Aspen

Before you binge the 1977 miniseries, discover Burt Hirschfeld’s Aspen, the sweeping novel that inspired it. The book delivers a richer, more expansive portrait of the ski town’s rise, exploring power, money, and desire with page-turning intensity. Hirschfeld’s storytelling dives deeper into Aspen’s social circles—old-timers, developers, ski pros, and jet‑set newcomers—unspooling interlocking ambitions and betrayals the screen only hints at. If you crave layered backstories, sharper motivations, and a vivid sense of place, the novel is the definitive experience. For readers who love glamorous settings, big emotions, and high-stakes drama, Aspen is a must-read. Trade the limited runtime of the series for a fully realized narrative where the town itself becomes a living, breathing character you won’t forget.

The miniseries distills the novel’s wider scope into a tighter, character-forward plot. Hirschfeld’s book follows multiple intertwined arcs across Aspen’s boom years, while the adaptation streamlines timelines and merges subplots to fit network runtime and pacing. Tone and content shift noticeably. The novel’s candid treatment of sex, money, and power politics—core to Hirschfeld’s style—is softened for 1970s prime-time standards, reducing the raw edges and moral ambiguity that give the book its bite. Character depth is broader on the page. Several secondary figures with significant motives in the novel become composites or are minimized on-screen, which simplifies business, legal, and social machinations. The book’s interior viewpoints reveal why alliances form and fracture; the series conveys these mostly through plot beats. Expect structural changes, too. Events are reordered for dramatic cliffhangers, certain conflicts resolve more neatly, and thematic threads about Aspen’s transformation—from scrappy mountain town to luxury playground—are more overt and granular in the novel than the adaptation can consistently sustain.