The first season of Prime Video's Wheel of Time series ended last week, and as I watched the finale, I had a strange revelation: Despite the infinite things I dislike about the show, I still like it. The show is an improvement over the original novels because of the many changes made to the original source material.
If you are a hardcore fan of the books, this will upset you, but the show was never for you. The show had to appeal to a huge audience in order to justify its existence, says the show's creator. The show would be too different from the books, so we thought we would lose hardcore book fans who read the series multiple times. We would lose people who have never watched a fantasy show before because it is too much like the books.
The Wheel of Time has not been hurt by that, and the show was the most watched show in the world for three weeks. That is amazing, especially since there are so many problems with the series that might put those newcomers off: lackluster set design, awkward direction, some one-note performances, and just a general "second-rate Game ofThrones" vibe.
The show has a budget of $10 million per episode and those are some pretty intense problems. If that makes sense, they are TV series problems and not adaptation problems. The Wheel of Time show has modernized, streamlined, and focused the narrative told by Jordan in the massive 14-book series. The show is easy to follow and it's a blessing when there are so many new concepts introduced in each episode. It is a welcome and inclusive update that the novels stick to the gender binary. Even if some of the performances have issues, they have been solid, especially turns likeRosamund pike as Moiraine and Daniel Henney's Lan, who feel better at bringing the emotionality of their characters to life than those characters felt on the page.
The show has removed the deadweight from the books to allow the fantasy story at the heart of The Wheel of Time to shine. The world that Jordan created all those years ago is incredibly imaginative and fascinating, even as it draws on classic, because the reincarnation of the person who broke the world in the past is the only one who can save it in the present.
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