Submitted 1 day ago by Skavau@lemm.ee to Television@lemm.ee
https://deadline.com/2025/05/the-wheel-of-time-canceled-prime-video-1236409657/
Didn’t read the books until recently. It was an okay show without the context of the books. The first season was slow and confusing but it seemed pretty par for the course for the YA fantasy genre.
Lot of people hating on it here for not sticking to the books, which is fine, I guess, but I’m glad shows like this are made otherwise the only shit I’d have to watch are “The Bachelor Season 405”, “Generic Cooking Competition 7”, and “Real Housewives of Some Random Ass Place”.
I guess I’ll have to watch it
The fate of most shows nowadays. Greedy companies don’t give a shit about telling a good story or giving it a proper ending.
All they care about is number go up.
Stop giving them your money and attention.
I’d like to see creators who own their rights put in contracts that the story must be told in full, and that whatever pacing is decided on (1 season per book for example) needs to be maintained. I know most studios would walk away, but I’d love for someone to have the balls to tell them that
You want to make my 10 book series into a TV show? Put your money where your mouth is and pony up 10 seasons worth
While i agree mostly, if someone wanted to edit some of The Slog down, I’d have no problems with that.
I just want to see creatives actually owning their creations in the future and not being slowly choked out by corporations and their greed.
“It you don’t sign over everything, we’ll just use Ai to rip you off and get away with it.”
Honestly I don’t see actors in the future owning their own likeness. “Want to be an actor? Well we’ll own your face and voice forever”
I’m surprised it lasted 3 seasons to be honest. I hated it.
I couldn’t make it past the first episode.
I made it through the first season, but just barely, and I didn’t go back.
I felt that way about the Fallout show. The acting (and the CGI) was so freaking bad
If you want the loyal fans to watch it, stop fucking it up! Keep the source material, and let your cooky ass writers write their own shit.
If you want the loyal fans to watch it, stop fucking it up! Keep the source material, and let your cooky ass writers write their own shit.
cough cough Halo
cough cough WoT
cough cough LotR
cough cough Witcher
They just can’t fucking help themselves. Like incontinent tomcats, they’ve just gotta spray their stink all over everything, because “we can do it better.”
Perrin having and killing his wife?
I had to look this up, and am now even more pissed that it wasn’t even Faile, which at least would have the benefit of a dead Faile.
Yeah, making it Master Luhan would still have fucking sucked, but at least it wouldn’t have involved fridging. Plus, it would have given Perrin the overall character development they wanted, without impacting his romantic character arc in such an incredibly destructive way.
To give the showrunners some benefit of the doubt, doing this could have gone some way to help explain Perrin’s overprotectivness.
I also don’t prefer her lol. I guess I should havebeen more specific.
Brando Sando commented on this. The choice was made to accelerate Perrins character development. I guess he suggested that Perrin kill Haral Luhan, but it was ultimately rejected by the writers.
It’s like the Witcher. People aren’t going to respect your OC by fucking up a recognizable name, they will just find you incompetent
Glad they finally put a nail on that one. You got to stop funding projects made by people who don’t even like the source material.
Bond and Dexter improved by straying from the source material (up to a point). Bourne trilogy is better for ignoring the disguise element.
But in general you are correct.
I think to know where to deviate from source requires a thorough understanding of and appreciation for it first.
I think the Watchmen movie is the only example I can think of where deviating from the source material was actually a good thing. Even then, it was a tempered change that still captured everything else about the comic, and they didn’t try to “fix” anything else.
You don’t make a successful book-to-movie project that makes millions of dollars by shitting on the source material that also already made millions of dollars. Hollywood writers are egotistical assholes that do not make millions of dollars. The book was successful for a reason. Don’t fuck up a good thing.
I agree with most others in here, they ran roughshod over major character traits and plot points for no discernable reason. Wasted an episode of the first season on some random Warder.
That said, the biggest crime was the 8 or 9 out of 10 emotion and yelling in basically every scene. Wheel of Time can definitely drag on, so maybe they were trying to spice things up? Idk, it was weird.
At least this Rand fucks, though.
