Amazon's so hyped for its Wheel Of Time show that it's already ordered a second season
TV Features Amazon
Amazon’s commitment to becoming the streaming TV destination for people looking concerned while holding a sword in a forest continues apace today, as the retail omni-giant announced today that it’s renewing Robert Jordan fantasy adaptation Wheel Of Time for a second season. This, despite the fact that shooting on the series’ first installment has only just now wrapped in the Czech Republic, because fuck, but does Amazon love swords, we guess.
It’s not clear as of yet how much of Jordan’s series—which eventually ran to 15 doorstopper novels, out-lived its creator, and required 19 days of audiobook tape to cover—that first season will cover. (Fingers crossed that it dispenses with the first book, 1990's The Eye Of The World, somewhat quickly, because that one’s a bit of a snooze. We’re just saying.) Showrun by Agents Of S.H.I.E.L.D.’s Rafe Judkins, the series centers in part on Rosamund Pike as Moiraine, a secretive witch searching for a young man she believes is the reincarnation of the world’s most powerful wizard. Josha Stradowski co-stars as Rand al’Thor, a young farmer who finds himself swept up in Moiraine’s quest, to potentially apocalyptic effect. There will also, if the series stays true to the books, turn out to be an astonishingly large amount of high school-esque romantic drama, but that’s generally part of the series’ appeal.
(Also, this feels like as good a time as any to recall the other Wheel Of Time pilot that aired, back in 2015, on FXX, after the network was paid for some of its after-hours time to run the damn thing. Cheaply shot, and starring Billy Zane, the “pilot” was constructed and run as part of a transparent gambit for its creator, Red Eagle Entertainment, to hold onto the rights to Jordan’s books, and is, accordingly, bizarre. Jordan’s widow, Harriet McDougal, later reclaimed the TV rights ahead of this Amazon show, but “Winter Dragon” remains a very strange little side story in the efforts to get Wheel Of Time to air.)
Of course, Wheel Of Time reads as positively conservative in comparison to Amazon’s other big fantasy adaptation in the works, Lord Of The Rings. Still, this renewal notice is a pretty sharp vote of confidence in Wheel Of Time by Amazon, your one-stop shopping spot for woodland magical drama shit. There is, as yet, no word on when season 1 of Wheel Of Time will air.
63 Comments
I’ve only read the first three books (I’ve been partway through book 4 for over a year, haven’t picked it up in months), but I’m excited for this. Interestingly enough, it was hearing about the Billy Zane pilot airing secretly at 2 in the morning that brought the series to my attention. I went out and read the first book and enjoyed it, even if I was having to constantly flip back and forth from the glossary to understand what the characters were talking about.
If you think book 4 is slow going, wait until you hit 5 and 6! But Brandon Sanderson wrapped up the last…I think it was 3?…really well, they definitely moved along better than Jordan’s volumes did.
lol, not to wade into a decades old discussion about which books are slow or not but 4, 5, and 6 are some of the most exciting before we get into the famous slog. Which books exactly are part of the slog or whether the slog even exists are still debated hotly to this day.If someone isn’t into 4-6 at all, then the series is probably not for them.
Book 4 is probably my favorite of the entire series, what with Rhuidean and the… spoilers we learn therein.
I thought Book 4 was so much fun. I read it several times. Book 5 wasn’t as good. Book 6 was fun again and then… oh well.
Exactly – that’s probably one of my favourite scenes in the whole series, the buildup and the payoff is just *chef’s kiss*.
Yep. They’re really going to have to work hard to build up the particular belief that is shattered by that scene in order for it to land, especially since (as I understand) we’re not going to really meet the people it’s about until season 2.
Yes, and especially since they’re going to be condensing the story significantly. I doubt it will land as profoundly as it did in the books, but I still hope they try and do it justice!
I loved the books through Book 6. And then everything ground to a halt and I gave up around book 9 or 10.
Seriously: Dumai’s Wells.
I would definitely say 5 and 6 are the slog — I assume from your username that you probably know better though. I’ve only read them once but I hope the show is good.
I tapped out halfway through book 6. I think I lost interest at book 5 but was too stubborn to quit.
That’s what I’ve heard. So far book 2 (The Great Hunt?) was my favorite.
Which one has the part where the same paragraph is repeated several times, because the characters are stuck in a time loop? It’s either the second or third book. That was where I bailed.That said, I will check out the series, there were some nice original ideas in the books but the pacing was just brutal. That could easily be remedied without losing the good stuff.
