Why did C.J. Sansom approve this moronic Disney+ Shardlake adaptation?

What would C.J. Sansom have made of the Disney+ version of his novel series about 16th-century crookback lawyer Matthew Shardlake? Sadly, because he died just a few days before its release, we’ll probably never hear the full story. But this comment from the show’s producer offers a hefty clue: ‘Chris [Sansom] has been enormously generous and he wants more people to read the books, and this is such a good way.’

Sounds very much like Sansom accepted this atrocity of an adaptation as a necessary evil: his books had been stuck in development hell for nearly two decades (possibly, because his labyrinthine whodunits about monastic reform and court politics in Henry VIII’s England were considered a bit niche for mass audiences) and, in the end, he simply capitulated to moronitude.

But I wish he hadn’t. One of the things that make the Shardlake books so distinctive and admirable is their attention to period detail. They don’t just take enormous pains to capture the look and feel of the era (the first is set in 1537), but also the very different way people thought. ‘His characters are of their time,’ commented one reviewer. ‘He never allows anachronisms to creep in, either in language or in his characters’ thoughts.’

The problem – and it’s a big one – is that this adaptation comprises almost nothing but anachronisms. Within minutes, we meet a street hawker with a talking bird. It’s a macaw, from the New World, such as would surely have been well beyond the financial reach of all but the very richest folk before the great age of Elizabethan discovery.

Nor, I suspect, did the buildings in Henry VIII’s England look remotely like the two main locations for the gloomy monastery – one castle (Hunedoara) in Transylvania and another (Kreuzenstein) outside Vienna. This is a generic, cod-medieval fantasy-land, acceptable enough perhaps in a sword and sorcery series like The Witcher, but somewhat grating in a world populated with named historical figures such as Thomas Cromwell (Sean Bean, barely even trying).