In 1998, Tom Wolfe published “A Man in Full,” a novel about (among other things) Charlie Croker, an Atlanta real estate developer whose business and world fall apart, and Conrad Hensley, a worker at one of Croker’s subsidiary businesses whose world also falls apart when he’s laid off.

Now David E. Kelley has written a television miniseries, premiering this week on Netflix, with similar characters in similar situations in the same setting, but so much is different, lost or added that adaptation hardly seems the right word. “David E. Kelley’s Tom Wolfe’s ‘A Man in Full’” might be closer to the mark.

Jeff Daniels stars as Charlie, a former college football star and celebrated businessman, whom we meet at his 60th birthday party being serenaded by Shania Twain. He has a young wife, Serena (Sarah Jones), an ex-wife Martha (Diane Lane), and a teenage son, Wally (Evan Roe), who has been suspended from school for expressing nonconformist thoughts.

He has private planes, a big house in leafy Buckhead, a country place called Turpmtine [sic] where he shoots quail and studs horses, and a skyscraper that ostentatiously bears his name, Croker Concourse. He also has debt amounting to more than a billion dollars and a bank that wants its money, stat. Oh, and a bad knee. Though the details are different, and Wolfe evidently had Atlanta figures in mind as models, one’s thoughts float easily toward Donald Trump, given the profession, the tower and the debt. And the narcissism, of course.

Charlie’s appointed persecutors are Raymond Peepgrass (Tom Pelphrey), a weedy midlevel bank officer who was involved in writing his loans and now is gleefully assisting in his downfall, and Harry Zale (Bill Camp), who specializes in working over big-shot deadbeats. Raymond, in his Dean Cain Clark Kent Collection glasses, and Harry, doing pushups on his office floor, are caricatures of weakness and aggression.

Down among the little people, we find Conrad (Jon Michael Hill) driving a forklift in a Croker warehouse. Attempting to keep his car from being towed, he tussles with a policeman, and winds up in jail awaiting trial, surrounded by dangerous characters. In Kelley’s rejiggered flow chart, Conrad’s wife, Jill (Chanté Adams), has become Charlie’s executive secretary. Conrad and Jill, who are white in the book — and living in California — are Black in the series, which gives their storyline, heavily altered in other respects, a different sociopolitical flavor. (Charlie has his faults — indeed, he’s almost nothing but faults — but racism is not among them.)