Why did they do this to a truly compelling story? They turned a book about adventure, growth, and redemption into a soap opera. The people who bastardized this book added plots and characters that are paper thin and poorly written. The resulting series loses entirely what the book was actually about. It's really painful. The book is full of three dimensional characters. The tv series is full of cultural stereotypes that are so simplistic it's laughable. I have a hard time imagining the meetings where people came up with this nonsense - or the meetings where someone else gave this drivel the green light. Why? Why? Why? If you wanted to write a soap opera, fair enough. Did you have to ruin a great book in the process?
