Read it all through. I like the world building and the magic system, but there's a point in the story where the main protagonists were wandering about in the Aiel desert. I felt the story meandered seemingly aimlessly there and got less interesting for a time. Several people I know dropped reading the series around that time. Once they leave the Aiel waste behind, things take up speed again.
I'm not looking forward to a TV series though. Just take a look at the precedents:
Dune was deemed unfilmable, and rightly so. Some respectable attempts were made, but if you haven't read the book then you're missing out on, well, almost everything but the most basic touchpoints of the story. (I only ever read the first book myself.)
Lord of the Rings was tough for me because I love the book so much. I don't hate the movies, but they butchered the finer points of the novel - what's the point of basing your movie on a good story when you're going to rewrite it anyways?
(The Hobbit movies should never have been made in the first place as they never had a chance to live up to the LotR hype, and once I got beyond the pain of watching them I actually delighted in seeing them fail and betray the original Tolkien material in new, inventive ways at every corner. Tauriel was hilarious.)
Game of Thrones had one great advantage, namely that I hadn't read the books and thus couldn't be disappointed by poor adaption. And after the Wheel of Time I won't begin reading a big cycle again before the author has actually finished writing the books.
(For the record, I liked the gritty and "realistic" world very much like having swords that can actually be used, and fights being short, brutal, and non-flashy most of the time. The final season was a letdown as far as storytelling goes, but the bar was set very high and they did properly finish the story after all.)
