The Undoing: where to start reading
Adapts You Should Have Known by Jean Hanff Korelitz. Say how far you watched, and pick the book up exactly there.
at You Should Have Known.
The six-episode limited series adapts the whole of Korelitz's 2014 novel, keeping the same Manhattan therapist and the same death at its centre, but restructures the story into a whodunit and reworks how it resolves. Reviewers who read both versions describe the changes as substantial, and one dedicated comparison piece calls this the looser of Kelley and Kidman's two HBO thrillers, set against their earlier Big Little Lies. Specifics of the ending are withheld here to avoid spoiling either version. Korelitz has not written a sequel novel.
Limited Series draws on this book. Read the full story:
You Should Have Known
What the show changed here
- ChangedThe book's title, You Should Have Known, is what to search for -- HBO's press rollout used The Undoing instead. The UK edition was reissued under the show's title to match; the US edition kept its original title, adding only an HBO tie-in line on the cover.
- ChangedKorelitz has said she pared her husband character, Jonathan, down on the page; David E. Kelley brought him forward into a lead role played by Hugh Grant.
- ChangedThe novel is told entirely from Grace's point of view; the series restructures the same events into a whodunit that keeps several characters plausible as suspects, a shape the book's narration doesn't have.
- ChangedThe final stretch is reworked from the novel's resolution. Director Susanne Bier has said she used the book as a 'conceptual framework' rather than a page-to-screen ending, and multiple outlets that compared both versions describe the finale as substantially different. Specifics are withheld here to avoid spoiling either version.
The six-episode HBO limited series (2020) is titled The Undoing, but it adapts Jean Hanff Korelitz's 2014 novel You Should Have Known -- that is the title to search for. Korelitz has said she learned of the retitling from a press release; the UK edition (Faber) was reissued fully under the show's title to match, while the US edition (Grand Central) kept its original title, adding only an on-cover line noting the HBO tie-in. One dedicated comparison piece, weighing it against David E. Kelley and Nicole Kidman's earlier HBO collaboration Big Little Lies, calls this the looser adaptation of the two, and multiple sources that read both versions describe the ending as substantially reworked -- this page doesn't say how. Korelitz has not written a sequel.
Rate it from where you are. No account, and nothing here says a word about what happens next.