I mean, Rand was running a harem for half of the series
I hated it from the first episode.
They had amazing material to work with, all they had to do was adapt it to TV.
A group of amateurs made an awesome Wheel Of Time episode with a budget of about $5 and an afternoon of shooting. Amazon should have just given them the money to do it.
Fuck’s sake, it had just started to properly settle down and get good
It legit was getting good. The first season was rough. I loved the books so I’ll watch it. Later episodes were getting better.
Great job!!
Now do it for Rings of Power.
So will Prime use this freed up budget to fund some decent programming, or will they just throw it at another Bezos money pit project like the Lord of The Rings tv show?
I have a sneaking suspicion amazon picked up wheel of time because they wanted fill a high fantasy slot in the portfolio. Now they have rings of power with a stronger backing IP, typical executive brain will put focus there instead.
Murderbot
It’s not … A great show?
But it’s fucking cheap (small cast, limited sets so far), and it’s trying to be charming.
It’s the streaming equivalent of comfort food.
We need more content like this to keep streams full, then we have a few prestige shows like andor or whatever.
What we have now is crap writing burning prestige money (twot/LOTR-trop) and leaving us with unwatchable crap.
It could be better. I read the books and they’re rushing through the story at 90 miles an hour. They’re also overdoing the voiceovers and on screen displays to the point of annoyance. The “rise and fall of sanctuary moon” inserts are a hoot though.
That’s an apple show what does any of this have to do with anything
Naw, it will be another Meliana Trump documentary
Meh
They screwed it up completely within the first 5 minutes of the first episode so not a big deal for anyone who’s actually read the books.
I have read the books several times and mostly enjoyed the adaptation tbh. Literature and film are not the same. Stylistic choices which work in one don't work in the other.
This was my reaction, exactly. 10 minutes in and I’m screaming “WTF?!”
Even people who hadn’t read the books, realized how rushed things were in some cases, and then dragged out filler in others.
It was obvious they had the same issue as several other recent adaptations: The showrunner wants to make original content and think it’s so good that people wont care that it differs from the source.
Yeah I watched the first two episodes of Foundation and immediately peaced out. And that one’s even more ridiculous because the foundation books are more of an outline than an actual fleshed out story. So really, all they had to do was fill in the blanks. And they still fucked it up beyond all recognition. I’m sure it was probably enjoyable to somebody who’s never read even one of the Foundation books. But for somebody who’s read the entire series it was an insult.
This is why you wait to see if the series is going to get an ending before starting it.
Everybody waits to see if it gets an ending…nobody watches…cancelled after first series.
I saw the first season, it got more than it deserved.
They took forever to build out the characters and the story. Good production for a series, but had the worst pacing. Sadly, their build up now leaves you hanging. I am not sure why Amazon is cancelling their series, without proper finales. I am guessing this has to do with overspending on Bond.
Similar to Netflix’s approach, they most likely found that viewership drops sharply after the first 2 or 3 seasons, so more money to be made elsewhere.
But similar to Netflix, they’ll find that people aren’t willing to give things a chance and will associate all your original productions with crap, if you keep doing it.
I could never get past Loial not having expressive ears. Like 90% of Ogier emotion is described by the positioning or movement of their long ass ears
Or the fact people from Two Rivers are often identified by their physical look and way they speak, but the TV series starts out with every person from their tiny isolated village being ethnically diverse.
Red Rivers peeps are darker skinned than your typical “white.” Rand is specifically noted for being much fairer than normal, even with a farmer tan.
It’s why they stand out from the pseudo-English that surround them.
Why would you assume otherwise and then get mad about it?
If there’s an ethnicity they would resemble, it’s certainly not “Anglo.” Even an ambiguous “Mediterranean” doesn’t explain why Rand’s tan wouldn’t let him blend in.
As someone who never read the books, I found the TV show cluttered. Part of that was watching it non-binge style I’m sure.
Should I give this another try? Even though there won’t be an “ending…”
I only watched the first season (big fan of the books as a kid). Imo, it is not worth your time. They took out what makes WoT special and produced some extremely generic, bland fantasy.
