Wheel of Time was made by a team that respects the source material about as much as the team that ruined the last seasons of Game of Thrones. Unfortunately, you're not missing much.
Big Co: let’s acquire this beloved series for $X00 million.
…
Big Co: ok writers, feel free to completely ignore the content we just paid endless riches to acquire and change it however you’d like.
…
Big Co: strange, the fans don’t seem to be as excited about this content as we expected!
They never should have made a WoT show, it was obvious from the start that the books are built on values which don't fly in modern media (particularly, gender essentialism.) Instead of butchering the story to make it comply with modern values, they should have simply written their own story. But of course the sort of writers who get hired for jobs like this aren't good enough to write their own stories. Companies think they can cheap out when hiring writers if they buy an IP that already has fans, and dumpster fires like this are the result.
Indie TV is coming for them. There are already stirrings of fan made short series whose production quality can stand toe to toe with most of the AA dreck available now. Many of these are made by a single person with a vision and the 3D modelling and animation skills necessary. Their main limitation is in acting talent but style transfer will quickly put that in their hands.
Just put the setting 100yrs after the last book and suddenly you can have a society innit that fights against gender roles etc.
Ive stopped watching TV the series in the second episode but I'm pretty sure I could've kept watching if they hadn't butchered the original story so much.
I work in the industry and the above poster is mostly right. Executives buy IP for the sake of association marketing “Watch the adaptation of the best seller series”.
BUT the industry suffers from a dearth of competence. If you work in the visual arts or make creative work in some way you would be familiar with the process of ‘uglification’ where a client with no creative taste gets to destroy the work of a brilliant creative through an avalanche of notes and changes. The creative might want to protect their work but depending on your ability to protect it, they might not.
‘Uglification’ happens in the film/TV industry all the time. People with little knowledge of film history call the shots and they have terrible taste. The result is they hire bad writers, bad directors and produce poor output. And that uglification pipeline is how adaptations get destroyed.
In example:
Executive who doesn’t know anything about “Wheel of Time” owns rights. He hires a writer who doesn’t know anything either. Writer reads the book, doesn’t like it, decides to use it as a platform to write whatever he wants plus he also needs the money. He gives it “a modern spin”, executive likes it. Executive then hires hot advertising director who’s no good but is hot in LA. Director hates the books, thinks it’s dumb but sees it as his big opportunity to break through into narrative film. Everyone involved now doesn’t care about the original books at all, and thus they will do whatever they fancy.
It goes on and on and what you get at the end is mush. Unless someone at the helm - director, writer or executive - is absolutely resolute that he wants a good adaptation, nothing accurate will come out of it.
I don't buy it. There are no "darker patterns" just a lot of out of touch LA / NYC writers, and marketing execs who need to sell whatever dogshit is being released this week.
The way the stoicism of Lan was just trashed in the tv show means I wont be watching season 2 or 3 or any of them!
Big Co buying 100's of Big name IP titles / options... BIg Co has no real plans for the IP
Big Co has lots of screenplays not attached to any Big Name IP
Big Co randomly pulls Screenplay Y, and tells screenwriter to make this "into a This big Name IP" and slaps the Big Name IP title on it...
So many of these movies and shows have soo little to do with the original source that they have to been imaged as wholly new properties, but then retro fitted with the name slapped on to an existing property because Hollywood is completely adverse to any new thing, it all has to be a reboot, squeal, or prequel at least in title.
Reality is more like:
Big co buys a big IP because they are excited to sell stuff to that fan base
Producers scurry around trying to find people to attach to the project
If they find a good director and/or team of excellent writers who are genuinely passionate about the source material, they are worried the artistic vision will frighten the exec producers and fat cats funding the movie.
If they find big name writers or director, that person frequently wants to make their mark and doesn't care much about the source material. If they can't find big name writers or director, the people they get are second-rate and can't help but butcher the source material whether they care about it or not. After all a film/series is very different from a book/book series and so some changes/adaptations have to be made to accommodate the new medium.
