The show changes the context of some of the art that it's based on. For example, the image of the two boys playing with the Scrapper while a police van (the widely accepted interpretation is that they were going to attack the police as a joke) shows up is changed to Ed and Beth testing out the Scrapper while a police van shows up (the context is that Ed is letting Beth try it out, then the cops go over to Ed to talk to him about disrupting the neighborhood with the Scrapper).
Being set in Ohio, United States instead of Sweden.
A common criticism of the show is that the main cast and their stories are rather depressing and too quiet. This is, perhaps, ironic, since many of the behind-the-scenes pieces and reviews about the show talk about how it is intended to be neither dystopian, nor dark.
For a show about the wonders of exploring impossible science, the series does love to hammer home how miserable working there will make your life in the end, most of which isn't really due to the weird science (though that happens sometimes) but more due to the American nuclear family system. We never really see a stable family, either spouses are cheating on one another or the parents are depicted as neglectful workaholics. There seems to be an attempted Aesop about putting family before work, but we never really get to see what 'work' these people are doing that pulls them away into the Underground in the first place. You could replace the 'work' with a normal office job and it would still have the same tone.
