The Sword and Laser discussion

I did watch the miniseries back when it first turned up on Amazon and liked it well enough. (It had also been long enough since I read the book that I didn't remember/notice any of the I'm sure many, many changes to the story.)

Having said which, the way they handled the seeing/unseeing isn't quite how I would've done it -- in the miniseries, they put different parts of the frame in or out of focus depending on which city you were supposed to be seeing. I think I would've preferred it if they just gave the two cities (and their residents) very visually distinctive styles and had scenes carefully choreographed so that the inhabitants just never seemed to actually notice or interact with each other, maybe sort of like Morpheus walking through the Red Dress training simulation in The Matrix.

I just started watching it. While reading the book and knowing there was this miniseries, I anticipated the out-of-focus when a character was unseeing someone/something. I can understand the budgetary reasons for it. Likewise, the people of Beszel canonically speak English in the show, probably so they don't all have to do a bad accent.

The two cities have a different color palette, but so far there's little other distinction. I'm OK with out of focus unseeing, but it would be neat to have scenes outside the character perspective where the audience sees the delicate dance all the people do.

The first episode I noticed is that there's a sharp distinction from the book Borlú and the show Borlú. In the book, he wants to move the case to Breach, but in the show, he has personal motivations to keep the case. I guess that makes show Borlú more interesting, and he needed it (in my opinion).

I'm going to continue watching...

I can't find this anywhere in Australia to watch.

I watched the whole miniseries, and it's different than the book, but I didn't find it better or worse. Some major (spoilery) differences:

Minor spoilers for the show
(view spoiler)[
Borlú's wife is a non-entity in the book, in the show, she's a radical scholar searching for Orciny and had a relationship with Bowden. Rather than illegally buying a copy of Bowden's book, he takes the one out of the cache where he hid her work. She had disappeared in mystery 5 years before the events in the show.

Borlú is a worse detective in the show, in my opinion. He's driven by grief and is not shown being good at his job.
(hide spoiler)]

Spoilers for the book and the show.
(view spoiler)[
The nationalist politician is the one colluding with the American company to steal ancient artifacts. He's given a more dramatic, unpleasant ending.

Corwi is Breach. I guess that saves the series from introducing another major character more than halfway through and give Corwi more to do, but I didn't like this so much. I mean, it's good for the actress, but I didn't care for the plot development.

The billionaire wins. Rather than causing a major Breach and trying to sneak off, the billionaire casually leaves, sneering and defiant at Corwi and Borlú on the way out. It's more cynical than the book.

Maybe Orciny exists as an afterlife of sorts?
(hide spoiler)]

I have to admit that I didn't like the book or the show. Neither were bad. I ultimately didn't like the story they both told. I think Mieville is a talented writer that just doesn't work for me.

(You may wonder why I exerted so much effort on something I didn't like, but what I dislike fascinates me as much as what I enjoy.)

Tassie Dave wrote: "I can't find this anywhere in Australia to watch."

Weird. It's still on Amazon Prime in the US.

TV rights are weird in Oz.

TC&tC was on iView which is an ABC streamer (our tax paid government regulated station.) but it finished there and no other streamer has picked it up.

The changes to Borlu’s motivation and the character lineup for the show make sense to me, although I haven’t watched it myself yet to see how well executed it is.

The characterisation was definitely the weak point in this book imho.

I would like the miniseries better if they gave him a personal motivation, *and* was shown being good at his job. The book Borlú is good at his job but is rather uninteresting to me. The show's Borlú was more interesting but more frustrating. There's less procedural work shown in the series, and that's why I watch them.