John Grisham’s The Rainmaker started life as a novel (1995), became a film by Francis Ford Coppola (1997), and is now a television series on USA and Peacock. Somewhere, creative teams are readying a rock opera and a Saturday morning cartoon. 

The new show is better described as an homage to the book and movie than as an adaptation of them. Familiar names pepper the script, but characters’ circumstances, identities, and motivations have been significantly altered. To be sure, creator Michael Seitzman, previously an executive producer on the network thrillers Code Black and Quantico, is under no obligation to retell the same story. Still, the show’s changes are instructive, as is usually the case when Hollywood types reveal what they think we want to see.