They tightened up a lot for the TV show. It’s a tough job to fit 1200+ pages into one season, so they take some liberties in world building and lore to adapt it for new viewers on a different medium.

Personally I like WoT a lot (slog and all), both the books and the tv show in its own way. I hope you and your wife will enjoy!

Robert Jordans the “Wheel of Time” is infamous for its slog, even among its fans.

Once his series was secure, he dabbled with many creative writing experiments, which included a phase of describing literally every mundane activity a character went through, to a part of the book where he literally wrote out the same chapters twice but slightly tweaked - to fuck both the readers and the characters with the feeling of dejavu as their timeline was getting fucked with.

Dude wrote 11 books in the series, many of them with over a thousand pages. It was finished after his death by Sanderson.