Belaboring some, but this comes to mind.
The show probably seems generic because it's so disjointed. Stuff does basically just happen that had vastly more context in the books (well, to the extent show and books have same events).
I get why. I've seen 5 episodes and there are important things in book one that haven't been touched yet because the books are so overstuffed. They have to move events along vastly faster than the books, and I can see places where they changed things probably to substitute for mounds of exposition to describe stuff before and during when the characters engage with it.
Structurally, they have to somehow make move 900+ page books in a 14 book series to get to some sort of resolution as they don't have 400 episodes guaranteed to tell the book series' story, removing massive amounts of depth. At the same time, to make people care at all about what's going on, there are scenes that try to do some character development that feel forced (to me, anyway). (Ironic that the character dev in the books is largely missing.)
I could see liking something better that had narration, but a lot of people seem to hate narration. Actually, there are probably similar problems between this and the recent Dune movie due to trying to avoid certain storytelling techniques while giving fans lots of details. (They also seem to spend a lot of time making things look pretty, when I don't care about visual effects.)
Also, book one isn't the best book. When I read it the first time, it felt like some taking Lord of the Rings and other stuff. It has references that don't pay off forever. The ending felt rushed and weird to me on first reading - I reread the book recently and it wasn't nearly as weird to me, but, then, I understood references far more and understood what was actually going on, given that the first three books tell a fuller story.