Hi, are you referring to me? You understand that my requests for how to film inner monologues are rhetorical statements and not a desire to see proposed screenplays. It is intended to get beyond content free statements like "writers and showrunners believe they can tell the story better" into actual discussions about how to film them in an interesting way that makes good TV, generates the necessary character development and stays as faithful to the books as possible. I think this is very hard to do all of them well simultaneously and accept the need to introduce new material, but lots of posters think otherwise. Fine, lets discuss. But just saying "be closer to the books" is not discussion, it's a way to shut down discussion because it's an appeal to emotion without any accompanying arguments which can be debated. What is statement even trying to say? How is Amazon purposely dividing the fans? That some fans like it and others don't? Doesn't that go with the territory? How about LOTR, is Amazon purposely dividing the fans on that show also? How do know it's true, do you have an actual argument backing up this statement?

1. I think the books are unfilmable, where I've explained my reasoning in gory detail in other threads. Saying the equivalent of "just film the books" with no rationale is a cop out to avoid serious thinking about the problems with trying to film it. 2. Congratulations on not having a life. Most people are not going to rewatch 56 hours of TV to understand the nuances for the final season. If you were the showrunner, would you assume most of your audience was going to rewatch previous years before each new season or design your show to accommodate normal people who don't have either the time or desire to rewatch previous seasons. The WoT books have massive repetition in them because of the amount of time between books. Jordon didn't believe most of his readers would reread the previous books to prepare for the next one. He solved the problem of his audience forgetting concepts by repeating them, sometimes ad nauseum (see the Perrin/Faile/Shaido arc which stretched over several books where much of the time in each book was used to remind readers how Perrin felt about Faile's situation without moving the plot forward). 3. The production constraints don't stop you from filming a series, but they do limit/change some of the things that you can do. The tEotW meeting of Elayne in Camelyn would have required a large cost for the set and actors for just a couple of scenes. Nothing in it was important to the rest of the season. Skipping it and setting up a different introduction of Elayne made perfect sense from a production viewpoint. Agelmar Jagad appears in the first and last books. From an actor viewpoint, it made perfect sense to kill him off in the first season because the character would need to be recast by the time he is needed again. Easier to just invent another respected military leader for his second appearance. I can come up with numerous other examples where deviating from the books makes sense from a production standpoint. Is it better to use the money and resources on other more important elements or use them to maintain consistency on minor points? 4. Dune (1984) was terrible, so this isn't the best example to show how to film an unfilmable book. Just saying that you don't understand why it's hard to film extensive internal monologues doesn't illustrate that you can film them while still being close to the books. Have you ever considered that not understanding is a "you problem" and not a problem with the showrunners understanding on how to make a TV series? 5. Just saying "be closer to the books" is not really an answer. Cutting significant portions of the inner monologues is not realistic since they contain much of the character development of the major characters and a significant amount of the world lore. The series is already combining multiple characters (with almost of the combining leading to complaints by the closer to the books crowd), so it's following your advice. So again, how would you "edit and script the books" in such a way that they are filmable? Playing out the series over 12 years is far from ideal, but that seems to be the schedule they are currently on. I would love to have a season per calendar year and that would allow the showrunners more latitude and might mitigate some of the concerns about the casual viewer (maybe 95% of the audience) forgetting the nuances. But as it stands today, the showrunner has to script for a series that will last years in real-time, which requires, in my opinion, compromises such as new arcs allowing casual viewers to remember and understand the series in broad strokes. Off topic - I've never understood why anyone suggests that Henry Cavill is a good actor. He is the most wooden major actor I've ever seen and wouldn't cast him in anything above a local theater production. After saying that, he works in Witcher since Geralt is supposed to be a non-emotive, wooden character, the perfect role for him.

