So last night was the premiere of the second season of HBO's "Game of Thrones". I don't know why it took so long for someone to realize it, but this is the easily the best way to adapt a novel to screen. Each episode is an hour long and there are 10 episodes per season, this way you don't have to cut anything a reader of the book might have enjoyed. This isn't to say that the producers have to adhere a hundred percent to the source material. "Game of Thrones", in fact, has scenes that never happen in the books. These scenes are necessary to compensate for the limitations of the medium. In a book, a character's motivation or back story could be told though inner thoughts or simple exposition. That doesn't really work on screen (except, of course, for the LOTR opening).

I'm tired of movies butchering a great book. Some don't even try to keep with the source. Take The Bourne Identity and its sequels; they took the title of book, the name of the main character, and the idea of an amnesiac government agent and discarded the rest. While the movies might have been good on their own, attaching the name of the book ruined them for me. LOTR was probably the best modern film adaptaion of any novel, but even that is dwarfed (haha) by the HBO series.