t is a truth as old as Hollywood itself, that the book is always better than the movie. The difficulty of compressing a novel into two hours means that adaptations such as Hitchcock’s Psycho, Spielberg’s Jaws and Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers are among only a handful of films that arguably improve on the novels that inspired them.

But recent television adaptations have begun to show the transfer from page to screen doesn’t have to disappoint. Take the new version of Neil Gaiman’s 2001 novel American Gods, which began this week on Amazon Prime worldwide: Gaiman’s 500-page whopper about ex-con Shadow Moon and his roguish boss Mr Wednesday has never been adapted before. Thankfully, no one ever tried to shoehorn the chunky novel into a two-hour film; instead, the first season of the TV show is set to only tackle the first third of Gaiman’s book.

Readers once complained when film directors cut out their favourite moments for the sake of time – but TV is now going completely off book. Fans of American Gods are set to get even more time with its large cast of gods, who, in the novel, wander in and out of a main narrative that follows Shadow Moon’s story arc on his journey across America. But the freedom of TV means these characters – Bilquis, the man-eating Queen of Sheba; Mad Sweeney, an Irish leprechaun; Slavic deity Czernobog, to name a handful – get more room to breathe.

The Man in the High Castle, another Amazon Prime series, is based on Philip K Dick’s 1962 novel and sees the Third Reich in control of the east coast of the US, with the west in Japanese hands. Dick’s book weighs in at around 250 pages, yet the TV series launched its second season in December. How?

In the book, one of the protagonists, Juliana, has a failed marriage behind her. In the show, she’s just starting out dating Frank Frink, a Jewish man living in San Francisco, allowing a romantic storyline and an opportunity for the writers to imagine being Jewish in a world where the Nazis had won. Brand new characters have been added, including a German officer, played by Rufus Sewell. And while Nazi-ruled New York looms large in the book, none of the characters have scenes there – something very much changed for TV.

The new TV adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s 1985 dystopian classic The Handmaid’s Tale, about a theocratic, patriarchal America that reduces women to chattels and breeding machines, has added a lot to Atwood’s book: flashbacks, new scenes, new characters. But perhaps the most notable change is the scrapping of Atwood’s original concept, that Gilead is a whites-only society. In the novel, Atwood wrote of non-white races being sent off to the midwest somewhere, with intimations of concentration camps and ethnic cleansing. But after talks with Atwood herself, this idea was scrapped – a change that’s as much to do with audience identification as anything else. Who in 2017 wants to watch a TV show with an all-white cast? The Handmaid’s Tale, too, will have a second season.

Miniseries are where novels get their most faithful adaptations: the BBC’s recent SS-GB, based on Len Deighton’s novel about an alternative history where the Nazis won; Louise Doughty’s thriller Apple Tree Yard; the many adaptations of Agatha Christie. But straight, faithful adaptations are now a rarity – especially if the plan is for a longer dramatisation.

We’re used to TV shows spanning multiple seasons, which suits big book series such as Game of Thrones and The Walking Dead. But as American Gods showrunner Bryan Fuller says, every time he picks up Gaiman’s original novel he “keeps finding jewels” to expand and explore – and books are now something akin to a bible for TV producers to unfold in directions that the author might never have dreamed of. As American Gods, The Handmaid’s Tale and The Man in the High Castle are showing, we may be at a point where it no longer matters when there is no more book left to adapt.