and opinions some people might find offensive but for which I won’t apologise.
Don’t read any further unless you are open-minded.
Also, hard as I try not to give away too much, I can't guarantee there are no spoilers.
Outlander - TV Series 2014 – Ongoing. Starz. Fantastic story telling, with a Saturday matinee adventure serial feel
Just after WWII a British combat nurse Claire Randall is swept from the 20th century back to the Scottish Highlands of 1743 – yes, a perfectly strong, independent woman falls through time to a superstitious age when the British are invading Scotland, and women are supposed to know their place.
(Ha ha ha ha ha ha.)
Also, Claire can’t let on she is from the future but has to work out how she got where she is and how to get back where she came from.
I don't think the "spoilers" needed to tell you what this is about will spoil anything.
In the 18th century Claire finds herself attracted to Jamie Fraser, a hunky highlander hunk. This is a worry because she already has a husband in the 20th century, and she takes her wedding vows seriously. But Jamie is a hunk. And besides, in the 18th century men are more likely to leave a woman alone if she “belongs” to someone, plus she has normal “needs”, plus she is not sure she will ever get back to her own time and her 20th century husband Frank... And did I mention Jamie is a hunk?
Adapting books for screen is a challenge. It’s almost impossible to get it perfectly right, but with books like these, which were definitely not written with film in mind, the challenge is huge, and not just because the books have such a massive cult status. If you decide to watch this show be prepared to go where the story takes you –
Season one is set mainly in the Scottish Highlands where rebels are fighting British invaders, blokes duel with swords, and there is even a witchcraft trial. There is a definite Saturday Matinee adventure serial feel to this season, a fair amount of humpy pumpy and there is also some confronting violence because a Redcoat Captain who wants to break Jamie is a very sick unit.
The first half of season two has little humpy pumpy at all, and moves to 18th Century France. I luuuurved the whole Versailles thing, because that is a period of French history I find endlessly fascinating and I loved the way this show handled it. Claire and Jamie do eventually end up back in Scotland. Claire even ends up back in the 20th Century for a while.
The whole book saga moves back and forth between the 18th and 20th Centuries, which is handy. This means people from Gen X onwards can eventually catch a glimpse of just how things really changed for non-White people, or for white people with no dicks, during that period.
It helps a lot that Caitriona Balfe and Sam Heughan (sometimes pronounced Sam “Huge-One”) have more on-screen chemistry than any other two actors in the last 30 years - and that includes more chemistry than Angelina and Brad in the movie Mr & Mrs Smith, which is saying something.
The production quality of individual episodes varies in the first two seasons between appalling and pure genius. To be fair most of them deserve a minimum rating of 7 or more out of 10 and work well as entertainment.
If you have no interest in the books you can skip the next bit and just start watching - though if there is any chance violence can be triggering you might want to scroll down to the discussion of the show’s MA 15+ rating first.
How well does the TV series serve the books?
It’s probably different for each of us, but I do know that once I see something on a screen there is a strong chance the screen version will overwrite the home-made movies I’ve already got in my head from the original books. Some structural changes are inevitable with any adaptation as are new characters introduced or some characters eliminated.
Most book fans around the world are seriously happy with the Starz TV version. In season 2 one of my very favourite characters was introduced, and the character was nothing like I had imagined. The way the character was written (Brianna) in that season seemed to me to be appalling.
Although I swore I would not go back for season 3, I did eventually weaken and that was, in part, because Brianna does not feature much in book 3.
Season 3 of the TV series is of a much higher standard than the book (not my favourite). It’s not perfect but the story line is much tighter and eliminates some potential criticisms. (At one point there is a serious hole in the story arc between TV seasons 2 and 3, but better to fix a mistake than continue with it.)
But… the next season sees the return of an adult Brianna and now I’m really sure I can’t go back to the screen version of her – it’s just too awful for words.
MA 15+ Strong sex and violence
Sex
Well, I’ve warned you above about the humpy-pumpy. This series of books and therefore the TV show are about human nature. People do sex stuff. So what? You will see sex scenes in this show, and everything including male genitalia (but not a vagina).
Violence
What you need to be aware of is the violence aspect - including sexualised violence. Can't discuss this without spoilers.
The first two seasons of this story are set during the early expansion of the British Empire and without giving you a whole blah blah blah, it was a time when life was even cheaper in the West than it is now. Breaking Jamie Fraser (the handsome hero) becomes something of an obsession for a sadistic English Captain. Jamie’s horrific flogging is a recurring motif in season one, but in one episode in particular, he is raped and otherwise treated quite brutally by the Captain. Why does the Captain do it? Because he can. Most of it is suggested and off-screen, but it does freak some people out.
It took me a long time before I could watch the episode (0115) right through and realised it was actually better to watch it than imagine worse things happening. None of it is gratuitous (if you accept that the English Captain is a sick fuck) but while too many of us are inured to the idea of women being treated badly, the idea of males being raped freaks some people out even more, etc, etc, etc and lots of other stuff to discuss. The rape happens in one episode, and there is more of it in the following episode because Jamie is trying to process it in flashback. (No wonder Jamie was not looking for a lot of humpy-pumpy in the beginning of season two, heh?)
There is only a total of about 5 minutes that is gross, including suggested stuff rather than blatant stuff, but it grosses people out, big time. Our imaginations are powerful beasts.
There is no scene anywhere near so brutal in any of the following books til book 6 (tho everything is relative) and so there is no reason for the TV series to show anything so extreme either, in future episodes.
Bingeability – Yes. You will definitely want to know what happens next. Even if you have read the books, you will be curious about how the TV series handles the characters and the storylines. And yes, there are episodes even I could watch again and again and again, because they are brilliant; the episodes that work are really, really, really, really good.
This series would be on my Desert Island list, but only if I could not take the books.
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For Readers - if you have not read the books but might like to try them, and if you are in Australia or another Commonwealth country, and if you are looking for an English language version of the first book, you might consider trying to get a U.S. version which will most likely mean a hard copy through a company like Amazon. 
Whenever possible I buy eBooks now through iTunes, but in Australia I still ended up with the British version of book one which was tampered with (and in my opinion wrecked) by some pompous English editor when first released in the UK yonks ago. Later books in the series were not affected. The Brit version of book one, (now called Outlander in UK so it's the same name as the original & TV series) still "works" but is not so good as the first, US version.
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