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!
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.