@coin said in Good TV:
I just started reading The Fifth Season though and Jemisin is fucking awesome.
I haven't read that but IIRC it's on my to-read list.
Some material is also... I won't say unfilmable because that's a term people throw around a lot, but definitely harder to convey over a movie or TV show in a way that retains its original scope or focus. The visual stuff can be distracting and action sequences are so cinematic I can see why directors would allow them to take over.
For instance one of the properties in the link is Foundation. Now, I grew up with Foundation, it fucking shaped me. Normally I'd be climbing up the walls about Dr. Asimov's masterpiece becoming more mainstream.
But so much of those books is about esoteric stuff. It's about two adults sitting in a room theorizing about how something might work, tossing potential solutions to problems at each other and then shooting them down using logic; I really don't know if and how well that can be translated to a screen. More so, telepathic 'combat' in general was another thing Asimov didn't spend much time visualizing or even explaining in depth; to him it was about exploring the implications of free will, or examining your own actions and second-guessing your own motivations for traces of subtle outside influences.
But the thing is you can't give a producer $50 million and then expect them to do these 'talking' scenes. In fact they may be right to say it's boring; audiences would nod off. I can read (and have) hundreds of pages about this stuff at the edge of my seat, but would I sit there while two characters resolve issues through logical discourse over half an episode about the Earth's location in the galaxy? Probably not.
On the other hand... Wheel of Time? Gimme. That's cinematic as hell.