The holistic detective is coming back.
Douglas Adams' Dirk Gently made his way to the small screen with a one hour, one off adaptation for BBC Four late in 2010. And while fans were mixed on the results the adaptation the ratings soared and the Beeb has responded by commissioning another three hours worth of Dirk, spread over three one hour episodes to air in 2012.
Now, nobody has asked me, but here's some unsolicited advice. One, they need to up the absurdity. Dirk Gently in novel form revels in the quietly impossible things we experience and take for granted every day and expands those out into significantly larger absurdities. Hinting at them in the show - i.e. by including direct references to Dirk's fridge - without fully indulging them - i.e. by not following through on the fridge story and actually giving us the birth of the Guilt God - irritates fans more than satisfying them.
More importantly, I think the best things producers can do would be to take all three hours to tell a single story. A failing of the first attempt was the revision and compression that had to occur to fit a story into an hour. But Dirk is all about the diversions, all about the seemingly random twists and turns into seemingly unrelated ground, and if you're going to hold a Dirk Gently story on to a clean and narrow path to keep the plot ticking from point to point to fit within an hour long format, well ... that's not really Dirk any more. At least not the Dirk of the printed page that fans love. Give the man some breathing space and see where it goes.