Yeah, 4-7 is the best stretch by a long shot. Book 11 might be the next best after those ones.
Sanderson’s final 3 certainly moved the pace along, although with a significant drop off in quality. A lot of the most important characters were woefully butchered (particularly Mat). And I think he lapsed into a Mormon fever dream when writing Egwene in the last battle.
For me the issue wasn’t so much the slog (though…yeah, that got pretty bad) as when Jordan just kind of gave up writing endings. E.g., book 7 (I think?), which builds up to a climactic battle that concludes so ambiguously and seemingly inconclusively that eventually Jordan had to step in and confirm to fans that [character] was, in fact, dead.
I don’t remember the book number, but there’s one where one of the main character’s girlfriends gets kidnapped in the prologue, and all book I’m waiting for the exciting rescue sequence — but that doesn’t come until the next 700+ page book…
Ever since Amazon got their hands on the Lord of the Rings rights, they’ve gotten more and more power hungry and soulless, kind of like…well, the right analogy isn’t coming to me.
That’s nonsense.They’ve always been soulless.
“And while Amazon aquiring the rights to Wheel of Time wasn’t the beginning, it was a beginning…”
Rosamund PikeAh so that’s her name. I have never seen a role where I liked her character, so I’ll pass.
the series centers in part on Rosamund Pike as Moiraine, a secretive witch searching for a young man she believes is the reincarnation of the world’s most powerful wizard.
Interesting how they are trying to push Moiraine as a star when (book spoilers alert) she is gone from book 5 to 13 (out of 14!)
I thought it was more to play up the mystery of who the Dragon Reborn could be. When I read The Eye of the World, there was no mystery as to who the Dragon Reborn is because the rule of fiction is: The character with the most chapters/scenes is the main character (this can be debated). If the story is told from Moraine’s POV, then the mystery could play out the way a mystery should.
Worked okay for Eddard Stark.
and similarly, rosamund might not be interested in doing 15 seasons, so having an off ramp built in isn’t a terrible idea
I’ve been following the development of the show pretty closely and the showrunner has said they’ll be condensing the books so they don’t have to make 10+ seasons, so they’ll probably end up doing something about the amount of time her character is offscreen. Besides, it’s pretty common for shows with ensemble casts to really push the marketing on one particular actor (especially ones where the rest of the cast is relatively unknown).
This assumes that the series will shelve Moraine for as long as the books did rather than accelerating her subplot somehow.
Amazon will cancel the series two thirds of the way through and Quibi will finish it.
So nice to see someone with your username commenting on this post! 🙂
:quickly googles to remind self if AmaltheaElanor is a WOT character:
It’s actually LOTR and The Last Unicorn.
Yes! Last Unicorn, I remember now. I knew it looked familiar!
Plenty of room to write her into a shitload of flashbacks if they wanted.
I was given the first book as a gift when I was a kid and, although I remember reading and enjoying it, I cannot remember a damn thing about it, nor did I ever read another one. So I’m much more excited about the Lord of the Rings show, but I’m happy to give this one a go as well. At least it will feel totally new to my forgetful brain.
Wheel of Time is a title that’s been forever floating in my literary circles, but I’ve never latched on. Much like the Shannara books, I suppose.
First book was great. But I remember it all going progressively downhill. I got to Book 8 or 9 before I just couldn’t make it any further. Reading became a chore, worse than that even.
Also, all I really remember past the first book is amazing world building and absolutely shit gender politics. Oh and obligatory: [Nynaeve tugs her braid]
Yeah, that was the series nadir for sure – after 5 it started slowing down as the number of characters and plot elements ran away from him.
The 8th book (The Path of Daggers) has nothing happen in the most excruciating detail possible. A bunch of stuff happens that has pretty much zero consequence, and the end of the book basically rolls stuff back to where it was before things started. I firmly believe you could skip the entire book and not notice.The good news is that if you can make it through that part, it does pick up again. A small amount in 9 and then a lot of stuff started moving in 10, and then Jordan died. Sanderson’s final three books based off his notes move things on at a really fast clip and are all excellent, especially the ending which surprised me by being incredibly satisfying – I assumed after following the books for two decades I was going to be let down, I wasn’t at all. That said, even though he tried to ape Jordan’s writing style, the books have pacing closer to Sanderson’s own stuff and they don’t quite have the same feel as a result (this might be an improvement depending on how you felt).That extremely slow period from 7 through 9 is the sort of stuff that will be heavily edited and streamlined in a TV adaptation if they know what they’re doing at all.