I think that there are several issues that the people who believe that this series is filmable (or nearly filmable as written) don't wrestle with enough. Note that all these issues are interwoven and must be addressed together: 1. This is foremost a TV series and TV series and books are fundamentally different with their own rules for what works and doesn't work. The paramount goal is to make an interesting TV show 2. If everything comes together, the TV show will encompass 8 seasons over 12+ years (2021-2034?). This is a very very very long time to remember details. 3. Most viewers are not fanatics and will only watch the show once. This means they will have only sketchy memories of the details after a couple of years, but might maintain some understanding of the larger arcs. 4. Viewers have to have enough understanding of the background and motivations to appreciate the pay-off for a character that might have started 10+ years (in real time) before. 5. Much of the character development and their motivations are done in internal monologues* which are not filmable as written. Taken together, these facts suggest to me that small changes in dialogue or scenes will not suffice to show the necessary character development because they have no lasting impact to most viewers. Casual viewers need to be hit with the equivalent of a two-by-four of information to remember it years later. Dialogue isn't sufficient; large show arcs, possibly lasting years seem a much better method. By definition, these arcs will be new material, not in the books, because they are manifesting the details of each character's inner monologues. Since I'm trying to watch an interesting TV show, I'm willing to accept these types of changes because I think they are necessary for such sprawling (both in book info and real-world implications) material. This does not mean that I like every change or think that the show runners always got it right, but as long as the hit/miss rate is decent and the rest of the show is done well, I'm not going to lose sleep over the inconsistencies with the books. I've repeatedly asked the poster who think that it needs to be closer to the books for examples of how to film the books in such a way that the following things all hold: 1. INTERESTING TV show 2. Viewers in 2032 will remember enough from the early seasons to appreciate the character/event pay-offs 3. Accounts for filming constraints (time, money, actor availability, CGI capabilities, sets etc.) 4. Appropriate character development from the internal monologues is filmed 5. close enough to the books to satisfy your desire for consistency So far, crickets. Just more posts saying that the show needs to be more like the books. Maybe I'll be lucky and get a response in this thread. *In previous posts, I've called this "POV", but I think that Elder_Haman's description of them as "internal monologues" in more accurate, thus the change in terminology

How does the first sentence even begin to make sense? By definition, all the POVs, which makes up something like 50% of the books, is cut unless the writers find another way of conveying the information (which you constantly rail against because they aren't book cannon). yet you claim that most of the important character development and world building cut came from dialogue. If we get all 8 seasons, it will take 12+ years at the current rate. A single conversation happening in an early season laying out the problem won't be remembered in later seasons that might be 5 or more years later in the real world when the resolution comes in the series. So no, a conversation between Perrin and Elyas is not a good way to convey a major character issue like Perrin's inner conflict which is expressed symbolically in the books as having to choose either the axe or the hammer. In the books, this conflict came up repeatedly in Perrin POVs which gave meaning to the scenes when he finally choose the hammer. Are you suggesting that Perrin should have this same dialogue a bunch of times in the series so the viewers will remember it? That's boring TV. Some kind or arc, although outside the books, is more interesting TV and will allow viewers better understanding of his inner conflict. As an aside, the whole focus on Lan training Rand is similar to the problem with Perrin and the axe/hammer. Rand training with a sword is the symbolic representation on his inner conflict of Tam's son or the Dragon. As the Dragon, using a sword is silly, but as the son of a blademaster, the sword is his link to his adopted father. Lan providing advice on how to be a better man can and did happen outside his sword training. You choose to ignore my question about the difficulty (or ease) of filming POVs when responding to Elder_Haman earlier, perhaps you will reconsider.

