Fans of the Starz show Outlander , and fans of the series of novels of the same name by Diana Gabaldon, are loyal but for producer Toni Graphia, there were always going to be some things from the novels that wouldn’t make it onto the small screen. Most of these things she says she can live with, but there is one regret that keeps gnawing at her.
Digital Spy reports that the flip side of this is the fact that parts are expanded for television and dialogue is written which doesn’t appear in the books. For example, the character of Murtagh was expanded, and while his character is gone in the novels, he is still alive in the Starz series.
Graphia said she always knew that some omissions were inevitable, and she always hoped that fans of the books would be “forgiving,” but there is one small scene that she really wishes she hadn’t cut.
“There’s a conversation, I think, from maybe even in book 1 where Jamie is looking at the trees at Lallybroch, and he has this beautiful speech where he tells Claire, ‘I know this land so well. I know these trees. And I know when it’s going to rain, because the leaves turn a lighter shade of green, because the leaves turn upward, and you see the underside of the leaves.’”
Graphia says that it was just a beautiful speech about how much he loves the land, and it really spells out how Jamie feels about his surroundings and his homeland. The producer says that it was so perfect, but she couldn’t find the right place to insert it, and through several rewrites, it became frustrating.
“And it stuck in my mind so much that I put it in about four scripts to try to get it in. And then sometimes those smaller moments are the ones that get cut if the episode’s running long. And then I try to put it in somewhere else.”
She explains that the one line from season one stuck in her head particularly when it was time for Jamie to talk about how he feels about Fraser’s Ridge in the American Colony of North Carolina. Graphia is committed to making things work and moving forward with as few regrets as possible.
And luckily for Graphia and Outlander fans, Gabaldon has provided everyone with pages and pages of text and dialogue to make the series interesting for years to come, according to The Inquisitr .