Been watching Amazon's 'Wheel of Time' series. I read all the books years ago and have a mixed review of them. Some were great with great world-building and events, but the middle books suffer massive character bloat, pointless plot threads and seemingly go nowhere. That being said, it's a series that could make some great TV, though with so much content it's hard to prune it down to a TV friendly size without each book being 15 episodes.
The show is.... okay. It's reasonably high production, and the CGI magic isn't offensively bad, but they made some weird choices in what to adapt and what they pruned. The main character of the books seems to be reduced to a side-character, and while it's going to be tough to fit all the characters in substantially, it feels like they really just decided to have him as a 'deus ex' when necessary and focus on the others. S2 seems a touch better in that regard, tough it's trying to cover a lot of material in 8 episodes. Some major characters have become footnotes, other 'new characters' such as Perrin's wife seem like pointless additions.
Casting is a bit mixed. No one is awful, but the guy who plays Matt (and is replaced in S2) was definitely a bit weak, though they reduced that character so much he's barely present. Perrin's actor is good, but they've made him a bit too quiet and brooding. The actress that does Morraine is probably one of the best in the show. Nynaeve and Egwene are good, though not particularly memorable. Rand's actor looks the part, but they've pruned so much of his content from the books and made him basically flip from scared teen, to rebellious angry teen, to stoic man in all of 4 episodes.
There's a lot of race-swapping, which I usually don't care much about particularly in a world where magic and teleportation gates exist, but the books were clearly basing some of the groups off existing world cultures, so it feels a bit heavy handed, or at least makes the groups feel less monolithic and every city is a modern multi-cultural urban mix a la Toronto, LA or New York. Not looking to start a political discussion about it, but it feels like it doesn't add to the show.
I'm mid season 2 and will likely finish it, but won't really care one way or another if it gets renewed. Have a suspicion the season is going to end on a weak note with how quickly they're covering ground.
It does feel like it's kind of a lull period for big name shows at the moment, but maybe I just don't follow TV enough.
I do agree about the race-swapping. It gets tiresome when the changes are unnecessary. Morraine and Lan are likely my favourites, although they made some changes to Morraine I didn't appreciate.