These types of threads always make me bounce my head off the wall a few times. WOT was long considered an unfilmable series due to factors like the following: 1. 12000 pages 2. 2000 named characters 3. 5-7 major arcs and 2-3 minor arcs competing for attention at any given time for most of the series 4. taking place on 8 planes of existence (Randland, dreamworld, ways, portal stones, Aelfinn and Eelfinn worlds, and the arches in the Tower and Rhuidean) 5. complex magic system 6. complex lore 7. takes place in ~10 countries across the continent 8. 7+ major (and unique) cultures that need to be explained since they play important roles (Aeil, multiple Randland countries, Seanchan, Forsaken, Aei Sedai, Sea People, Ogier) 9. significant amount of CGI needed 10. massive amount of POV which encompass most of the character development 11. massive amount of POV We seem to have two viewpoints about how best to film an unfilmable book series (and make it visually interesting as a TV show): adapting it requires changes and additions to overcome the problems making it unfilmable; or film it like it was written. I know which viewpoint I subscribe to. I think that the hardest of the issues to overcome is the amount of POV and all the character development advanced by the POVs. I've asked this question several times to posters calling for a closer book interpretation, how do you incorporate the POV information into your idea of how to film the series? You could: 1. ignore the POVs entirely 2. put the character development and other important information contained in the POVs into dialogue (lots and lots and lots of dialogue) 3. introduce new scenes/arcs which show the character development and other important information in another way 4. other In reality, the first three should all be used and someone more knowledgeable than me might know other methods. Some things should be ignored, some limited amount of dialogue can be used to highlight some things, and some visual way should be found that create the same character development. So far, I get crickets to my question, just "it should be closer to the books" It's a valid opinion to think that the choices the showrunners made to try to overcome the issues identified above were bad and unsuccessful, but I don't believe that the correct answer to "the choices made in trying to film this unfilmable series were bad" is "make it more like the book". Maybe I'm wrong and you think that the book is easily filmable as written and makes a visually interesting TV series. If so, please tell me how you would film the POVs.

Speaking only for myself since I'm not omnipotent, I want an entertaining TV series that allows me to get closer to the world of the books. Faithfulness for the sake of faithfulness at the cost of entertainment is a bad trade-off. You are coming across as holier than the pope here. I expect that Robert Jordon himself, looking at the series as a whole for adaptation purposes would find issues with individual books and parts of books. The early books were interesting enough to continue reading the series, but they weren't perfect by any means. Honest question, why do you think a "very faithful adaptation" (however you define it) would make entertaining TV? In my view, things from the first 3 books that make bad TV include a lot of uninteresting walking from place to place, introduction of too many characters who are only important later in the series, cardboard thin characters for anyone not named Rand, few standout moments for anyone not named Rand except at the ends of books 2 and 3, and lots and lots of unfilmable POV. The first two seasons of the TV series addressed each of these issues one way or another. Maybe badly in some cases, but they attempted to replace things that made bad TV. Yes, they also update some of the sensibilities to better fit a modern audience. Why is this bad? An archaic feel to the show is not good TV and would tend to drive audiences away. Can you really watch archaic shows like Ozzie and Harriet today without feeling a little off-put? Just to take one example that posters are complaining about - the lack of sword training for Rand. I always saw the sword training as a symbolic extension of the "am I the Dragon or Tam's son" debate. Since the debate was strictly in Rand's POV, sword training doesn't add any character depth without a deep exploration of the Dragon v Tam question. Because the question played out in Rand's head, there is no good way to film it. The only way would be lots of Rand spilling his guts to someone through repetitive dialogue which is not good TV.

Now that we have seen Season 2, it would be interesting to revisit some of the important Season 1 creative decisions to see how they look after an additional year. Would we have argued over them for months (and months and months) if we knew what was coming? 1. Who is the dragon - this was always a Season 1 issue with no effect on Season 2 2. Lack of Tam and Rand's backstory - Poor to incomplete It had no effect on Season 2 and we don't know what effect it will have in future seasons (if any). TBF, Rand's anguish about not being Tam's son was pure POV that couldn't be filmed. In neither the book nor the series did he have someone to pour his heart out to about his ancestry. 3. Perrin killing his wife - Poor to incomplete This had little effect on Season 2 and we don't know what effect it will have in future seasons (if any) 4. Mat's broken family - Good I liked the story in Season 1 because I thought that EF was too Ozzie and Harriet for the time and place depicted, so I am biased. This allowed Mat to decide to be a hero in spite of his background instead of just drifting into a reluctant hero meme. Better TV. 5. Steppin - Fair to good They moved Lan's missing bond arc up a couple of seasons, so there needed to be something prior to that to give it meaning. 6. Move screen time to Liandrin and Logain - Good They were both great in Season 1 and 2. 7. Thom - incomplete With everything that happened in Season 2, he might have got lost in the shuffle. We need to see his role in later seasons to understand. 8. Not introducing Elayne - Good Introducing her in Season 1 would have been a very static scene with a lot of other actors who won't show up again for years, so I didn't miss it. Her introduction in Season 2 was very good and she had time and story to establish her character. We didn't miss her meeting Rand moment becase it was handled very well in Season 2. 9. Whitclocks - Fair to good Season 1 established that Whiteclocks could be both good and evil. Perrin with Dain moved that forward while still giving us a WTF moment when Perrin killed Geoffery Bornhold. 10. Suian - Poor to fair The oath scene played into Suian's actions with respect to Rand, which I didn't like much. 11. Ending - Episode 8 is still bad

