Yes, Covid would explain the absence of crowd scenes. Although Elizabethan Sept-Tours did have a wedding ball with musicians, and multiple couples on the floor, and Rudolf's hunting lodge did have crowds of people trying to see him.
And I'm not surprised that they reduced the number of characters for simplicity; that's standard operating procedure for converting a book to a screenplay. The first example of this that I noticed, as a child, was "101 Dalmatians" combining the characters of Missus and Perdita into one, which feels sorta kinky from the book's perspective. In TV "Discovery", Hancock is merged with Gallowglass (simplicity), Verin and Ernst disappear completely (simplicity), there's no further investigation of the Voynich ms (which IRL lives at Yale, and they had already moved that part of the plot to London), and none of Chris's students have names (much less are any of them daemons or vampires).
Corra, of course, wouldn't have been a Covid problem, but she does show up much more frequently in Book Three than in Season Three, and I'm not sure why -- I guess the writers thought she wasn't necessary to any of the relevant scenes.
I suspect some of the positive differences are the result of having more people in the room saying "does this line/action make sense?"
I'm only about 40% through Book Three at the moment; I'll watch for more interesting differences.
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And I'm not surprised that they reduced the number of characters for simplicity; that's standard operating procedure for converting a book to a screenplay. The first example of this that I noticed, as a child, was "101 Dalmatians" combining the characters of Missus and Perdita into one, which feels sorta kinky from the book's perspective. In TV "Discovery", Hancock is merged with Gallowglass (simplicity), Verin and Ernst disappear completely (simplicity), there's no further investigation of the Voynich ms (which IRL lives at Yale, and they had already moved that part of the plot to London), and none of Chris's students have names (much less are any of them daemons or vampires).
Corra, of course, wouldn't have been a Covid problem, but she does show up much more frequently in Book Three than in Season Three, and I'm not sure why -- I guess the writers thought she wasn't necessary to any of the relevant scenes.
I suspect some of the positive differences are the result of having more people in the room saying "does this line/action make sense?"
I'm only about 40% through Book Three at the moment; I'll watch for more interesting differences.