Matt Boyd Smith interviews Julie Grossman and Will Scheibel about their new edited volume Penny Dreadful and Adaptation: Reanimating and Transforming the Monster (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023), which explores the titular Showtime series (2014-16) and its spinoff, Penny Dreadful: City of Angels (2020). The rich and wide-ranging discussion touches on issues related to adaptation, gender, and the implications of the mosaic of references in both the original series and the spinoff (including Victorian literature, Universal horror films, and film noir). Grossman and Scheibel discuss the fascinating contributions made by their impressive array of contributors, and both demonstrate their own expertise throughout: Grossman previously published a monograph on adaptation, Literature, Film, and Their Hideous Progeny: Adaptation and ElasTEXTity (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), and Grossman and Scheibel collaborated on Twin Peaks (Wayne State University Press, 2020), a TV Milestones volume exploring David Lynch’s legendary series and its numerous paratexts. The conversation is a tie-in to the forthcoming New Review of Film and Television Studies special dossier “Women’s Authorship and Adaptation in Contemporary Television,” guest edited by Sarah Louise Smyth (University of Essex) and Stefania Marghitu (Pitzer College), which will appear in issue 22.1 (2024).
Julie Grossman is Professor of English and Communication and Film Studies at Le Moyne College in Syracuse, N.Y. She has written numerous articles and book chapters on film noir, adaptation studies, and gender and film, literature, and television. Her book monographs include Rethinking the Femme Fatale in Film Noir: Ready for Her Close-Up (2009), Literature, Film, and Their Hideous Progeny: Adaptation and ElasTEXTity (2015), and The Femme Fatale (2020). She is co-author (with Therese Grisham) of Ida Lupino, Director: Her Art and Resilience in Times of Transition (2017) and co-author (with Will Scheibel) of Wayne State University Press’s TV Milestones volume Twin Peaks (2020). She is founding co-editor (with R. Barton Palmer) of the Palgrave book series Adaptation and Visual Culture, for which she has co-edited three essay collections, Adaptation in Visual Culture: Images, Texts, and Their Multiple Worlds (with R. Barton Palmer, 2017), Screening Contemporary Irish Fiction and Drama (with Marc C. Conner and R. Barton Palmer, 2022), and Penny Dreadful and Adaptation: Reanimating and Transforming the Monster (with Will Scheibel, 2023). With Barton Palmer, she is currently writing a two-volume study of performance in classic film noir.
Will Scheibel is Associate Professor in the Department of English at Syracuse University, where he teaches film and screen studies. With Julie Grossman, he co-edited Penny Dreadful and Adaptation: Reanimating and Transforming the Monster (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023) and co-wrote the “TV Milestones” volume Twin Peaks (Wayne State University Press, 2020). He is also the author of Gene Tierney: Star of Hollywood’s Home Front (Wayne State University Press, 2022) and American Stranger: Modernisms, Hollywood, and the Cinema of Nicholas Ray (SUNY Press, 2017), and with Steven Rybin, the co-editor of Lonely Places, Dangerous Ground: Nicholas Ray in American Cinema (SUNY Press, 2014).
Matt Boyd Smith is Assistant Professor of Communication Studies at Young Harris College. His research is focused on the history of media industries and the circulation of popular formulas as cultural and industrial products. He has forthcoming work in New Review of Film and Television Studies, several edited collections, and has written about Nick Fury and Cold War super spies in Marvel Comics of the 1960s for the Handbook of Comics and Graphic Narratives (DeGruyter, 2021). Matt is currently working on his first monograph.
Stay tuned for issue 22.1 of New Review of Film and Television Studies, “Women’s Authorship and Adaptation in Contemporary Television.“