Hi, Laura. Yes, absolutely, I'm enjoying The Dresden Files series on the SciFi channel. I read all the books about a year before the show was developed. (In fact, my website partner developed a Dresden Files Concordance on our Snortyville website if you're curious.) It has been very interesting to see how loosely based the series is on the books. I mean, the show is going one way and the books are going another, both equally valid. The only point of intersection was the "Storm Front" episode, originally intended to be the pilot, that was based on the first Jim Butcher book, and even that had a lot of changes.
My website partner and I are more familiar with the books, so it has sometimes been hard to accept the t.v. version. We both think that Paul Blackthorne is perfect as Harry Dresden -- exactly what we had imagined. But we've had big problems with Bob. In the books, Bob came off as sort of a dirty old man or aging frat boy. In the t.v. series, he seems too prissy like the disapproving butler. I wrote an article on this for our website and inadvertantly caused a minor fuss in the SciFi.com forum (amongst fans who had Googled and found the article) in a 13-page thread devoted to how wonderful (t.v version) Bob is. Wow, who would guess there would be so many passionate fans?
Another problem we've had is Morgan. He's way better-looking in the t.v. version than in the books, but not nearly "hard-bitten" enough in our opinion. But we love Blackthorne, his subterranean apartment, Lt. Murphy and the rest of the Chicago PD, and we especially loved Claudia Black in the episode "The Other D***" She was fabulous (just as she was in Farscape), and we'd love to see her become a regular.
Oh, I like your comparison to the SciFi version of LeGuin's Earthsea books -- I can tell that you were as appalled by it as I was. Good golly, it was awful. One of LeGuin's biggest public gripes about what the SciFi Channel did her books was that they changed the ethnicity of her characters (all of whom were supposed to either be black, or have a Tibetan/Native American look), and made her characters white (all of them, and not just the Kargs who were supposed to be white). LeGuin didn't want her readers to think she had "sold out", so she spoke up against this change (and many others) on her own website.