24 book-to-TV adaptations you need to see in your lifetime

Some of the best movies of all time are adapted from books, but turning a book into a TV series is a whole different kind of magic.

The showrunners don't have to worry about compressing hundreds of pages into a quick running time, they need to balance fidelity to the source material while keeping the audience entertained for hours and hours.

Just ask Stephen King, who's had his books adapted into movies and TV shows countless times. He's had at least one of his books turned into a show almost every year since 1990, and he has two this year: "Mr. Mercedes" in August and "Castle Rock" on Hulu now.

To make this list, we looked at the most awarded and critically acclaimed TV shows that use books as their source material. Sometimes the adaptations works best as a one-off miniseries, like "Brideshead Revisited" and "The Handmaid's Tale." And sometimes it works best as a long-running show, like "Sex and the City." We also omitted shows based on plays published as books — sorry, "Angels in America."

Here are the best book-to-TV adaptations of all time, ranked.

"Sex and the City" (1998-2004)

The HBO comedy about four New Yorkers confiding in each other about their sex lives defined a generation and made the careers of its four stars — Sarah Jessica Parker, Kim Cattrall, Kristin Davis, and Cynthia Nixon. It was adapted from a book of essays of the same name by Candace Bushnell, which started out as a series of columns in the New York Observer.

"Big Little Lies" (2017)

HBO's adaptation of Liane Moriarty's novel was a thriller that scratched an itch for fans of "Gone Girl" and carried an important message to boot. But what really made it amazing wasn't the murder mystery, it was the cast — one of the best assembled in the history of television. Nicole Kidman, Reese Witherspoon, Shailene Woodley, Laura Dern, and Alexander Skarsgård are all nominated for Emmys.

"Homicide: Life on the Street" (1993-1999)

David Simon is most famous for "The Wire," his depiction of crime and justice on the streets of Baltimore, drawing from his experience as a police reporter. But before that, his book "Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets" was the basis for the NBC show "Homicide: Life on the Street," which ran for seven seasons and focuses on the work of the Baltimore Police Department's homicide unit. It followed the earlier, acclaimed HBO series "The Corner," also based on one of Simon's books.