Two points that are unspoken underlying assumptions on most of these types of posts. 1. The show runners are first and foremost trying to make an entertaining TV series. Fidelity to Robert Jordon's work is important, but they are willing to make changes if they think that it will make better TV. You can certainly argue that the writers might not understand what makes good TV and they might not have the skills to execute their vision. If we took a poll asking if we wanted better TV at the cost of fidelity or higher fidelity at the cost of worst TV, we all know which side would win. What the critics refuse to acknowledge and credit however is that one thing the writers are very good at is identifying what doesn't make good TV. Things that work in books may or may not work on screen and one of the first acts of an adaption should be to remove the elements that make bad TV. There are many elements of WOT that don't make good TV as written. The extensive character arcs that are almost all POV, the repetition of the first 3 books (travelogue with duplicative fights as Scarloc99 points out), unfilmable scenes (the fight in the sky at Falme), exposition heavy lore and world building etc. So in addition to changes required for cost/logistic reasons, cutting material to fit the series length and having to write additional material to compensate for the missing material, they changed things because filming it as in the books would have been lousy TV. So all the posters venting that they want more fidelity, seriously think about whether (some) of the things that got removed and rewritten would be good TV if left as written in the books. Bad TV for the sake of book fidelity is never the right answer. 2. Another fundamental assumption that colors how we view the series is the degree of difficulty we assign to the task of adapting WOT. I would wager a good portion of my hypothetical fortune that the people who like the show would rate the adaption difficulty as harder than the people who want to be closer to the books. I think that this is a very hard series to adapt and expected a lot of changes and willing to tolerate them if the TV is good and I can understand why they made the changes. If you think that this isn't too hard to adapt without a lot of changes, then it makes sense to be upset with the number of changes.

Agree that Lan's usage in Episode 8 didn't make sense. Moiraine was not protecting him by leaving him behind since if she died, so would he. He was safer if he was with her where he could possibly save her life. If they were going to have the Steppin arc, they needed to follow through the consequences throughout the rest of the series.

The difference from the book to the series was that in the series, Moiraine was dying and Lan was both in great pain through the bond and totally concentrating on ways to try to keep her (and himself) alive. That he wasn't very concerned about perimeter defense is understandable since they were both going to be dead in a few hours. Given the different situation, the fact that Nyn got within a few feet in the book, and next to him in the series doesn't seem to me to be a terrible injustice.

It should also have made the viewers reinterpret Moiraine's Trolloc poison scenes from episodes 2-4. Lan was in as much danger as Moiraine and his actions and reactions [should] take on a different feeling once the disadvantages of the bond became known to non-book readers. Having earlier scenes change meanings as more information becomes available is generally a good thing for series TV.

