Novel adaptations come with their own set of challenges, but Netflix’s adaption of Pulitzer Prize-winning author Anthony Doerr’s masterpiece All the Light We Cannot Seewas going to require more than just two-and-a-half hours of footage.

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Set in the 1930s and 1940s, All The Light We Cannot See tells the story of multiple characters, but two above all else: our heroine Marie-Laure, played by newcomer Aria Mia Loberti, and a young boy named Werner, played by German actor Louis Hofmann. Marie-Laure is a young blind French teenager living in Saint-Malo, France with her father Daniel (Mark Ruffalo), and uncle Etienne (Hugh Laurie).

Marie-Laure and her father fled to Saint-Malo after the Nazis occupied Paris, forcing them out of their hometown. Werner is a gifted young German radio operator who is recruited by the Nazis to spy on the enemy. In this case, the enemy is Marie-Laure, as she broadcasts a French resistance frequency that becomes the country’s sole source of hope and the enemy’s worst nightmare. 

That’s only a fraction of the story, as an important chunk is also devoted to Ruffalo and Laurie’s respective characters as Marie-Laure’s father and uncle, as well as the infamously coveted and mystical jewel they hold in their possession, known as the Sea of Flames. As such, series director Shawn Levy (Deadpool 3, Stranger Things, Free Guy) decided the only way to tell the story properly was to break it up into a limited series. 

All the Light We Cannot See episode count

Unlike other famous novel adaptations such as Brie Larson’s Lessons in Chemistry on Apple TV Plus, All the Light We Cannot See bears but four episodes, each coming in at around an hour long. Episodes 2 and 4 are 51 and 53 minutes, respectively, whereas episodes 1 and 3 are 62 minutes.

In the novel, the first act sets the scene of Marie-Laure and her father’s life in Paris before they are forced out. It also gives us a chance to build a rapport with Werner as a young orphan before he’s ultimately recruited by the Nazis. Without this, the remainder of the story would carry far less weight. In the Netflix series, we get most of this information told through flashbacks, with much of the second episode doing this heavy lifting.

Unlike its source material, the Netflix series has been attacked by numerous negative reviews, with many citing a weaker beating heart and the want for poetic emphasis that pervaded every page of the novel. Nevertheless, for fans who have clung to the beloved 2014 novel, there’s nothing quite like seeing your favorite characters come to life on the screen.

All the Light We Cannot See is currently streaming on Netflix.