Not nearly enough tugging of braids :d
The show has a completely different tone and pacing from the books. The books are much closer to LotR (particularly the first one which is basically just alt. Fellowship) and spend a lot of time with the characters traveling and getting to know each other and the lore of the world. There’s plenty of bickering, but the characters all like each other and get along decently. The show opted to cut most of the parts where you learn what’s going on to instead focus on manufactured drama.
They also just changed things in really confusing ways like making Mat’s parents deadbeats, among other things. Some of the plot restructuring makes sense given how much stuff there is to adapt. I don’t think anyone reasonable can expect any book adaptation to keep 100% faithful unless it’s getting crazy funding as a TV series. That said they just really took a knife to things.
Idk, as someone who loves the books despite their issues I wasn’t particularly enamoured with the show. Some people liked it though.
If the world seemed interesting I’d recommend the audiobooks. Love Michael Kramer and Kate Reading.
Making Mat’s parents deadbeats was just crazy to me.
As someone who read the books, the highlight of the show is S3E4 where they (more or less) faithfully recreated one of the best sequences in fantasy on screen, and it was incredible.
Everything around it was soap opera romantasy. 90% of the characters had any meaningful personalities sanded off, entire arcs from the plot were tossed out the window in favor of glorified fan fiction, and as you noted the final product was just a mess in terms of trying to follow along even for people who didn’t care about faithfulness of the adaptation. I won’t mourn it being gone; maybe we’ll get a decent animated adaptation in 10 years.
Yeah I started it a couple times but kept losing track of the goal/stakes in the story. Really wanted to like it.
Fuck.
After 3 seasons they have to give people a pay bump so I’m mot surprised
On the bright side at least we know how to pronounce Egwene
The back of the books spell out words and names phonetically. I mostly ignored 'em, too.
Hopefully another company will step in.
Didn’t read the books but found it an ok watch which was obv not enough for a marquee show.
Whelp, at least I can finally cancel my prime subscription.
A long time I tried to read the books; the first ne was great, and probably also the second and third, but after a while it got extremely drawn out and the books just kept getting longer and longer. I had hoped the TV show could mitigatre that and reduce itself to what is no doubt an intriguing story. How were the first two seasons?
Each book seemed longer and longer but each book took place over fewer and fewer days until it seemed like the last books you’d read a whole book about someone’s day. Then someone’s meal, then someone’s thought about a hill the looked at on the horizon.
I know this is absolutely insane to say when we’re talking about books that are 1,000 pages long, but book 6 is where the series really becomes levels up into something incredible. I enjoyed it a lot before then, but if you can get that far, it’s just amazing.
Conversely, that’s about where The Slog begins. All the Tower/Salidar ark feels like social studies in hell. Well, to me, at least.
Dragomus@lemmy.world 3 hours ago
Frankly, I am bummed by this news.
I read the books, but seeing how it was a decade+ ago since I last went through some of them, most of it is a blur and I can forgive some of the changes in favor of smoother storytelling.
While the show brought familiarity back, and season 1 was painfully bad in almost all ways, from adapting/changing characters to lore. The show was leaps better in S2 and with S3 each episode felt very cinematic and now told a more cohesive story.
So, even though it was adapted, I was looking out for each new episode and had high spirits for a good S4.
Alas, if it is not picked up by any other studio, the “unfilmable book series” will remain that way, no one will burn their hands on it again. So, those cheering its demise, take that in consideration.
In closing, Prime definitely did not do it full justice at the starting line and it was expensive to catch up to that fact …
But the show was treated and produced better than Rings of Power, which does get another stay and money pumped into it, a choice I rather saw turned around.
socsa@piefed.social 44 minutes ago
Same. I am actually kind of pissed about how much neckbeardery there was around this online because the last season was legitimately getting good and I was excited to see it through, but all of the "um akshually the dagger was crimson" shit probably killed the show.
LadyButterfly@lazysoci.al 1 hour ago
Yep I couldn’t get through the first 2 episodes of season 1. On paper it should have been great! I skip ahead to 2 and 3 thanks 😊