I’m surprised it lasted 3 seasons to be honest. I hated it.
I couldn’t make it past the first episode.
I made it through the first season, but just barely, and I didn’t go back.
I’m a completionist, and i couldn’t finish the 1st season. I’ll let Miracle Max express how it felt: “why don’t you give me paper cuts, and pour lemon juice on it!”
So will Prime use this freed up budget to fund some decent programming, or will they just throw it at another big budget Bezos money pit project like the Lord of The Rings tv show and that awful Citadel tv universe?
My prediction: This is being sacrificed to pay for a Bond 007 tentpole show that won’t be any good.
Meanwhile Amazon owns the rights to Stargate and does nothing with it.
I have a sneaking suspicion amazon picked up wheel of time only because they wanted to fill a high fantasy slot in the portfolio. Now they have rings of power with built in IP recognition, typical executive brain will put focus there instead.
Murderbot
It’s not … A great show?
But it’s fucking cheap (small cast, limited sets so far), and it’s trying to be charming.
It’s the streaming equivalent of comfort food.
We need more content like this to keep streams full, then we have a few prestige shows like andor or whatever.
What we have now is crap writing burning prestige money (twot/LOTR-trop) and leaving us with unwatchable crap.
It could be better. I read the books and they’re rushing through the story at 90 miles an hour. And they are leaning into everything like it’s all quirky comedy which does a disservice to the source material. The characters are supposed to be characters, not caricatures. You should to care about what happens to these people but in the series they so far feel disposable. They’re also overdoing the voiceovers and on screen displays to the point of annoyance. The “rise and fall of sanctuary moon” inserts are a hoot though.
Yeah, the pace is stupid, the problem is it’s 22 minute shows, and I think they’re trying to finish in less than 10 episodes.
For 22m shows they should do 18-20 er season, but the format generally sucks for anything except comedy.
But I was optimistic because the short length also means it doesn’t have to be burdened by all the overwhelming pretense of the heavier stuff, it can be chill about it.
Oh god they did what to murderbot?! These bastards. What a waste of good source material
Naw, it will be another Meliana Trump documentary
Glad they finally put a nail on that one. You got to stop funding projects made by people who don’t even like the source material.
Bond and Dexter improved by straying from the source material (up to a point). Bourne trilogy is better for ignoring the disguise element.
But in general you are correct.
I think to know where to deviate from source requires a thorough understanding of and appreciation for it first.
I think the Watchmen movie is the only example I can think of where deviating from the source material was actually a good thing. Even then, it was a tempered change that still captured everything else about the comic, and they didn’t try to “fix” anything else.
You don’t make a successful book-to-movie project that makes millions of dollars by shitting on the source material that already made millions of dollars. Hollywood writers are egotistical assholes that do not make millions of dollars. The book was successful for a reason. Don’t fuck up a good thing.
Man I don’t think I could disagree with a comment more. He captured nothing about the comic. He missed the point entirely.
Can you expand? I thought it was pretty much shot for shot, except the exchange of common external enemy and exclusion of pirates.
I agree with your point, but the lack of
spoiler
dead fake space squid
was still a silly, unnecessary and confusing change. It completely lost the critical “look out, they are coming for you from space” aspect, which is the only way his plan might have worked.
Say those words in the spoiler out loud, and you’ll see how silly and ridiculous the concept was, especially to modern audiences.
I agree. But comics are weird. (And comics movies need to risk being equally weird, to be good.)
If they had to replace it, I think they still should have picked a replacement that actually still somehow implied
spoiler
an extra terrestrial threat to humanity.
They kinda did, if you think about it.
Agreed.
But how does the TV series fit into that?
Good point.
I thinknwe could say those creative teams still clearly love their source material, even as they deviated from it.
A great adaptation feels like a valid alternate take on the original story, rather than expressing complete disdain for the original story.
Great job!!
Now do it for Rings of Power.
I hated it from the first episode.
They had amazing material to work with, all they had to do was adapt it to TV.
A group of amateurs made an awesome Wheel Of Time episode with a budget of about $5 and an afternoon of shooting. Amazon should have just given them the money to do it.
Uh Link please!
Give this a whirl:
Wow, that’s good! Actually better than the Amazon one
Fuck.
As someone who never read the books, I found the TV show cluttered. Part of that was watching it non-binge style I’m sure.
Should I give this another try? Even though there won’t be an “ending…”
The show has a completely different tone and pacing from the books. The books are much closer to LotR (particularly the first one which is basically just alt. Fellowship) and spend a lot of time with the characters traveling and getting to know each other and the lore of the world. There’s plenty of bickering, but the characters all like each other and get along decently. The show opted to cut most of the parts where you learn what’s going on to instead focus on manufactured drama.
They also just changed things in really confusing ways like making Mat’s parents deadbeats, among other things. Some of the plot restructuring makes sense given how much stuff there is to adapt. I don’t think anyone reasonable can expect any book adaptation to keep 100% faithful unless it’s getting crazy funding as a TV series. That said they just really took a knife to things.
Idk, as someone who loves the books despite their issues I wasn’t particularly enamoured with the show. Some people liked it though.
If the world seemed interesting I’d recommend the audiobooks. Love Michael Kramer and Kate Reading.
Making Mat’s parents deadbeats was just crazy to me.
I only watched the first season (big fan of the books as a kid). Imo, it is not worth your time. They took out what makes WoT special and produced some extremely generic, bland fantasy.
Not nearly enough tugging of braids :d
skirt smoothing intensifies
They took out what makes WoT special and produced some extremely generic, bland fantasy.
