Your division don't make full sense to me. WH and COT happen for the most part in parallel, and tons of "set up" scenes in COT can be abandonned if the story is told chronologically. There isn't much action in COT, true, but there's ton of set up scenes which are necessary later. There's no way it can be told in 80 min (2 ep.), but as long as you move the exposition elsewhere, a lot of scenes can be skipped.

The obvious thing to do is to re arrange the material, as Jordan should himself should probably have done, and bring all the storylines to the stopping point of the Cleansing. This has the added bonus of keeping all the main cast present though both seasons.

It doesn't make sense to cluster KOD with TGS. Brandon ruined a whole aspect of the logical dramatic progression of the story by splitting the finale like this (in short, it didn't make dramatic sense to have Rand reach his epiphany before the other storyarcs also reached their peak of despair too. Brandon got away with it in a book, to an extent, but as drama this wouldn't work and the jumps back and forth in the timeline just wouldn't make sense). What happens in KOD is short, can be made shorter and it is a prelude to the finale (ie: a good start for a season). With bit of leftovers scenes from COT, it would make a good first third to the last season (Perrin frees Faile, and bumps in Galad and enters the last stretch of his wolfbrother training. Mat lets Tuon go, and meets Verin on the road (no need for purely episodic material to stretch it out, you just need Mat on the road and Verin showing up) and resurface in Caemlyn, while Tuon resurfaces a few episodes later as Empress and gets Rand's offer of a meeting. Rand is forced out of Tear, captures Semirhage and moves to Arad Doman. You need one episode to show his failure there and his decision to return to Tear after the scene at Graendal's place, and he has his epiphany in the climax of the next one, that as main piece as the Seanchan attack on TV. Egwene gets Rand's offer, put her war plans in motion, gets captured and has two third of the season left for her showdown with Elaida before the Seanchan attack.... Elayne is under siege since the season 5 finale, gets captured and becomes Queen. Soon after, Mat shows up.

So far, the finale looks to be fitting perfectly in two thirds of a season, especially that TGS and TOM are full of redundant chapters and scenes that TV writers would condense to drive the action faster, and filler material that can go without losing anything, like the haunted town "episode" that was there just to get Mat a few chapters in the first book before the beginning of his storyline as planned by RJ.

It's precisely by cutting the extraneous material, ie: scenes Jordan wrote to re introduce characters and plots from the previous books and whole "episodes" he added at the beginning and or end of arcs to have something for the characters to do early on or to create a stopping point (Hinderstap, So Habor, a lot of the circus scenes etc.) that TV writers could get most of the series on screen without major significant cuts.




It would. The recurring secondary cast and the huge gaps between their appearances would be very difficult to manage. A very great deal of the tertiary cast can be turned into "random" non recurring characters, but it would be every hard to secure the secondary cast. Shows with recurring guest stars (2-3 episodes a year often have problems, and in WOT we speak of dozens of those. I speak of characters like Siuan, Elaida, Niall, Verin, Cadsuane, Domon most of the Forsaken etc. Even some fairly important parts (to the fans, anyway) tend to disappear for a long time, from Loial to Thom and Lan) It would be especially hard for a TV series (unlike movies and minis), as they typically produce per episodes or two in parallel, not for the whole season. If they producing it like a movie or mini, needing to pre-produce the whole season before filming begins etc., their costs will approach those of movie and minis, but if they don't they'll run very often in trouble with recurring actors not available when they need them.


Other than that I agree with your analyze, though I think you overestimate the problems re: VFX. Many scenes would have to be "re staged" with compromises (eg: you don't get tons of Trollocs chasing Moiraine and co. through hills. You rather move the scene to woods, and use tons of close-ups. You don't have tons of LOTR style shots showing thousand of Aiel at Dumai's Wells: you have just a few, and you use as many close-ups as possible. This is how it's done on TV, even on huge shows like Rome. GOT is a very good example of how you can show very impressive environments, while avoiding the features that would make the budget skyrocket, e.g: you put the money to make them look great but you show them as establishing shots instead of compositing them in every shots (you don't show the palace complex in the distance in every other shot, as you would in a movie), avoid camera movements in scenes where they are composited with real footage and keep those only when it counts, and you shoot the action closer to the building to avoid showing street perspectives, rooftops and so onetc. )

WOT'S VFX are perfectly feasible on a TV budget nowadays, and every year the speed of production and the costs keep going down. It would be difficult to do this with the big US companies, as most of their business is with big budgeted movies, they're in high demand and they don't really cater to the budgets of TV (even less since they're in HD), but there's not shortage of much cheaper alternatives in the UK, Canada, New Zeland etc..

Creatures are more of a problem, but by and large there aren't that many in WOT. Compromises can be made about the height of the Ogier or Trollocs - you don't go and make those CG (You keep CG Trollocs for when there are too many). Draghkar are only CG when in the air. Myrddraal are never CG. VFX for creatures like the gholam, Mordeth etc. are fairly cheap, if not as cheap and easy as channelling effects (weaving itself, or weaves like fireball, balefire, water, shields etc. - it's all very basic stuff for VFX people) would be.

It's fairly limited in the end. People don't realize how much VFX there are on mundane TV shows nowadays, because so many of them aren't noticeable anymore. Set extensions, shots cleaned up of all sort of things that were in the way etc. are fairly common. It's just unnoticeable if you don't know, that's all. There used to be a time when if you wanted to shoot a Chicago scene in LA you needed a lot of set dressing to camouflage any telltale LA stuff. Nowadays they just don't bother too much, it's cheaper to remove or substitute stuff in CG, and thet the budget for this from the money saved on set.