My wife and I just watched the first episode last night and it was VERY VERY VERY different from the book.
Peter Jackson changed some things in his LotR adaptation, but the people in charge of this project are writing their own plots from scratch it seems!
I think they took all the original ideas from the book and threw them out, making it even more cliche than the original material.
**SPOILERS?**
In an attempt to garner non-fantasy fans, I think they dumbed the story down to the reluctant hero quest.
They made Richard too young, too skinny, and too immature. The man is supposed to be an experienced woodsman, with responsibility and confidence. Not a wimpy emo-kid with angst and pathetic-ness. They took an original character idea and boiled him down to a archtype of a completely different story.
Oh, and Darken Rahl.....Wow....Way to take a creepy villain and make him totally uncreepy. One, he is supposed to be blond and good looking, to belie his evil actions. They have him kill an advisor "just to show how bad he is" instead of taking the time to develop him. The actor they got for him is too bland.
Also, when they are chasing the bad guy who isn't even there.....dumb. And the firing catapults at the boundary? What??? Darken Rahl is supposed to have power over the land of the dead and is slowly toppeling the boundary.
It also seemed like the character of the witch woman was just thrown in to appease fans. She did absolutely nothing useful for the 'new' plot.
***END SPOILERS?***
I could understand some of the changes, they made sense in order to streamline the story for visual format. However, they zipped through a good third of the book IN THE FIRST EPISODE!
They could have made 2 or 3 GOOD episodes from the time period they covered in the first.
I'm going to watch some more episodes as I am curious how they are going to dig themselves out of the plotholes they created for themselves.