Today, my mother mentioned a show she was watching that's so good. She had expressed interest in the new Amazon show "Bosch" based on a character in a series of novels she enjoyed, but it turned out she was referring to "North and South" (British version), and she went on a tirade about not even finishing the first episode of "Bosch" because "Harry doesn't talk like that". There was more in that vein, but in her eyes, it was sacrificing a significant aspect of his characterization to adapt for dramatization.

Now on top of the issues around the recent "Wheel of Time" pilot, I can't help but consider the issue the inevitable decay of the material in the adaptation process. It isn't just issues like cheaping out on the special effects, but the need to reach a wider audience and the pandering to a less-literate denominator, which kills a lot of the details that make you interested in a property like WoT in the first place. That sort of thing is apparently hard enough to get right that even alleged fans, who, in spite of the indications of the quality of their output, are actually paid to write fantasy novels, fall down on the job. When you see what a book writer does to WoT, can you imagine what the mouth-breathing simpletons who write for TV shows are going to do to it?

I have had many issues with "Game of Thrones" and their forms of dumbing down and pandering, and yet I go read TV blogs by pretentious critics like Alan Sepinwall, Maureen Ryan & Daniel Feinberg, who seem to think it's an intelligent, well-written show, with deep characters and all the other crap they bloviate about on utterly boring smart-person shows. They think Tyrion is a witty character, when his "jokes" mostly consist of correcting people's grammar. They think the cardboard cutouts are characters with depth and nuances. They think there's depth and intellectual content in the show that introduced the term "sexposition" to the popular lexicon. And maybe there is, but as a book reader watching the show, I can't help notice all that is missing. Characters make decisions in the books that make sense in the context of the complex interactions of their society and the history of their world and aligned groups within that world. When they make the same decisions on the show, they come across as simple-minded and arbitrary, or else the characters go on extensive explanations to justify some aspect of their customs or practices, which the books convey simply by seeing it in action, leading the viewer to wonder how a man might reach his forties and still need an explanation about the importance of family loyalty and answering insults in their culture.

When TV makes Terry Goodkind look deeper and with more nuanced characterization, you know there is something wrong with the medium. I have never seen a satisfactory adaptation of the genre to the small screen. Even in feature films, I don't see much success, with the exception of a moment or two from the Hobbit, and LotR not sucking as much as it could have. I liked those movies. I thought they were awesome on their own. But as a faithful adaptation of the books...ehh, not so much. I'm not saying the stuff in the books was necessarily better, but I could also see why Christopher Tolkien might not want any further adaptations done. And those were really short books, with very simple characters, and a massive, long-time, deeply motivated, fan community producing sufficient human capital invested in getting them right, to get as much right as they did. When they said "screw it, let's CGI this bitch" for the Hobbit, we got a lot of crap, like puffy-faced Legolas, near-miscegenation, hands-free Smaug, Dame Edna as the goblin king and the theme-park barrel ride. LotR excised Glorfindel & Imrahil. The Hobbit trilogy jettisoned the concept of terminal velocity. Viewers of LotR wondered why they didn't make more use of the eagles, but viewers of the Hobbit must have wondered why they even bothered with the eagles, since dwarves, hobbits and wizards are apparently unharmed by falling from great heights.

Other properties for which I had less affection were no better served. I gave up on the Harry Potter movies after the 3rd, because I did remember that a key misapprehension hinged on a werewolf being indistinguishable, or at least easily mistaken for, a large black dog. I saw the bastard offspring of Lassie & Montgomery C Burns on the screen, and I about rolled my eyeballs clear out of my head.

Do we want this for WoT? Do we want to hear Loial talking like an Ent or the big rock thing from the Neverending story? Loial is one of the most generally liked characters, but when we can't read his words as fast as we want, we'll be as impatient and annoyed at his excess verbiage as the characters sometimes are. Do we want to hear the American-written WoT characters speaking with British accents? I'm wondering which would be worse: a long series of Rand & the other Two Rivers folks talking with "posh" accents despite their country backgrounds, or running the world while talking like Alfie Doolittle. Or maybe they'll compromise and give them a burr.

Do we want to see the Aiel clans on the march, which are always described in such massive sweeping terms, with details indicating a whole population on the move, reduced to maybe twenty guys trudging across a wide-open bare desert, the way the wildlings on "Game of Thrones" looked so few and stark on their glaciers? Do we want to see Moiraine, Lanfear, Morgase and other characters played by bland and dull-looking actresses, or worse, middle-aged women, because getting the ageless look, or the presence and dignity of such characters is too much trouble, so the producers say "screw it, make 'em old"? Do we want to see Mat making pratfalls and lewd remarks, because of the Hollywood tendency to boil characters down to a simplistic description like "comic relief" and go to the formulas for that? Do we want to see Rand and Perrin whining about feelings for the benefit of the audience, when their outward stoicism is a significant trait of both men? Do we want the women to start talking in feminist tropes about how they are bucking the pre-industrial equivalent of the glass ceiling, or Min making a verbal assertion of her right to wear pants?

That's what we're going to get, even if this gets handed off to the most professional studio around, headed by people respectful of the work, with a guarantee of long-term financing and lots of it, and a commitment for sufficient seasons that the producers don't feel the pressure to hook the audience in the first episode, and executive producer credits for Harriet Rigney, Brandon Sanderson & Maria-something.

I'm sorry that the Rigneys have been unhappy with the outcome of the deal (t)he(y) made with REE, and that this pilot thing might prevent Bandersnatch from regaining the rights. I'm sorry that RJ's heirs are not getting to handle the material and intellectual property he created according to their wishes.

But the complaint most people seem to have, that "Winter Dragon" is keeping WoT out of the hands of people who might actually produce an actual adaptation? That, I do not regret in the least.

Mark my words. If WoT EVER makes it onto a screen, Narg is going to fart, or Hopper is going to pee on something.