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 show have soo little to do with the orginal source that they have to been imaged as wholely 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, sequal, or prequal 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...
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!