Here is the harsh reality of the market...
Fantasy on TV works if you dumb it down enough that a) adults who don't like fantasy still enjoy watching it, because of hot stars, cool fights or hot stars; and
kids can watch it easily. The rest of us, the ones who like the genre and read the books, we are a minority and we don't matter to the TV industry.
Put every Robert Jordan fan, GRRM fan, SE fan and god help us, even the Goodkind fans together and (after the inevitable massacres due to 'ho'd win' and other equally critical fistfights) you would have just enough people to clean the auditorium once the OC fans have left for the night.
Thus, I give you Hercules, Zena, and to an extent, Higlander, Buffy, Angel and Charmed, as non-exhaustive examples.
I don't include sf shows like Trek, B5, BG, Lost, etc, because when it comes to TV, the genres are distinct. Thanks to Trek and the X-Files, spaceships, laser guns and secret conspiracies have a built in market (albeit a somewhat fussy one, or Serenity/Firefly might still be on TV).
Dingeons and dragons do not unless you can capture a sub market, like teenage girls who would dearly love to be able to jam a stake into the teenage boys who confuse them, and people who think Kevin Sorbo has a nice ass and remember enough greek history to correctly pronounce 'Zeus'. Or drool over Sarah Michelle Gellar enough to overlook the stuntguy in the Babylon 5 surplus mask trying to eat her.
And just for good measure, if you cannot deliver most of the first season in nice, tight, 44 minute chunks that can be divided amongst another 16 minutes of commercials at strategic instances, forget it. The networks don't want to know. Buffy, Hercules and Highlander succeeded based on drawing viewers in with self-contained, 'dumb' episodes early on, and THEN working in a 'mythology'. And TV show mythology can backfire, as anyone who struggled though the last 2 or so seasons of X-Files might agree.
So, you find your tall dollars of funding to make your pilot... you put together your cast of thousands... you tape your first season, miraculously covering GotM in roughly 22 episodes... and you run your epic TV event... and after the first 15 minutes when a bunch of CG hounds sit around while some dude with a hood full of shadows cackles evilly.... while elsewhere half a dude talks to some overweight sorceress about all the dead people on the hill, most of your audience switches to COPS, or Survivour: Cancun and the advertisers start looking at maybe exercising those kill-clauses in the contract, and the network exec who sold the show on the basis of 'It's like Lord of the Rings meets Platoon meets Night of the Living Dead with skykeeps!!!' clicksends his CV into Monster.com from his Blackberry. Don't worry tho'... the SciFi network might pick up the rest of the season, but your budget just got slashed and it seems Anomander Rake will be flying around in a leftover spaceship from 'Farscape' because the CG budget can't cover a castle. Raest will be fighting muppets, is that ok? Oh and instead of 22, you have ten episodes to work your magic. And can we leave out the whole Kruppe/Murillio/Baruk thing, cause it doesn't really add anything to the plot and nothing 'splodes. Good luck.
Which is why in my never so humble opinion, TV and epic fantasy do not mix.
You can turn LotR or Harry Potter into a 3hr masterpiece by heavy and selective editing. But if you won't work with 3hrsd at the outside,
you're out of luck until CGI and desktop editing becomes so advanced that you can creat your entire series and market it exclusively over the internet. Which will probaly happen in a few weeks or so, but we're talking about TV here and I digress...
- Abyss, doesn't have experience in the industry or anything...
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