Why they cancelled The Wheel of Time TV show

I love The Wheel of Time books and so was incredibly, and naively, excited about the TV show. Now, it seems, we are only going to get three seasons.

I was a bit disappointed with the first season although the acting, design, and special effects were great. The locations and monsters were also pretty much how I imagined them. But by the end of the series, I wasn’t all that excited.

Season two was better. I really enjoyed how they portrayed everyone, and the Seanchan and their A’dam and so on were great. I still wasn’t singing its praises, but it was definitely getting more on track.

Season three was great. Finally, we were getting something closer to the books and everything was pretty spot on in my humble opinion. There were still changes from the books, but I wasn’t annoyed at them and understood their necessity. I assumed the plan was to condense the show to something like seven seasons.

But then Amazon cancelled it. There are a couple of reasons for this.

The Wheel of Time series is probably too big to finish

There are 14 books, (plus a prequel,) and each one is epic in its own right. The average book length is around 315,000 words per book. For perspective, all three Lord of the Rings books combined add up to around 473,000 words.

I would say that the series is a good advert for a Kindle, but when something is this epic, the temptation to splash out on some of the gorgeous paper editions out there is tempting.

I mean… look at this:

You can check all the covers and details here.

But as I said earlier, I had assumed they would condense the show. To have 14 seasons would be ridiculous and unlikely, but even seven or eight seasons seemed possible.

I was clearly wrong and a fool.

The main reason it was cancelled is… money

The TV show started in 2021 and it was apparently Prime Video’s most watched series premiere. But it faced issues – the primary one being that it wasn’t all that great and didn’t really seem to be aimed at any particular audience. Or it aimed at too many and hit none. What I mean is that fans of the books didn’t like it as it deviated too much from the source material, while people who were new to the world experienced a show that was largely good, but never quite hit the mark.

The viewing figures then seemed to just keep dropping while somewhat paradoxically, the show got better and better. I have seen figures that suggest a drop in viewership of 40-50 per cent. That’s not good. Fewer viewers for something that cost a ton of cash to make isn’t good and cancellation was looking likely. But I really thought we might get a season four at least, and maybe that would have saved it. It was unlikely though, as they have already shelled out so much for the inferior Rings of Power.

So, the dropping viewership was the issue and not the quality of the show, which improved. This isn’t just my opinion, the Rotten Tomatoes score is:

Season one – 81% critics score, 61% audience score.

Season three – 97% critics score, 83% audience score.

Do an average for each and that is pretty much how I would rate them.

But most people don’t want to sit through hours of stuff that is ok, just to get to the good stuff. So a slow rise in views is probably not on the cards. An article in Decider said that the lady who ordered the show, someone called Jennifer Salke, was fired a couple of months ago and now this has happened. It looks like Amazon is slimming down.

This is a shame as the Wheel of Time was a hell of a lot better than Rings of Power, which is still going to carry on. They paid a billion or something for the rights, so I guess they are stuck with it.

Oh, well. It is best to look on the bright side and we got to see a lot of cool stuff. I am currently on book six – The Lord of Chaos – and am loving it. The images from the show were pretty spot on and are now what I see in my brain when I read.

There is a petition to bring it back, which you can find by clicking on this link. Who knows? It may happen. Maybe on Netflix. Go on Netflix…

You should check out the Wheel of Time books if you liked the show. Or if you haven’t read them.

(If you are reading them, then this encyclopaedia thing is great.)

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