The most frustrating aspect of television's obsession with IP above all else is how often new shows take stories that were told efficiently in prior versions and just pad them out because they have more time to fill. Apple TV's take on Paul Theroux's novel The Mosquito Coast produced two seasons without even getting to the events of the book, which was itself already adapted into a fine Peter Weir/Harrison Ford film that ran just under two hours. HBO's Perry Mason show with Matthew Rhys needed most of its first season to even let its title character be a lawyer; the second season, where he was a full-time attorney, was much better, but like Mosquito Coast, it didn't get a third.
My fear when I heard that Netflix was making a Man on Fire show — adapting a 1980 novel about a spy-turned-bodyguard that was previously made into a 1987 movie with Scott Glenn and a 2004 one with Denzel Washington — was that it was also going to be another prequel that took forever to get to the actual premise. To the credit of the show's creator, Kyle Killen (Lone Star, Awake), the series doesn't pull a Surf Dracula. It's not telling the exact same story as the films did, but the season has the same rough shape, and gets into its plot by the end of its first episode.
Instead, the series tries another trick often used on TV versions of stories that were previously told in a more condensed format: it turns a solo adventurer into the leader of a team.