Quote Originally Posted by Psyren View Post
Would Umbrella Academy numbers be good enough? I think so.
What do you mean by UA's numbers? The article said that 45 million viewers "sampled" it. That could mean a lot of different things, one end of which being that many people watched the trailer that was automatically popping up, or it could mean people who watched an episode or more. And according to this article, Netflix considers watching 2 minutes of a show to be watching the episode.
AIUI, Netflix and others use the metric of first views. This is the number of new subscribers who watch a given show as the first thing they do. Because of this, it doesn't matter if people who already subscribe watch something, just whether new people are signing up to watch it. (I believe this is why Netflix almost never goes past three seasons on a show.) Even if everyone currently signed up for Netflix watches a new show, if no one new subscribes and watches it first, Netflix would consider it a failure, or at least, not as much of a success as a show that no current subscribers watch but brings in 10k new subscribers that watch it first. I think Amazon is similar in what they do, but they have a whole thing about it also driving people to shop more from Amazon, and I don't know exactly how that all works out.
But let's just consider the general Netflix model. For WoT to be a success, it has to bring in new subscribers. One could look at it as it being easier to bring in new subscribers by faithfully adapting something, as the fans of the book will be more likely to sign up. But it could as easily be argued that buzz around it is more important, because you want to try to draw in people who haven't heard of it before. In that case, upsetting the purists might be the better plan, because they could cause a stink on the internet, and cause other people to become aware. I have no idea what the calculation behind that is, but I'm going to assume the people Amazon pays to make these decisions have some way to determine what to do. They could easily decide wrong, but they have more info than me.
Ultimately, though, if I had to guess, I'd say that if as many people watch this as watched the Umbrella Academy, it would work out that everyone at Amazon would be happy about it. And again, I am not saying that they shouldn't change it. I don't really care about the series - I read it, but after book three it's all pretty much a blur. I think the entire series is incredibly bloated, and could have used an editor to cut it down to about 6 books (weren't there multiple chapters dedicated to Egwene taking a bath?). Any changes to streamline it would be welcome, as would any changes to make it less offensive to real world groups. I don't see a good reason why the duality has to be between men and women - yin and yang can encompass dualities between light/dark, shady/sunny, masculine/feminine, summer/winter, rise/fall, and so on. What the divide actually is doesn't seem to me to be as important as there being a divide, but again, I don't remember the books well enough at this point to refute those who say it has to be male/female. What I do know, though, is that at least some people in the world (not anyone here that I know of) would fight against changing it not because of true importance to the books, but for outside reasons, and those opinions can be safely discounted by people looking to make the series.