i hadn't really thought about it, but since this thread is about how I would have started it - and I wouldn't have had Rafe's agenda - I would open it with the Blood Snow with Tam, then cut to the Foretelling intro'ing Moiraine / Siuan, then roll the opening credits. No mystery for the audience, a dead seer showing why the Dragon being reborn is so terrifying, and then cut to black. Out of the credits, have a moving camera track over the terrain in a breezy sort of fashion until it comes across Rand and Tam heading to the Two Rivers and seeing the Fade. If you wanted to play a mystery up, have the wind stop when the boys are sitting at a table outside the Winespring, instead of the walk in, and have them each talk about seeing a stranger in a cloak - it avoids the Nazgul in the Shire visual. I then would probably move Liandrin's gentling intro to episode 3 after Egwene / Moiraine / Rand talk about who Aes Sedai are going into Shadar Logoth, and saves the first major One Power display for Moraine on Winter's Night. it also needs to happen before Logain gets intro'ed TV isn't like books and movies; audience's need linear because of the time gap between the first and last episode isn't measured in hours, it's measured in months. This isn't about "fixing" what I don't agree with Rafe on - fixing Mat, Perrin, and Maxsim - just moving stuff around to create a more linear story to hook the audience in the characters first, and deal with the world building later

I feel sorry for the true fans of the show, and for the rest of us who had new WoT Content to debate and discuss and speculate about, on this forum and elsewhere. I am somewhat surprised, mainly since the streaming services never struck me as particularly money smart. But in a lot of ways, this was doomed by a reverse slog - instead of being good through great with a slog in the middle, the slog on this one is right up front, and the show never really recovered. There's no point in pointing the finger at any one thing in particular - the pandemic, the actor switch, the lack of financial and time commitment, Rafe's personal agenda, the basic Hollywood disdain for genre heroic fiction, the impossibility of satisfying the core audience, too complicated a world to make clear for a new audience, the author's over reliance on similar concepts from recent classics (LoTR, Dune), the fact that it wasn't similar enough to others (GoT), Trump's external production tariffs, None of which changes the fact that if it were better, it would have survived, but it didn't. In my 50 years of life, I can count the number of genre projects that caught the popular zeitgeist on one hand (Star Wars 4-6, LoTR, Matrix 1, GoT 1-4, MCU Phase 1-3) and maybe another handful that were both critically great in spots and commercially successful (Jurassic Park, BSG, Buffy, Deadpool, the Expanse, some Star Trek, others) But history is full of failed projects that didn't land right, or didn't find an audience; shows with interesting premises that weren't given time to grow; shows that exceeded the abilities of their talent to deliver. Shows that had a good idea that couldn't sustain a movie, let alone a series. thanks to the community for sometimes making the site sometimes more enjoyable that the show, and to the moderators for keeping it going. now we wait for the next turning of the wheel, and enjoy the books whenever we want.