Along the way the project drifts while different stars and funding fatcats are attached to the project causing writes/rewrites, additions, changes etc. Later the project drifts when people see rushes or tehre are test showings etc and they decide rewrites or reshoots are needed.
It's very seldom that a talented director and/or team of writers is given a genuine chance to produce something true to the original source material. I mean if you think about Fran Walsh and Peter Jackson, prior to LOTR they were most known for writing and directing a pretty non mainstream horror movie. The sort of risk-taking that it takes to greenlight them doesn't happen very often.
Example: I'm a huge Star Wars fan.
But I don't much like RotJ.
Or Episodes 1-3.
Or Episodes 7-9.
Or a lot of their other properties.
(Clone Wars is amazing, there are major exceptions)
So, if I don't like the majority of the stuff out there, then how am I still identifying as a huge fan?
Or you've read more than 1000 Wookiepedia articles.
It basically comes down to what depth you absorb of the setting. The issue is that the "campaign setting" is not props, but that's what 7-9 directors treated it like.
And even though the Jedi powers are way OP, the Gennedy Clone Wars shorts are possibly my favorite thing EVER done in the Star Wars universe.
But as a general rule? You can be a fan of any part of a series and your fandom is completely legitimate. If you know all the details of three movies that puts you head and shoulders over someone who watches everything both uncritically and superficially.
I mean, you like what you like -and I'd say it's a question of depth of "liking" (knowing the lore, etc) rather than being comprehensive (liking anything that has 'star wars' written on the label).
Critics: it's too close to the source material and shows no imagination.
Show ran all the way through since it had only 3 seasons but you barely heard of it. Which is a shame, it is so good.
It wasn't a problem with the material, but the cast. Lyra and Will were just flat as could be. They both seemed bored, not as if they were involved with a multi-dimensional struggle of good and evil. I think it's just very difficult to find high-quality young actors.
Also, disclosing that this was in our world early in the series was a mistake. That was a huge "wow" moment in the book, not revealed until much later.
That's one of the key points of the books as well. Lord Asriel is the one who is fighting a multi-dimensional struggle of good and evil and it corrupts him.
Lyra and Will are kind of just struggling to figure out what they are supposed to do through most of the story, and eventually just kind of try and do whatever is right, while still harboring doubts about their actions. It's a more realistic story of a hero, in contrast to the others who are absolutely sure about the fact that they are in the right, which in itself leads them to doing terrible things.
The assuredness and lack of doubt in religion is something the original book story makes out to be a bad thing.
> I have over the years talked to a few (quite successful) Hollywood screenwriters, just through an accident of what I do for a living (I am a college professor who researches topics that sometimes get me in the same room as said writers). I had a very nice conversation once with one of the guys who had written one of the more modern Planet of the Apes films (I forget which one) about the difficulty of making films that were true to source material. This was in the context of World War Z, whose film is literally the opposite of the book in many ways (the book is about how there aren't singular heroes that are going to save the world, the film is about how Brad Pitt saves the world, to put it bluntly). Anyway, he made the point that the only way in which an existing form of IP has any chance of guaranteeing some fidelity is if the fan base is very large and very important to the marketing or acceptance of the film. So Harry Potter had to be (perhaps painfully) deferential to the original source material. But World War Z did not, because the imagined audience was several orders of magnitude larger than the people who had read the book.
> Similarly I don't think Gibson fans were the imagined audience of The Peripheral show, since there aren't as many of us as we'd like to imagine, and even most people who have read some Gibson haven't read The Peripheral (such is my experience, anyway; I know a million people who have read Neuromancer and that's it).
