Australia and the U.K., where it became a reading group staple. It was made into a popular Australian TV series in 2011 (as a result, some reports cite the new adaptation as a remake of that series, without noting the original source material).

Released in the U.S. as an original trade paperback, it  received a strong endorsement from the Washington Post. The reviewer praised it for giving American readers a sense of life in Australia, while exploring subjects that resonate here,

In The Slap we live for a few short weeks in suburban Australia, learning the language, becoming intimate with the characters and experiencing their customs. But finally the novel transcends both suburban Melbourne and the Australian continent, leaving us exhausted but gasping with admiration.

Most libraries are showing holds on the winner of the National Book Award in Fiction, Phil Klay’s Redeployment, (Penguin Press; Penguin Audio; Thorndike, OverDrive Sample)

Holds are likely to increase when Klay gets the Colbert Bump on Wednesday (which is the next to last day of the show. Here’s hoping Colbert continues to cover books when he takes over David Letterman’s chair on the Late Show in January).

Last month, Klay appeared on the PBS NewsHour:

Following on the success of the STARZ 2010 adaption of Ken Follett’s Pillars of the Earth, ABC is planning a 10-episode series based on the first book in the author’s Century Trilogy, Fall of Giants, (Penguin/Dutton, 2010).

According to The Hollywood Reporter, if it does well, the other two books in the trilogy, Winter of the World (Penguin/Dutton, 2012) and Edge of Eternity, (Penguin/Dutton, 2014) will each get their own series.

The script is being written by Ann Peacock, who will also executive produce. She wrote the adaptation of Alice Hoffman’s The Dovekeepers, (S&S/Scribner tie-in, 3/17/15) for Mark Burnett and Roma Downey, which is set to air on March 31 and April 1 on CBS.

First look, below (Downey’s dove seems a bit anxious).

The seven-year run of FX’s  Sons of Anarchy ends tomorrow night, but it seems some fans already know the ending because of an unauthorized release of the tie-in (see the story in Entertainment Weekly’s TV blog).

No problem for libraries; the few that ordered it haven’t received their copies yet.

Sons of Anarchy : The Official Collector’s Edition
Tara Bennett
Time Home Entertainment: December 10, 2014
9781618931276, 161893127X
$29.95 USD

During his interview with John Cleese, author of the new memoir, So, Anyway … (RH/Crown), Jon Stewart achieved a career high by making him laugh.

There was’t much talk about the book, but Stewart did say, “So, Anyway … is on the bookshelves now.” Nevertheless, the book roses to #152 (from #411) on Amazon’s sales rankings.

Good news for those who enjoyed HBO’s adaptation of Elizabeth Strout’s Pulitzer Prize winner, Olive Kitteridge. The director, Lisa Cholodenko, is gearing up for another TV adaptation, this one for NBC, of a complex, award-winning novel, The Slap by Christos Tsiolkas, (Penguin, 2010).

It was just announced that Uma Thurman will star, replacing Mary Louise Parker, who recently had to drop out to recover from pneumonia.

The controversial Australian novel, about the shock waves set off after a man, having had it with an obnoxious four-year-old boy at a barbecue, ends up slapping him. It was a hit in both Australia and the U.K., where it became a reading group staple.

When it was released here as an original trade paperback, it received a strong endorsement in the Washington Post.  Noting that the book switches back and forth among various characters and their reactions to the events, the reviewer says,

It’s a potentially confusing structure, but Australian writer Christos Tsiolkas is a master of seamless joints … He gets so close to his characters that the reader almost pleads with him to treat them more kindly.

While it gives American readers a sense of life in Australia, it also resonates here,

In The Slap we live for a few short weeks in suburban Australia, learning the language, becoming intimate with the characters and experiencing their customs. But finally the novel transcends both suburban Melbourne and the Australian continent, leaving us exhausted but gasping with admiration.

It was made into a popular Australian TV series in 2011 (as a result, some reports cite the new adaptation as a remake of that series, without noting the original source material).

Below is a trailer for the Australian version:

In comics adaptations, the big news is that Benedict Cumberbatch (PBS’s Sherlock Holmes) is confirmed to play Doctor Strange in Marvel’s upcoming movie.

In book adaptations, the big news is that Benedict Cumberbatch, currently getting Oscar buzz for his portrayal of Alan Turing in The Imitation Game, narrates a new BBC trailer that offers glimpses of some highly anticipated adaptations.

Using the “All the World’s a Stage” soliloquy from Shakespeare’s As You Like It, as narrative, the trailer offers clips from upcoming shows (click on the titles in the trailer to view each one). Included are:

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell — based on Susanna Clarke’s 2004 best selling debut novel, it stars Eddie Marsan as Mr. Norrell and Bertie Carvel as Jonathan Strange; Christmas release in the U.K. Tie-in scheduled for 2/17/14 (Macmillan/Bloomsbury USA)

Wolf Hall  — based on Hilary Mantel’s two Booker award winners, Wolf Hall and its sequel Bring Up The Bodies, it stars Mark Rylance as Thomas Cromwell and Damien Lewis as King Henry VIII; to air next year in the U.K.

Esio Trot — based on the 1990 novel for children by Roald Dahl, it stars Judi Dench and Dustin Hoffman; December release in the U.K.

The Casual Vacancy — based on the 2012 adult novel by JK Rowling, it stars  Michael Gambon, Keeley Hawes, Rory Kinnear, Monica Dolan, Julia McKenzie; specific release date has not been announced

Unfortunately, there is no news yet on U.S. release dates for any of these adaptations.