How The Expanse UNDERSTANDS Adaptation

... and then there's The Witcher and The Wheel of Time to provide us with a counterpoint to understanding what an "adaptation" is.

It's amazing that this show is still as underrated and unwatched as it is. It's a beautifully shot and well acted and written show. Which is a lot more than I can say for the Witcher series.

Unless I’m forgetting something, The Expanse has to be the best ScFi since the re-imagined Battlestar Galactica. It’s fresh, bold, imaginative and the very best thing is that yes there is source material but there isn’t a huge overbearing presence of cannon. The Expanse is a fantastic show and I’ll be sorry to see it go…..great video to! Thanks!

It’s the best show I’ve seen. I’ve never geeked out as much on any show or movie. Masterpiece for me.

Criminally underrated show. For me it's the best sci-fi series I've ever watched together with Battlestar Gallactica.

The Expanse is the best show in the last decade, maybe even more, for me personally. Love every single thing about it!

Great analysis! Though, IMO, it not only reaches the heights of thrones, it surpasses it!

The best thing this show had going for it from the start is the authors being heavily involved with production. It's clear how this property succeeds from that input versus other properties adapted on TV.

The casting is nearly pitch-perfect. It’s gives the writers a little boost.

To me season 4 deserve more praise than it gets. We see a crew that spends its time zipping from spacestation to spacestation get stuck on a planet (and eventually in a prehistoric alien cave), and the writers still found a way to make it thrilling. Cibola burn (the book s4 was based on) is much less engaging than the season turned out to be. Season 4 also marked the turned in the VFX quality of the series. I particularly found the rendition of the alien ruins really impressive. Cibola burn must have been the hardest to adapt! It makes you wonder why the 3rd book (Abaddon's gate) which contained so much action got shrunk to just a few episodes.

One thing that the Expanse adaptation avoids is turning characters into easy "bad guy" vs. "good guy" simplistic takes on their behavior. While some characters are just despicable, you can still understand what their motivations are. They just don't behave in simple "evil" ways; they goals and it a questions what means to those ends they'd choose, even if you wouldn't make those choices yourself. All the characters have flaws, and that makes them really interested and fully fleshed-out. The depth of these characters are certainly there in the source material, and much of that has been pulled into the TV adaptation. I think that many people watching might not expect all the characters to be so complex, and when asked casually if so-and-so is a "bad guy", there's no simple answer. Which makes this material so good.

Going from book to screen whether the big screen or the small screen is that things that only take a page in a book require the best part of an hour on screen so short cuts need to happen. On the flip side what takes only minutes on screen can take many pages in a book. The trick is to find a balance where the key features of the book{s) are presented without taking stupidly long times to explain them. A good adaptation will make people feel that the story was told as it should have been even with short cuts taken.

Imo the expanse is the single best scifi show/books. The show got me to buy the books and im now on book 6 and love them. Definetly worth the buy.

when I first watched season 4 I felt like it was nothing more than filler setting up season 5 but after rewatching it recently and listening to what you said I think those factors make it better. The system is a very big place so of course some main characters will have to deal with situations that don't follow the main story, especially if they are in different parts of the system. I definitely enjoyed season 4 the second time around

The opening song in Norwegian? And every single space battle scene is my fucking favorite part. Also the rest of the entire show is my favorite part too. Best scifi show I've ever bothered to sit down and watch

The Expanse has the advantage of the writers and producers of the Expanse, being the authors of the Novel series.

I’m not ready to see the Expanse end. It’s one of the best shows out there. It sucks that the final season was cut short. Time to hit the books for that fix I guess.

ABSOLUTELY! When people whine in FB groups or elsewhere that some scenes/characters are not the same as the book, I answer, so what? And especially after listening to the Ty & That Guy podcast, I have a very very high level of trust that between the show runners and the book authors, we're not gonna say "meh" at the end, like with GoT...

It helps that the authors of the book is the one making the series.

Remember the Cant!