> I was a little stunned last week when my exercise trainer guy told me he was watching The Peripheral, because he doesn't read books at all from what I can tell. (He's a super great guy, and great at his job, but reading is just not really his thing.) Which on the one hand is a huge success by Amazon — they penetrated the jock-bro market with this series — but also explains, maybe, why they made so many changes. Which, again, I think is unfortunate, because I think you could have had something that was more interesting (and, incidentally, truer to the book, which is more interesting than the show) and still had a fairly large market. Because as you note, there is actually a lot of reasons to think that more complex shows resonate with many audiences more than "more of the same" shows. Sigh.
Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/WilliamGibson/comments/zawucs/comme...
Epic fantasy is hard. Look at the middle 6 WoT books, almost nothing of relevance happens in 4000 pages. When GoT was signed I'm sure GRRM promised them that the next books were already "done" and ready for release but as is typical, 12 years later they had nothing. Honestly, they should have diverged from the source after season 4 and create a new story that could be concluded satisfactorily.
Reading this makes me kind of sad because the industry right now wouldn’t support that. That author would get pushed right out, epub-only releases, less marketing, etc. I wonder if we’ll ever have a long epic like this again.
There is so much content out there that I don't see any particular thing as a "must experience" anymore.
HBO told the producers to take as long as they needed. I believe they were eager to jump to Star Wars and rushed to conclude the series.
See, at least the prequel trilogy of star wars had good ideas. It was just terribly executed.
The finishing episodes of GoT don't even have good ideas, in addition to being awfully written, lacking continuity, and poorly acted.
One of my favorite things was fans of the book series pointing out how Tyrion went from being the poignant observer of the universe through GRRM's eyes to simply being a sideshow dwarf that constantly said "my cock" and little else as soon as D&D ran out of book material for him. The "head vampire" trope for the NK basically meant I didn't watch the final episodes.
And Rogue One wasn't really that good, it was just "Battle Beyond The Stars", itself a cheap cash-in on the Star Wars craze, dusted off for Star Wars with some bad kung-fu movie tropes thrown in.
The real pain was people reading them when it came out, so they'd wait 2 years or whatever for the next book and then it'd come out and the plotline they happened to resonate with didn't get very far. Or it progressed some but didn't particularly end on a high-note.
The problem is that if you are at a point where even GRRM cannot move his own story forward, it's unlikely someone else will do a very good job.
And that's basically what happened. Even if the writers are the most top notch, they aren't GRRM, otherwise they would have their own fantasy series out under their own names, as opposed to writing for TV shows.
Book spoilers ahead:
Look, I get that Loial can't be as big/tall for obvious reasons (budget, that CGI would be heavy) and I get that we skipped Caemlyn for casting reasons (can't really have Elayne/Gawyn/Galad/Morgase/etc show up now only to disappear for a season or two) but the whole "any of them could be the dragon" or "they could all collectively be the dragon" was annoying. Look, I'll be the first to point out the sexism in the books, the women fawning over men they have met 1-2 times, acting like love-sick puppies, etc but I'm not really sure that pretending one of them could have been the dragon is the way to right that wrong, if that was even the intention (also, to my understanding, the dragon is always male because of Saidin. I was also under the impression there has only been 1 previous "Dragon", Lews Therin Telamon, but the show acts like there have been many?).
The waygates really made me angry, where is the leaf of Avendesora? Literally every time they go into Ways we get a few lines to a paragraph describing the door and how it's opened but in the show you have to use the power to open it? How the heck is Loial supposed to open it when he, Perrin, Faile, Gaul, Chiad, and Bain supposed to travel back to the Two Rivers seeing how none of them can channel?
Very strong start, along with the next two books but yeah, I agree with GP just kind of wanders off and the plot stalls out. Maybe some day I'll have time to pick these books up and see if the other guy was able to tie things together.
Any other rando editor wouldn't have to cohabitate with the resentment caused by unflinching criticism of their spouse's creative output.
OTHER GUY: How can you read that series? It is sooooo boring!
READER: But it's so long!
