It’s been a few months since Geek Girl (10 x 30 minutes) made its debut on Netflix and became one of the buzziest shows of the summer. Based on British author Holly Smale’s 2013 novel of the same name, this live-action series generated more than 94 million hours of watch time in its first month alone, and remained in the mighty global streamer’s top-10 English TV ranking for four straight weeks.

Its success is immensely rewarding for the team behind the show—especially executive producer Jeff Norton, who has championed this adaptation since its journey to the small screen began more than 10 years ago. Pleased with its viewership numbers, he says: “The most pleasant surprise is that the show has found an audience well beyond the core teenage demographic.” From his perspective as an award-winning author/producer with nearly two decades of experience writing books for young readers (such as tween fantasy Dino Knights) and producing kidlit adaptations (including preschool toon Trucktown), Norton looks back on Geek Girl‘s long road to success.

Finding the north star

Geek Girl first landed on Norton’s radar in 2013, when he and Smale were on an author tour together promoting their debut novels. The emotionally resonant story stayed with him for years—especially the protagonist Harriet Manners, a socially awkward 15-year-old who is discovered by a modeling agency and becomes the face of a fashion campaign. One of the first things Norton recommends producers do when they’re considering a book adaptation is to identify the “north star” of the story—the crux of its theme and tone. In Geek Girl‘s case, it was the universality of Harriet, who perfectly captured how everyone sometimes feels like an outsider. To write the book, Smale drew on her own life experience as a teen model on the autism spectrum. And although Smale wasn’t diagnosed yet when she was writing the book, it’s evident to readers that Harriet is also neurodiverse (though that’s never explicitly mentioned).

With style and heart to spare, Geek Girl attracted the interest of many producers who wanted to option the title. But most of them had an Americanized treatment in mind—which Smale always turned down. “Because it’s based on her life story, it was very important to Holly that the project and the character stay British,” Norton explains. So when he eventually reached out to Smale’s agent to discuss an optioning deal, he made that commitment—and also agreed to honor Smale’s wish to be very involved in scriptwriting and producing the series. These promising discussions paved the way for Norton to secure the option agreement for Geek Girl. Option deals usually have a term in the range of 12 to 24 months, during which time the project must lock down financing in order to move on to the next phase, paying the author the exercise price and actually buying the rights to make the project. (While prices vary greatly based on the book, as a general rule of thumb, Norton says the option price is usually 10% of the exercise price.)

Assembling the right team

He may have won Smale’s trust to steer the adaptation, but Norton had limited time to put the project’s financing together. And a number of platforms and broadcasters passed on the pitch, saying they felt Geek Girl would only pull in a limited audience. “One of the main rejections was that they thought the target audience would be too young,” he explains, adding that they felt “viewership would tap out at 12.” Despite these objections, Norton and Smale saw Geek Girl as a four-quadrant series that could appeal to every demo and still be family-friendly. Then along came Netflix—the first buyer to share this vision. The streamer’s team was keen to ensure that the adaptation didn’t come across as strictly kids TV, but as content with broad appeal. “There’s a version of [the IP] that could be much more juvenile, but Holly and I didn’t want that,” says Norton. “And luckily, Netflix didn’t want that, either.”

The next step was locking down partners to help develop and produce the series. Norton signed London’s RubyRock Pictures as the lead producer first—a perfect match given the studio’s founder/creative director Zoë Rocha’s familiarity with all things fashion from a young age (her father is celebrated designer John Rocha). Norton also brought in Toronto’s Aircraft Pictures as a co-producer, having built a rapport with its bosses while he was consulting for Canadian media giant Corus Entertainment. “I had helped facilitate their [past] acquisition of the company—so I got to know Anthony [Leo] and Andrew [Rosen] well.” The project qualified as a UK/Canada treaty co-production, opening the door to rebates during a crucial time, especially since one of the UK industry’s lifelines, the BFI Young Audiences Content Fund, ended in 2022. Going the co-pro route also opened up an opportunity to film in Canada, with a book plotline (where Harriet travels abroad on a whim) strategically tweaked to take place in Ottawa—a setting Norton particularly favored. “The big draw was that Ottawa has a museum with a dinosaur, which was important to the story.”

After his Corus consulting stint ended, Norton headed up its Waterside Studios prodco from September 2022 to March 2024. Waterside funded the development of a writers room and scripts for all 10 episodes ahead of Geek Girl‘s greenlight from both Netflix and Corus in early 2023. Norton also negotiated a non-exclusive license with Corus to carry the show on its STACKTV streamer in Canada, leaving room for Netflix to launch it globally. The project was now ready to move into the next significant phase—exercising the option. And true to his earlier commitment, Norton brought Smale on board as a credited co-creator, executive producer and writer.

Down to the nitty-gritty

“Books are great [source material for films or series] because an author has spent years and years of their life figuring out the characters and the story,” Norton observes. Throughout the development process, he sat with the creatives and streaming execs involved to carefully go over the fine points of the script and the visual translation of the book. The writing team had to work hard to maintain the tone of the book, while also making sure the on-screen action was bringing something new to the story for viewers.

One element that sparked a lot of discussion was the show’s narration, which took its lead from the book’s first-person POV. Ideally, there shouldn’t be too much narration in a visual medium unless it’s purposeful, Norton says. So the team revised an early draft of the show that had a lot of descriptive narration, axing lines that were basically just reiterating what was happening on screen. Instead, the writers refocused the narration to explore the thoughts playing out in Harriet’s mind. “We use the voiceover whenever she says [or thinks] something that’s different to what she’s doing, [or] to contradict what the audience sees,” Norton explains.

In one example, when Harriet meets Nick, a fellow model she’s crushing on, she offers him a formal handshake, and her disapproving voiceover exclaims, “A handshake?! Seriously?” The biggest conversation the team had during development centered around whether or not to identify Harriet’s autism, Norton recalls. Netflix agreed not to explicitly name it in the first season; instead, the goal was to subtly portray her neurodiversity through her behavior and let the audience come to the understanding on their own. “We didn’t want this to come across like an issues show,” says Norton. “We wanted it to be about a character.”

Beyond relying on Smale’s lived experiences, the team also tapped the services of Kim Wilson’s OneFish TwoFish Consulting to ensure authenticity in portraying a neurodiverse lead. Production on Geek Girl began in June 2023 and wrapped in August, with initial filming in London, followed by two more weeks in Ottawa, and then post-production until March 2024. The show’s streaming success right out of the gate illustrates the power of a well-executed literary adaptation. Turning a well-known book into a series seems to be especially appealing in today’s risk-averse TV marketplace, and for producers wanting to do so, Norton says it’s important to honor what made the source material resonate with readers in the first place. No news has emerged regarding a potential second season…yet. While the first season wrapped up with an “incredibly satisfying ending,” Norton notes that there are eight books in Smale’s Geek Girl series, creating the possibility for more adventures on screen.

This story originally appeared in Kidscreen‘s Q3 2024 magazine issue.