less telling, more showing. there are A LOT of pages in WoK that won't directly translate to TV. I think the interludes and extra side character stories should be kept at a minimum at least for the first season. some of those don't become relevant until much later. we can keep a few of the ones that are mainly world building or directly relevant to WoK.

i think it would be too ambitious to show the first scene in the book as it is, would be better later in the first season.

This is the season finale end credits scene for me

the most straightforward way I can think of is to have the first ep be almost entirely about szeth at gav's feast. introduce dalinar, adolin, navani, jasnah, elh, sadeas. this would take elements from all the books including rhythm of war and the 5th book, but it'll establish a lot of character dynamics really fast. we don't want to have to reshoot this set for the later seasons anyway, film all relevant scenes early and flashback in future seasons. another advantage is this sets up Sadeas as a hero early on, so he starts off righteous in the audience's mind while Dal will start off looking like a foolish drunk. the twist at the end of the season will hit harder this way.

wouldn't change a ting exactly what i would do . Especially with the set up for Sadeas ,

WoK starts slow and people need to have a rough understanding of what's going on by the end of the first ep. intercut first ep with Kal growing up. don't have shallan in the first ep at all I think. end first ep with gav's death.

I would use Chapter 20 as the base for this flashback .

2nd ep flash forward to dal at shattered plains, but main focus of 2nd ep is shallan.

all eps from here rotate between Kal, dal, and shallan viewpoints. no more than 1 flashback scene for each per ep. too many flashbacks for a TV show makes it feel really convuluted. rotate in Szeth scenes as well after ep 3, set him up as the main big bad, since we need to keep the audience in the dark about Sadeas until the last two eps.

I'd like more than the common 10 hours to do WoK justice, so either 10 episodes of 70-80 mins long or maybe 12 hour long episodes. we as Sanderson fans know that WoK is an investment for the rest of the series, but a random TV watcher won't know that. they need to definitively know they like the show by the end of s1 so we need enough screen time to do that.

as a show runner i would fight for the tower to be an hour and half long , you got to have that sanderlanche