@Jabberwok:
Not sure that I would call Thom or Moiraine leads, even.
I wouldn't either but early on they carry a lot of weight. For the first season they'd be focal points. After that they pull the the backlines and you bring the other girls to higher prominence and Thom eventually becomes Matt's sidekick basically.
At the very least Thom is pretty constantly hanging around someone in the party, obviously he'd eventually just be sidekick to Matt.
As far as adapting the books would go, something like 1-3 adventure stuff, 4-6 Aiel, 7-9 for saidin and the Black Tower development, 10-12 for healing the White Tower, and 13-14 for the big finish. Depends on the length of the season, since there are more distinct events early on that need covering.
SOunds like a pretty decent 5 season plan to me. Obviously if they're only 10 episode seasons you spread that out a little more but… yeah. No way to do it without condensing like crazy.
@tatermoog:
Considering where it all ended up, you could really probably cut out Perrin.
shrug
Ouch. And yet, true. Would also avoid comparisons to GoT.
Padan Fain could be entirely cut as well with almost no loss to the overall plot.
And Masema for sure. I still think its hilarious how Sanderson dealt with that plot thread.
@tatermoog:
Now that I think about it, what I think I would do is hire Brandon Sanderson to write a general beginning-to-end treatment. He was less archaic than Jordan, seemed to have a good grasp of the characters, and figured out a way to push to an ending while trimming the fat and having some fun. Was it as unique or even as good as Jordan? Eh, arguable. But it was entertaining and true to the series.
I'm sure Sanderson would be down for that but he's busy writing like 18 books a year.
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@Huschel:
And I think one reason for him durdling around so much was that all the other characters had stuff to do and Perrin wasn't allowed to catch up with them too fast. But that probably won't be a problem because a lot of that will be cut as well.
There were quite a few things where the overall story arc for some characters finished could have finished super early, and you can see residue from when Jordan had planned on the series being a shorter 5 (and then 7) volume series. Really I think Perrin's story was done after the Two Rivers arc. He was married, hero of the town, had an epic battle, was a lord, and had beaten his villain. And that was in like, volume 4. Out of 14. He then sat out an entire volume before showing up again. I'm pretty sure the entire super dragged out Faile kidnapping plot for like five volumes was to give Perrin something to do rather than be absent for 7 volumes while the white tower stuff got slowly pushed forward.
(On the same note, the mysteries and prophecies surrounding Matt's things that started in book 4 that didn't get resolved till book 13 well… could have resolved way sooner though I guess it taking years in real time to get to Tuon helped some.)
Similarly, there were a bunch of plotlines that had to wait for Rand to do event X before everything else could move forward.
It's pretty easy to see spots where a hindsight edit could have easily taken out a couple volumes almost whole cloth with very little loss. Similarly if, with hindsight, the entire narrative had been willing to just wholecloth split and focus on one thing for a volume at a time and then reconnect it all later, it might have worked better. One volume for the white tower stuff, one volume for Perrin's thing, one volume for Rand's stuff... rather than having all their plots slog for 6 books.