That’s a great point. The show didn’t even capture the “vibe” of the books…at least in the first episode, which was unpleasant and boring at the same time…and is all I could get through.
Yeah I started it a couple times but kept losing track of the goal/stakes in the story. Really wanted to like it.
I agree with most others in here, they ran roughshod over major character traits and plot points for no discernable reason. Wasted an episode of the first season on some random Warder.
That said, the biggest crime was the 8 or 9 out of 10 emotion and yelling in basically every scene. Wheel of Time can definitely drag on, so maybe they were trying to spice things up? Idk, it was weird.
At least this Rand fucks, though.
I mean, Rand was running a harem for half of the series
Meh
They screwed it up completely within the first 5 minutes of the first episode so not a big deal for anyone who’s actually read the books.
Even people who hadn’t read the books, realized how rushed things were in some cases, and then dragged out filler in others.
It was obvious they had the same issue as several other recent adaptations: The showrunner wants to make original content, and think it’s so good that people wont care that it differs from the source or even changes the story and characters.
Yeah I watched the first two episodes of Foundation and immediately peaced out. And that one’s even more ridiculous because the foundation books are more of an outline than an actual fleshed out story. So really, all they had to do was fill in the blanks. And they still fucked it up beyond all recognition. I’m sure it was probably enjoyable to somebody who’s never read even one of the Foundation books. But for somebody who’s read the entire series it was an insult.
I really tried for both of them, but they seem to fall into the same mistake.
The wild thing is how the Fallout show was one of the most source accurate adaptations in a while.
This was my reaction, exactly. 10 minutes in and I’m screaming “WTF?!”
I have read the books several times and mostly enjoyed the adaptation tbh. Literature and film are not the same. Stylistic choices which work in one don’t work in the other.
They took forever to build out the characters and the story. Good production for a series, but had the worst pacing. Sadly, their build up now leaves you hanging. I am not sure why Amazon is cancelling their series, without proper finales. I am guessing this has to do with overspending on Bond.
Similar to Netflix’s approach, they most likely found that viewership drops sharply after the first 2 or 3 seasons, so more money to be made elsewhere.
But similar to Netflix, they’ll find that people aren’t willing to give things a chance and will associate all your original productions with crap, if you keep doing it.
Also true, but that’s not what shareholders and executives care about. They just want the next quarterly profits to go up to get their payouts
This is why you wait to see if the series is going to get an ending before starting it.
Everybody waits to see if it gets an ending…nobody watches…cancelled after first series.
I saw the first episode, it got more than it deserved.
I’ve not read the books, and just enjoyed it for the story it told…who cares if it’s not the books? I didn’t. I’m not a subscriber of books having to be adhered to. I was just glad it was a different story that wasn’t yet another Marvel / DC / Star Wars / Star Trek reboot (not saying I don’t like those, but they have been done to death). Pity WoT ended up another casualty of the vocal “IT’S NOT WHAT I WANTED” brigade, like Cowboy Bebop, and seems to be being attempted on Rings of Power.
Then as the target audience, a person who’s not a fan of the series and has bad media taste, get fucked by this early cancelation and cry.
I could never get past Loial not having expressive ears. Like 90% of Ogier emotion is described by the positioning or movement of their long ass ears
Or the fact people from Two Rivers are often identified by their physical look and way they speak, but the TV series starts out with every person from their tiny isolated village being ethnically diverse.
Red Rivers peeps are darker skinned than your typical “white.” Rand is specifically noted for being much fairer than normal, even with a farmer tan.
It’s why they stand out from the pseudo-English that surround them.
Why would you assume otherwise and then get mad about it?
If there’s an ethnicity they would resemble, it’s certainly not “Anglo.” Even an ambiguous “Mediterranean” doesn’t explain why Rand’s tan wouldn’t let him blend in.
So you are right, in a way, but in a way we all know you didn’t intend by “ethnically diverse”
I’m not OP, but I don’t think they meant “weren’t Anglo” but instead that the villagers were literally diverse, i.e. a lot of different ethnicities.
It does put a confused spin on both “huh, you’re from the two rivers? You look like one of those Aiel” and the post-siege development of two rivers where the increased diversity from folk moving from different places to there causes tension in the villagers.
I may be wrong, though.
zzz… so desperate to make it a racist comment.
Frankly, I am bummed by this news.
I read the books, but seeing how it was a decade+ ago since I last went through some of them, most of it is a blur and I can forgive some of the changes in favor of smoother storytelling.
While the show brought familiarity back, and season 1 was painfully bad in almost all ways, from adapting/changing characters to lore. The show was leaps better in S2 and with S3 each episode felt very cinematic and now told a more cohesive story.
So, even though it was adapted, I was looking out for each new episode and had high spirits for a good S4.
Alas, if it is not picked up by any other studio, the “unfilmable book series” will remain that way, no one will burn their hands on it again. So, those cheering its demise, take that in consideration.
In closing, Prime definitely did not do it full justice at the starting line and it was expensive to catch up to that fact …
But the show was treated and produced better than Rings of Power, which does get another stay and money pumped into it, a choice I rather saw turned around.Same. I am actually kind of pissed about how much neckbeardery there was around this online because the last season was legitimately getting good and I was excited to see it through, but all of the “um akshually the dagger was crimson” shit probably killed the show.
Yep I couldn’t get through the first 2 episodes of season 1. On paper it should have been great! I skip ahead to 2 and 3 thanks 😊
On the bright side at least we know how to pronounce Egwene now
The back of the books spell out words and names phonetically. I mostly ignored 'em, too.
After 3 seasons they have to give people a pay bump so I’m mot surprised