Or folding their arms under their breasts. Or commenting on one another's cleavage. Or really any excuse for the author to mention boobs out of the blue for no reason at all.
This seemed to start somewhere around book 4, and it happens WAY more than in any other books I've ever heard of. Super awkward once you notice it. WTF man?
It's like they did some market survey and found that their average readers were all 13 year old boys who wanted to hear about... you guessed it.
Didn't that happen because they completed the published books and had to figure out the rest on their own?
(I never read or watched either one, I just vaguely remember hearing something like that)
The final two seasons of GoT are an absolute mess but at least some of the blame has to go to George. D&D did a fairly excellent job adapting the story when they had the books to work from and only truly went off the rails once they had to start trying to tie things together from vague notes from GRRM. They certainly bear some responsibility as well, but it's hard to fault them for failing to finish a story that the author himself just can't seem to get a handle on.
I say all this with great sadness, but that's how it seems to me.
Looking at this analysis on Reddit, GRRM mentioned this particular piece of trouble multiple times over a 5-6 year period ( https://www.reddit.com/r/asoiaf/comments/2pp2m8/spoilers_all... ).
The crazy thing is that, based on what we saw in the series, much of the Meereen plot _doesn't even figure into the endgame_. I'm sure George has bigger plans, but Daenerys in Meereen seems to be at best the run-up to where her plot ultimately leads in the books, and yet George is spending years and years adding dozens of characters and solving a knot of plotting that seems like a sideshow! How he'll ever get to the point in his remaining lifespan is beyond me. The man is 74. Even giving him an extremely generous 20 more years of life, he's just not on pace to finish the series unless something changes very, very soon.
Meanwhile he's writing back story for Elden Ring, working on a series of TV shows, writing lore books and prequels to ASOIAF. Sadly the dude just seems to have lost the steam required to take it to the finish line.
It's extremely sad as ASOIAF is legitimately great.
I guess the real lesson: unless their name is Brandon Sanderson, do not start a partially completed series.
Is he even working on it anymore? It looks like he is spending his time on numerous unrelated projects these days.
ADWD released in 2011. Even at his glacial pace it's hard to understand how he could still be working on it if he was consistently dedicating hours a day to writing. It's not like he hasn't produced anything in that time either, so yeah, probably just not working on it much at all.
For the first few seasons yes. Not so much in later seasons (even way before the books stopped). They also changed many things that were not supposed to, for unclear reasons.
I'm a big fan of those last two books but can see how they'd be tough to adapt well, especially for a show that exploded in popularity like GoT did.
I think the issues with the next books come down to deciding:
- how the Army gets south of the wall
- how far south they get before encountering defeat (IMO they are the big bad, and if they don't make it down to the heart of the Kingsland slaughtering everything into a near-unstoppable horde, then the entire literary point of them is meaningless)
- how to plausibly defeat them
The failure of the TV series to address those three macro tension points to the whole series was the essential great failure of the series. They are the existential dread, they are old testament retribution for all the human sins on display in the series, they are nature's revenge for our failings as a species. An extinction level event where it's not just you dying, it's everyone dying. Really they are cold-to-the-bone fear that you're supposed to feel.
At this point why GRRM doesn't simply hire people to ghostwrite for him and he executive edits the final books is beyond me. There are fanboys likely of great writing ability and talent that would happily contribute for contracting money and not care if GRRM shovels the novels out the door with only his name on the finished product.
Idk though. He's described himself as a "gardener" when it comes to writing. I'm not sure he'll be able to prune things down to where he needs to to finish.
Another tinfoil hat theory of mine is that the reception to the end of the series has put extra pressure on him to bring home all his plots in a satisfying way. It would definitely be a strange feeling to see some of your major plot beats happen in an unsatisfactory way before getting to release them in book form.
The first two seasons were interesting because people were in the thick of it and their deaths were prior to their plot arcs reaching even their midpoints. I understand the books were more sprawling. But the show was very simple by the end.