You must log in or # to comment.
Alex Rider 100%
I’m still disappointed they botched the Wheel of Time. Like, right from the very beginning, that started making really questionable choices. I wish they’d do it animated because one, that’d make the magic way cheaper, and two, it’d make it feasible to grapple with the sheer size of the series.
I honestly don’t think it was this bad (coming from someone that has read it three times). Some decisions were weird. The focus on Alanna was a bit high. I also unserstood from the beginning that it can’t possibly be 1:1, so I went in with the mindset that it was a new turning of the wheel, which might’ve helped. The first season was thoroughly fucked by covid, ans the second season had to handle the fallout of that. By the third season I thought it really was starting to come together, and I was actually getting excited for its future. I was really bummed out by the cancelation.
The 3rd season actually was good and true to the source material as much as possible given where we were at that point.
But like, the first 2 seasons were completely baffling, I find it hard to find much redeeming quality in them at all. The dark one and the final scene of season 1 are both high points that I thought were well executed. But then you have stuff like Perrin being married at the beginning of the series to a random woman, who he then immediately accidentally kills. Insane direction to take that character. You have a decision that the dragon could be male or female, ok, I’m not entirely sure who or how that works if we’re maintaining that it’s strictly the male half of the power that is tainted but I was actually willing to see it through, the only problem was they did all that just for the next episode to say “actually the dragon is just rand, just like you all knew, were not doing anything different, the dragon is a male, were never addressing this again”
It didn’t even own its own decisions, you can make changes to source material but you should have a good reason why and own it. I don’t have to love what you do with it artistically or intellectually but you should stand behind your work
Personally I found the final scene of the first season rather lacking. But I also get it because of the covid restrictions.
Perrin’s wife was probably a good move imo. It’s hard to convey his complex feelings for the axe in a show where we can’t hear the character’s thoughts. This is a quick fix for that.
Mat’s parents is a bit more off for me. I’m not really sure what was gained from that change.
It’s crazy how badly they fucked up everything about that show from top to bottom.
Yeah… If you can decouple it from the books, it’s a fairly entertaining show, but as a Wheel of Time adaptation, it was just not very good.
I kind of cant even agree with that. I tried to enjoy it as a WOT adaptation, I tried to enjoy it as just high budget fantasy TV. for me, the writing was a disaster, it was very clear they were ther to tell the BIG story over 10 episodes but really over many many seasons, they were fully committed to this grand fantasy but they forgot that an episode of TV needs to stand on its own. Each episode was just like a 1 hour clip of a 10 hour movie, there was no narrative or structure to individual epsodes.
Outside of that, the CGI is bad, the effects in general were very bad. Set design and costumes were pretty decent mainly but the show looked cheap despite being the most expensive ever made.
There are a lot of other criticisms I have of the show but I don’t think ther is a lot of point going on.
For what its worth, I thought season 3 was actually somehow decently made and written, it was just so late at that point that it meant nothing.
So tired of animated reboots.
I kinda get it, but this one should have been animated from the start. The length and magic make live action really difficult to pull off, and I’m not surprised Amazon didn’t manage it.
I’m so happy I didn’t ruin my childhood memories watching it. It was a tough call at the beginning but I feel thoroughly justified in hindsight.
The whole bobiverse series.
Anyways, almost any book could be made into a fun series, because most books are well-written.
I read a lot of books. I don’t know that I agree most are well written, lol.
Ikr. Now we know that the surviving works and stories from the old world, only survived because they were good enough to be remembered. Too bad we have audio books, none of the bad books will be forgotten.
i would watch the shit out of that
This is a pretty basic answer but The Dark Elf Trilogy could be incredible on film if done properly. Drizzt’s early life is one of my favorite character arcs in fiction and Menzoberranzan is an exceptionally interesting society. It could even just be a series mostly focused on the first book and then ends when he leaves the city or when he goes topside so they could really flesh out just how fucked the dark elves are.
Agreed. The underdark portion of his life would make for and excellent TV adaption.
HOWEVER
I don’t trust the current climate of TV production to pull it off properly. In all likelihood, if produced today, it’d end up as a Netflix series (or similar series) where the streaming format would throw off pacing, and after completing a season of sticking to the story, any subsequent seasons would stray far away from Salvatores stories in an effort to have mass appeal.
I think it would have worked 15-20 years ago. Not before, as the CGI necessary wasn’t there yet. Not later because formulaic streamability would ruin it (along with Netflix-lighting, ugh).
