10 TV Shows That Were Right To Deviate From The Source Material

2. Game Of Thrones

As a fan of Martin€™s work for twenty-five years and a devotee of his brutal, operatic high fantasy epic A Song Of Ice And Fire since it began publication in 1996, I loved Game Of Thrones when it first arrived on television in 2011. From casting to dialogue to the production values, everything appeared to be a perfect render from prose to performance. That was fine for the first season, and for the second and third for the most part. Small changes became necessary simply due to the overwhelming challenge of telling Martin€™s complex, baroque story, with its cast of thousands. As small changes became larger ones, fans of the novels began to quibble with the show. However, the bigger problem came when it became apparent to HBO that Martin not only wasn€™t going to have the novels finished before the show came to a conclusion, but wasn€™t even going to be able to have the next book in the series ready for publication on time in 2015, something he had been confident about when the series began. Faced with the herculean task of adapting material on this scale, and then adding in the issue that the source material wasn€™t even finished yet, showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss have done an admirable job. There are issues with their adaptation that I€™m not comfortable with, but none of them have anything to do with how they€™ve strayed from the source. When you think about it, it€™s almost a blessing that Martin€™s fallen so far behind schedule. Had the novels been published on a schedule comparable to the show€™s schedule, more comparisons would be inevitable, especially had HBO continued to adapt a novel per season. With The Winds Of Winter not likely to arrive for another year, the separation between the two becomes easier to spot, and fans more able to think of the two as distinct tellings of the same story.