Late on Friday, Amazon announced that it was canceling its TV adaptation of Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series, after several uncomfortable weeks of silence that followed the show’s third season finale.
Fans of the series can take some cold comfort in the fact that it apparently wasn’t an easy decision to make. But as we speculated in our write-up of what ended up being the show’s series finale, an expensive show with a huge cast, tons of complicated costuming and effects, and extensive location shooting only makes mathematical sense if it’s a megahit, and The Wheel of Time was never a megahit.
Adapting the unadaptable
I was sad about the cancellation announcement because I believe this season was the one where the show found its footing, both as an adaptation of a complex book series and as a fun TV show in its own right. But I wasn’t surprised by it. The only thing I found surprising was that it took this long to happen.
Two things conspired to make it impossible for this Wheel of Time show to ever reach the Last Battle. One has to do with the source material itself; the other has to do with the way the TV business has changed since Game of Thrones premiered in 2011.
The Wheel of Time actively resists adaptation. It’s a sprawling 14-book series spanning dozens of named point-of-view characters and impossibly dense politics. And it even spans multiple eras stylistically—the early books were more Tolkien-esque in their focus on small bands of adventurers and a limited number of perspectives, where later books could go for multiple chapters without putting you in the head of one of the series’ half-dozen-ish main protagonists. And even among the series’ die-hard fans, most will admit that there are storylines, characters, or entire books that feel inessential or annoying or repetitive or sloggy or wheel-spinning.