That’s a shame, it sounds like I conked out right near the end of the “the slog” as it where. Ah well. I can’t imagine revisiting the books at this point, though I’ll give the series a watch. I genuinely liked the world Jordan built, and I think it’ll provide a neat platform given the right showrunner and writing team (scrolling up and seeing its being handled by Rafe Judkins, which is promising – I always felt Agents of SHIELD punched above its weight).
If Amazon is willing to commit to it and not throw it away a couple seasons in, then yeah it has a ton of potential and well positioned to do well too. It’s actually pretty disappointing how under-utilized the setting has been up until now. Just that one awful pilot, a bad trading card game back during the period where everyone was unsuccessfully chasing the success of Magic: the Gathering, and a video game that was honestly pretty good as a game but was utter garbage in terms of how well it matched the setting. I remember that Obsidian were working on a new game in the setting about 7-8 years ago too but that fell through. If it’s successful this might be the shot in the arm that was neededed to get interest in other stuff jumpstarted again as well.
Wasn’t one book— Book 8?— supposed to be “Here’s a bunch of other stuff that happened in the world while all the stuff in the previous book happened”? I haven’t read them in years (and never did get to the Sanderson ones) but I could swear that there were two books that covered the same time period in different parts of the geography.
IIRC 9 and 10 happen simultaneously, but I didn’t mind that as much personally because they were focusing on different characters and subplots.
It’s not that nothing happens in 8 either. Stuff does happen. It’s just that the main thrust of the book is essentially a bunch of people doing a whole lot of stuff that ends up having almost zero advancement of the overall plot, and when its done almost everything is in exactly the same state as it was before. There’s just enough that does happen that you can’t really skip it, but it was an absolute slog to read, incredibly disappointing after a long wait for it.
The real rub though was that Book 7 left on a cliffhanger for one of the characters and then he literally didn’t appear in the next book at all. Wasn’t resolved until the subsequent book.
Indeed, it’s ridiculous to consider the disparities between sex and the genders in this series. Nynaeve can’t be with Lan until they’re married. Egwene can’t be with Gawyn until they’re Bonded. Berelain is repeatedly slut-shamed by nearly every character. Meanwhile, Mat Cauthon is a veritable man-whore up and down the continent and Rand al’Thor ends up with three women who just all happily agree to share him.
Yea… when I read the series (or the first 8 or 9 books anyway), I was a teenager in the 90s so I either didn’t see any issues, or thought “yes, this is great, bang those dirty virginal warrior witch sluts”. As an adult, when I heard they were making a tv series out of it I got excited and then started to revisit what I remembered in my mind and was really embarrassed.
I dunno, people give Jordan a lot of shit for his gender politics, and while I agree it’s far from perfect, at least he was trying. Especially in an era (EotW came out in 1990) where women were few and far between in genre fiction. There are a staggering number of prominent female characters in these books, even if you excise a lot of the chaff.Also, credit where credit’s due: he imagined a world where a man committed Original Sin and looked at how it would affect many of the resulting cultures in their gender politics (most prominently being the Aes Sedai). Women have all different kinds of power: magic, political, war, etc. Societies are shown to be matriarchal and matrilineal. The Aiel practice polygyny but it is definitely not patriarchal. Characters like Moiraine, Min, Aviendha, Elaida, Siuan, Cadsuane, Nynaeve, Faile, Verin, Egwene, Elayne…have diverse backgrounds, abilities, personalities, and story arcs.Even today, I read an uncomfortable number of fantasy novels that default to a patriarchal society because that’s pretty much what we live in now and the male authors probably never really thought about gender politics and are scared to write women characters. While I like a fair number of these authors, I do kind of wish they’d take more risks ala Jordan.(A good example of this is Brandon Sanderson’s Mistborn trilogy, which I absolutely adore…but it’s basically Vin and a dozen male characters. And women exist almost nowhere else in their entire society. Sanderson has gotten a lot better on this front, but I do feel like it’s still too easily the default for a lot of male authors in the genre.)
Sanderson has mentioned this as being a legitimate mistake when writing Mistborn. He said he got so focused on making Vin a great, dynamic character that he automatically defaulted to writing everyone else as men, and he regrets he. He recently mentioned he’s writing the screenplay for Mistborn, and he’s changed some of the men to women. His future series are also MUCH better with female character representation.