The problem is that there is are a lot of people that believe that while he could have followed the books, he couldn't have made an interesting TV series while following the books closely for a myriad of reasons that have been discussed to death. It comes down to the goal of the adaptation - put a faithful representation of the books on screen or make an interesting series, even if it deviates in details from the books. Granted that there is a subset of viewers, like yourself, who believes that he didn't accomplish either goal, but when writing the adaptation, the showrunners must be crystal clear which goal is more important. Since they want to make money, "faithfulness to the story" will almost always be sacrificed for better TV. To beat the dead horse once more, here is a sample of reason that the TV series must deviate from the books: 1. show not tell. The medium is different and scenes that play well in a book may not play well on screen. 2. 160 pages an hour - if we get all 64 episodes, it will still be over 160 pages an episode meaning lots and lots of stuff must be cut. When you cut things, you need to stich the resultant plot holes with new, non-faithful material for the series to make sense. 3. Filming issues - some things on paper are just not filmable (or at least no filmable within a reasonable budget) and if they are important plotpoints, you need to rewrite lots of things to get around the issue while saving the plot. 4. actor availability - once you cast major characters, you need to have something for them to do because you can't have them skipping large periods of time like they do in the books. So new plot points to keep them employed. 5. Structure - The books grew up over a large period of time so the introduction of foundational aspects such as lore, characters, world building are haphazard in the books. For the series, you can logically introduce the foundational pieces according to the needs of the story. Since many of these pieces will be out of order to the books, this is all new material (e.g., Steppin). 6. Costs - Lots of things are being done to reduce costs of actors, sets, costuming, CGI etc. These likely impact what can and will be filmed. 7. POV - the books are written through some action scenes, but loads of POVs from dozens of characters, including much of their character arcs. You can't film POV, all you can do is figure out what is important in the POV and write new scenes to highlight them to the viewer. Just having the characters talk about what they are thinking (to be closer to the books) is heavy exposition and really bad television. Perfectly acceptable opinion not to like the overall show or individual adaptation decisions, but it seems very simplistic to simply say that it is easy to follow the books and that Rafe is in some way evil or egotistical or incompetent because the show varies more from the books than you expected or wanted. IT IS NOT EASY TO CREATE AN ENTERTAINING, BUT "FAITHFUL" RERESENTATION OF WOT. Could Rafe or someone else done a better job of combining the two objectives, probably. But you can say this about almost everything - it could have been better.

From your answer, the other shows have about 4 arcs going at one time (since by my count Witcher and RoP also have 4 arcs). WoT will have at least 5 main arcs, plus several minor ones. I count main arcs for Rand, hunt for horn, Mat, Moiraine/Lan, and girls in the WT. There may also be arcs introducing the Seanchan and Aiel (Aviendha) prior to Falme. There also may be arcs on WT politics and Forsaken plotting There might also be one or more world building arcs foreshadowing an important lore element that will be needed in the future. [introducing the Seanchan and Aiel probably fits this, so there might not be another one] You have to introduce the Caemlyn characters Elayne, Eladia, Gawyn and Galad. Given the importance of these characters going forward, they probably need screen time for a backstory like Min and Valda got in season 1. In addition, you need something to keep recurring characters like Min, Siuan, Liandrin, Fain, Logain, and Valda involved so the audience doesn't forget about them. Most will get integrated into the existing arcs, but if not, then they will need their own small threads. We are going from about 4 independent arcs in the other shows to 5-8 arcs in season 2 and later. I'm worried that the show will be jumping around to ensure that all the arcs get adequate TV time that the pacing will be atrocious and the story will be lost in all the little details.

I am currently watching Witcher Season 3 (only through episode 5, so please no spoilers) and found myself disliking all the different, independent character threads being interwoven throughout the series. I find them both distracting by upsetting the flow and timing as well as somewhat confusing because it always takes awhile to remember what the thread is trying to accomplish. I didn't watch GOT but found the LOTR series irritating for the same reason. WoT, somewhat in season 2, but on steriods in later seasons, has this same problem. In season two, we have at least independent arcs on Rand, Moiraine/Lan, Mat doing Mat things in Tar Valon, Perrin chasing the Horn, the girls in training, and introducing the Seanchan as well as any other threads (e.g., Forsaken meddling, AS plotting) that pop up. While things get easier since many of these threads converge at Falme, this is only a temporary reduction. In later years, we get separate arcs from all the main characters including Rand, Mat, Perrin, Egewene, Elayne with and without Nyn, as well as important arcs with Eladia, AS politics, black tower, Gawyn, Galad, Forsaken plotting, search for black ajah etc. Many of these arcs go on for years with no interaction with another major story line. With so many concurrent arcs, is there a way to structure the series to avoid some the pitfalls of the previous series (besides drastically cutting down the number)?

I agree with you. The cold opening hit the perfect note by addressing head on the elephant in the room - men who channel go mad [and you are relying on a male channeler to save the world]. I expect that the level of sex and nudity will remain the same throughout the series. They will do the planning and tricks you mentioned. It's just as important to stay at the established level of nudity and sex once established as it is to define it early in the series.