Which adaptation do you think has surpassed its source material in quality?

CaptainBasculin@lemmy.ml to Asklemmy@lemmy.ml – 98 points –
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The Magicians: The books were good, but the TV show really was in a class all its own. And it did away with using obscure words just because, that was annoying.

Game of Thrones: At this rate, ASOIAF is never getting done, so I'm by default giving it to the show for actually finishing the job.

Good Omens: The first season brought the book to life, but there wasn't source material beyond that. The second season did a great job fleshing out the characters and moving the story forward into the final season.

I’d rather the five released ASOIAF stay as they are, perpetually unfinished than anything close to the hatchet job that was the GoT show ever be released in book. For me, sometimes just finishing isn’t enough. The books > than the show 10,000 times.

Okay, fair. I'm mostly just frustrated that GRRM is taking so damn long.

I totally agree. The dude is aging, and not the greatest candidate for advanced years, we'll say. He's worth 9 figures. Please just hire someone to ghost write it and supervise their direction closely. He would more than recoup the financial hit in sales, so it could be argued it wouldn't even cost him anything.

He could even justify it to the fans as a collab with a well-known author, who would do the bulk of writing with Martin as a supervisor/big picture guy. Like if Jordan had spoken with Sanderson to finish WoT before he died.

the Game of Thrones show's last 2 seasons (the ones not based on any published books) was so bad, it make people retroactively hate the entire series and the entire intellectual property lol

Honestly, that's on Martin. He signed the deal, then failed to get off his arse and finish the damn series. HBO exercised their right to develop their own content when, after five eight years, he'd still not made any progress on finishing the series.

The fans needed something. Can you imagine the uproar if HBO told us all to wait another few years before closing out the story?

Martin can whinge all he likes about his creative process, and how he was shut out of the final seasons. I notice he hasn't whinged once about the money he made from selling the TV rights.

Don't get me wrong - he's absolutely entitled to that money. It's his creation after all. But he also signed the contract that got us to where we got to.

It makes me very glad that Wheel of Time finished before being adapted. That one has the potential to be better than the books, but they need to give it more episodes per season IMHO. WoT has some unnecessarily tedious bits that will likely be stripped out, which should improve things.

GoT show stripped the unnecessary tedium parts of books only to add unnecessary tedious parts by itself. Still, it went on plus since the former took forever in books and the latter was only few minutes in show.

I suppose one could say Game of Thrones has surpassed the source material in quality so much that it managed to do it twice in both directions.

Read the magicians after watching the series and it was such a drag. As mentioned in the Amazon ratings the writing style is just tedious to read... The emotional extent of the series was so much deeper in my opinion.