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Notes -
Average TV executive
From personal experience: Netflix has made adaptations of the Magicians and the Witcher. I quite liked both of these shows, but I haven't read the books they're adapting. I've also spoken to friends who have read the associated books and they were generally displeased. Generalizing from two personal anecdotes may not be the most epistemologically robust thing to do, but it hasn't stopped anyone before and it conveys the point: new audiences members don't care about fidelity to the source material. The real risk of disrespecting the source material is that you may lose the spark that made the original appealing, but that's mostly just a general risk of adaptation.
On the subject of fidelity to the source material, another Amazon show: The Expanse. Especially in later seasons, The Expanse takes quite a few deviations from the novels, reworking plotlines, changing characters, etc... It was nevertheless fairly well received by fans of the books. I don't have a thesis for why this is, I merely note it.
I would also note that creative types don't have to be actively pushing agendas. People tend to unconsciously other people think like them and share their tastes/beliefs. Woke writers will write woke shows because that's how people behave.
I haven’t actually watched The Expanse, but I read it, and I wouldn’t mind reworking some plots and characters in later novels: they just weren’t all that good in the first place. Same with the last books of Witcher series (though I read these close to two decades ago, so maybe they were actually better than I remember them).
The real issue is not so much lack of fidelity, but rather changing things in order to make some kind of political or cultural point, especially if they change good parts to be bad. But, I don’t watch any of the new moving pictures anyway, so I’m probably not the person to talk to about it.
I think they largely changed things that make sense in The Expanse.
In the TV version there’s a belter creole language. In the books, it seems less fleshed out and more like English with occasional other languages mixed in. Sort of like how in Firefly people would occasionally speak in Mandarin (I think). Since in the books, people are physically different from growing up in low g and it’s visually obvious, the creole provides a cultural separation in place of the physical.
The Ashford character is completely rewritten in the TV show, and his second Carlos “Bull” Baca becomes a female character, Camina Drummer. Both seem largely to be more interesting characters so it wasn’t a huge loss.
Both Amos and Alex are older, fatter and balder then their TV counterparts.
If you liked the books, it’s worth a watch.
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I've read both book series and watched both shows. In my opinion they both actually tell a better story than the source. Mainly because the prose in both book series is sub par.
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