William Golding’s 1954 novel has been adapted for film twice — Peter Brook’s bleak 1963 version and Harry Hook’s muddled 1990 American take — and neither has held up as a definitive interpretation. Jack Thorne, who wrote Adolescence, now has a four-episode BBC series that landed on Netflix in the US on May 4, and critics are calling it the adaptation that may make all subsequent attempts unnecessary. The Rotten Tomatoes score sits at 91%.

Adapting One Hundred Years of Solitude was considered impossible for most of the decades since Gabriel García Márquez published it in 1967. The novel’s narrative structure — seven generations of the Buendía family in the fictional town of Macondo, with magical realism woven into the historical fabric so completely that separating them is not a meaningful operation — resists the conventions of visual storytelling in fundamental ways. The García Márquez estate spent decades refusing film rights.

Shelby Van Pelt’s novel Remarkably Bright Creatures spent an extended period on bestseller lists largely through word of mouth — the kind of book readers press on other readers with an insistence that can be off-putting until you actually read it. The premise involves a widow working at an aquarium who forms an unlikely bond with an octopus named Marcellus. It is also a missing-persons mystery and a story about grief and the ways humans project emotional intelligence onto creatures who may or may not share it.

The pitch for The Boroughs is exactly what the cast suggests: Alfred Molina, Geena Davis, Alfre Woodard, and Bill Pullman live in a retirement community that gets invaded by an otherworldly threat, and they do something about it. Netflix premieres it May 21. The premise requires a tonal balance that is difficult to sustain — too much genre earnestness and the comedy collapses, too much winking at the audience and the suspense disappears — but the cast is experienced enough with tonal complexity that the possibility of something genuinely good is real.

The first season of The Four Seasons on Netflix worked because Tina Fey understood what the Alan Alda source film understood — that a dramedy about middle-aged people in long-term relationships has to actually believe in the relationships to generate any comedy worth having. The show was warmer than expected and funnier than its premise suggested. The second season arrives May 28 with the same structural premise: six friends, four vacations in a single year, and the annual reckoning that time-based stories impose on characters who are trying not to notice how much is changing.