Oh, I hadn’t heard that. That’s awesome!I do really appreciate his awareness for gender politics in the Stormlight Archives, as the Masculine and Feminine Arts are a very interesting approach. Also, Spensa in Skyward and Starsight might just be about my favorite of his protagonists. He has made a lot of conscious progress in this arena, and it’s very, very welcome.
i dont remember when i tapped out. probably around book 8 or 9. the whole thing was absolutely the pits. i thought it was universally agreed that this sprawling, convoluted, PG, bloodless, predicatable, disney-fantasy universe was just a huge waste of time. i certainly regret not giving up at book three.
I liked the universe itself, from what I remember, just not the details or how it was used. I liked the idea of the desert tribes, I liked the troll thing that could teleport and… talk to trees, was that right? I liked the idea of a magical order and the white tower, though I didn’t like how it was executed or the gender shit around it. I liked the concept of these childhood friends from a tiny village they’ve almost never left going on an epic adventure. But “sprawling, convoluted, PG, bloodless, predictable” is pretty spot on. And as much as I liked the universe, it was definitely Disneyfied with how it ultimately was filled in. I feel like – the universe had so much potential. Like if George Lucas had only made Star Wars and then 13 Christmas Specials. I think the first book works great as a standalone that just happens to be open ended. Or a series that Jordan should have just immediately handed over after the first book. Oh I also am not really a big fan of Chosen One narratives and this was probably the most glaring example of a Chosen One narrative that I’ve ever ready.
This series, almost single-handedly, lead to my audiobook addiction. There was no way in hell I was going to digest it through the written word, but the narrators and characters kept me company on long public transit commutes in a new city where I knew no one and, years later, I’m still an addict.I could have done with less focus on clothing (Jordan REALLY REALLY liked describing clothing for some reason, kind of like many fantasy authors do with food and feasts,) but it ate up hours and attention when I needed it most. It’s not the best fantasy series ever written, but I rarely ever felt like it was entirely wasted time.
I’m looking forward to this because it’s not one of those touchstones of my reading life that I’ll feel betrayed if they stray a bit too far in the adaptation and still offer a quality product.
But how will they translate the five-page-long descriptions of dresses to the screen?!
A veeeerrrrryyyyy slow camera pan up from the ankles?
I think I gave up about halfway through book six. What little progress the plot had been making was slowly being unraveled by dead characters being gradually contrived back into the plot, and I realized that I wasn’t enjoying the writing style or the setting. It became the literary equivalent of the later seasons of Heroes.
It was pretty disappointing to find out that the villains all pretty much had Get Out of Death Free cards.
I read the entire series (that had been released to date) when I was in college, in 1996. And then kept up with it through each book as they came out for the next decade and a half. Lord of the Rings is great and all, but the Wheel of Time was 100% my jam. I am more excited about this TV series than I have ever been excited about anything.I’m confident that they too recognize the slog that began in book 7 and went through book 11, and will condense a lot of it. If Faile is in that goddamn Aiel prison camp for more than two episodes, I will riot.
Will they consolidate all of the horrible councils of wise women into just one insufferable council? That would have to save a huge amount of money and time.
“The Eye Of The World, somewhat quickly, because that one’s a bit of a snooze”OK, glad it wasn’t just me.I tried getting into it, I really did. I’ve read some horrible work over the years because I was stuck somewhere and the only thing I had was more or less the collected works of Dean Koontz.
Yeah, I tried the first book and found it both boring and derivative. And with all the rocky things people have to say about nearly 2/3 of these books…I might be fine without them.
I remember reading that prologue standing in Waldenbooks (dating myself a bit) looking for a new series to read, and was hyped as Hell after that. The rest of the book was…meh. It took me a few tries to get through it.
Luckily the series picks up significantly from there, and is a favorite of mine. I just completed a re-read earlier this year that I had done as a refresher before the show aired and have come around to changing my mind on a couple of characters, liking them far more than I did in my previous reads.
I picked up The Great Hunt before a long flight, and didn’t realize it was book 2 until I was on the plane. When I finally read book one, I was convinced I would have never read the second book if I’d read them in order.
There are neither beginnings nor endings to the Wheel of Time. But it’s a beginning.
I just want Rafe to play another season of Survivor.
I guess I’m in the minority but I found these books to be some of the worst fantasy I’ve ever read. Granted, I didn’t finish the series – had to give up after book 5 or 6 (joke’s on me for forcing myself through that many of them) but god they were stinkers. A couple of them were solid with some cool worldbuilding but everything else was so dull and generic with some of the worst characters I’ve ever had the misfortune of reading.
I want to see this show so badly, but I also don’t want it to last as many miserable years as Game of Thrones. Give me 3 seasons and a New Spring 5 episode prequel miniseries.