"If the characters are great characters and you want to journey with them, the story is secondary," Goodkind said.
See, I don't know about this. It kind of makes sense but honestly, characters aren't enough. They also have to be in a story that's interesting, IMO.
Once the story is established and done, THEN have the further adventures or whatever. But I think it's a misunderstanding on the part of the author to so completely divorce character from story. Ideally, character and story rely upon each other and enrich each other.
So bringing well loved books (not by me, but by someone, I guess) to a tv series is awesome but saying out of the gate that the story kinda doesn't matter as long as we like the characters seems to be missing half of the equation.
On the other hand, artistic theory aside, if all they're cutting out is the bondage/torture crap, I can see their point.