Maybe it would work again at some point in the future once the current trend of algorithmic slop has gone away.
it will be a horrid 8 episode season, with stuff omitted, and peoples changed based on how the execs perceive the audience. and multi year wait in between seasons.
My first choice as well
With a special appearance by Señor Chang
Neil Stephenson’s snowcrash would be interesting.
I feel like most of the people with money would just play it up to be super cool instead of a dystopia. And given the Epstein stuff, not lightly edit it so the girl is of appropriate age.
True it could go really wrong but if done right it would be a really good satire.
The dystopia bit is what I’m worried about with the Neuromancer series coming out. It looks way too clean. Even the parts where streets are jam-packed look like clean jam-packed streets.
Seconded, although Mark ruined the concept of the Metaverse. And that sex scene with a 15 year old might need some rewriting. I love the book for its storyline and world building, but certain developments of the past 20 years stains the book.
Speaking of Stephenson, I wonder if Cryptonomicon could work as a TV series. Filming the two time periods without them seeming completely disconnected would be challenging, though.
Cryptonomicon would be cool, I could see it working on HBO or some other cable company.
There Is No Antimemetics Division.
You’re in luck!
Series.. Short film.
Hyperion.
I wish they could finish the Expanse. That was a pretty good adaptation as far as they got, and the books really tie everything very nicely together toward the end (as well as get kind of crazy)
they had problems with one of the actors being DV/Sa-er and they wanted to wait a while since the latest books is a time jump.
that’s interesting, I thought they just weren’t popular enough to justify more seasons
i heard it was the time jump in the other novels, so maybe that?
Wheel of time. No, that garbage they tried at Amazon doesn’t count.
I used to reread Wheel of Time frequently. I’ve probably completed the series more than 13 times, because I started reading it in the mid 90s and would reread from the beginning every time a new book was released.
After that Amazon slop, I haven’t touched the series since. It was so, so bad. And it had the potential to be so, so good. All the material was right there. All the money was there.
Such a wasted opportunity to have made something amazing.
As a pallet cleanser, here’s a fan made version made 10 years ago that is so much more authentic and watchable than Rafe’s disaster:
Should have just given them the millions.
#fuckrafejudkins
amazon shouldnt have sucked all the money budget from other shows to make ROP they did fans a disservice from all the shows on amazon.
I hadn’t heard of this! Thank you so much I’m excited.
I’d absolutely love it if Star Trek (not Alex Kurtzmen) adapted the Corp of Engineers books.
The original ebook series would slot in perfectly with a 20ish episode a year release cycle, and the plots/characters are already developed, you just need to script them out.
Each book is a “problem of the week” style story, with that classic Star Trek (not Alex Kurtzmen) style character development, based on the main problem of the episode.
But, until Kurtzmen, or the mouth-breathers that keep him employed, get hit by a bus we’ll never know how well it could be adapted…
They’re never going back to 20 plus episodes and people need to get over it. The work life balance people endured producing those seasons was unconscionable.
he has plaigarized some novels but dint give them credit. borg alliance, rogue changelings all came from various books(although its fan made), and the obvious super-massive cube was from a book.
STD, where michelle yeohs characther used words only known from the memory wiki sites.
For me it’s the Red Rising series by Pierce Brown.
I’m surprised how that hasn’t been a thing yet considering how big the story is.
They made a board game, and it bombed.
The Laundry by Charles Stross
Strong agree! Done right it could run multiple seasons.
None. No more.
Beat me to it.
diskworld series have some, but need more imo
I demand more Rincewind content.
the Amber books
Stephen Colbert was going to produce the series a couple years ago, but he seems to have moved on since then :(
It was always going to be a tough ask. I just finished reading the Corwin series again.
It would be difficult to adapt for a mainstream TV audience. A lot would probably need to change and that could lead to alienating the book lovers.
Yes, I would love to see a TV series. But only if it was done well with a budget large enough to do it justice.
I feel like the Chronicles of Amber would do better as a two season mini series.
I’d like one season per book, one episode per chapter.
No way. There’s not enough material in the books to go one episode per chapter.
I will admit it’s been a while since I’ve read them, but I remember it being a very fast read. Like, I think it only took me two days to read all of them.
Quick update. When I talk about having read all of them, I’m talking about the two book club series books that contained apparently the first five novels in approximately 600 pages.
I have the books that followed that, and I’ve not read them yet, so maybe make it a three season mini series.
that could be right
I haven’t read the books in a long time
I’d still enjoy ten seasons in a fictional universe I love
