The Wheel of Time showrunner explains book-to-show changes

The Wheel of Time is here! And the discourse is feverish. Is the show a Game of Thrones ripoff? Why were so many things changed from the books by Robert Jordan? Can showrunner Rafe Judkins and his team really adapt all 14 novels in this series?

Judkins is very much feeling the pressure of doing right by a book series he grew up loving, and a series beloved by millions of people around the world. “I feel a special burden laying me down, crushing me, of just wanting to deliver for this thing that I love, and my mom loves, and so many of the women in my family love,” he told Polygon. “I just want so much for the show to deliver for the people who really love it the thing that they love, while at the same time truly creating something that can translate to television. It’s built as a book series, I have to build this as a TV show. I hope that the changes that I’ve made and the changes we’ve had to make to do that still give the heart of it that people can fall in love with.”

One of those changes involves aging the lead characters — Rand al’Thor, Egwene al’Vere, Mat Cauthon, etc — up a bit. “In the books they’re all around 17 or 18, and we really felt that it was important to make them feel more like they were 20-21 — and to do that and have it feel authentic we also had to have those characters have a further emotional life that they’ve been leading,” Judkins said. “We felt like it was important to try to find a way to put some of these more adult concepts and relationships into their lives. So when the show starts it doesn’t feel like Moiraine [Sedai, played by Rosamund Pike] walking into the Two Rivers is the first day of everyone’s life. It should feel, hopefully, like they’ve all led complex, emotional lives and now they’re being swept off on this whole journey together.”

Now that the show is out, fans can judge for themselves whether these changes were well-reasoned. And speaking of Moiraine, the show puts more of the story on her shoulders, taking Jordan’s choice to center female characters in his original series — something that wasn’t often done in fantasy books of the time — and going further with it. Because while Jordan was an innovator back then, a lot of The Wheel of Time’s gender politics feels outdated now, what with the constant focus on how men and women are irreconcilably different. The Wheel of Time TV show is more up to the minute.

“This is a world of balance and the world of yin and yang and the strength you always have to have. In the first episodes, you already see some of the stuff we’ve done with gender,” Judkins said. “As the show continues on, too, we’re always trying to keep that conversation alive and make sure that we’re still doing the thing that he was trying to do in the ‘90s but doing it today.”

The Wheel of Time showrunner fields Game of Thrones, The Lord of the Rings comparisons

Another point of contention is how (or whether) The Wheel of Time has been influenced by Game of Thrones. Jordan’s books started coming out before George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire, but the Game of Thrones TV show came out before this, so the question inevitably comes up.

“Wheel of Time in the literary world really sits as kind of the pillar between Lord of the Rings and Game of Thrones,” Judkins said, proving his fantasy cred. “But [the show is] coming out after both of them. So, we have to be mindful of that I think, too. There are things that Wheel of Time created that Game of Thrones did their riff on, and it’ll feel like we’re being repetitive when it was actually in Wheel of Time first.”

"A lot of people are picking up a fantasy series today […] it’s not like if you didn’t read it in the ’90s, you’ll never read it. Or if you didn’t start Game of Thrones at the beginning that you’re not going to pick it up. People are picking up Lord of the Rings today and reading it. I try to be really true to what the Wheel of Time books are, and what makes them great."

And yet, there are some things in The Wheel of Time show that feel like they were inspired mainly by Game of Thrones rather than Jordan’s books. There’s some unexpected nudity in the first episode, for instance, which Judkins writes off as a “sometimes” thing. “There’s way more nudity in Witcher or Game of Thrones, but that’s not really true to The Wheel of Time series, and we don’t need it to tell the stories that we have with the characters that we have,” he said. “It’s an adult world. So, you still see stuff sometimes, but we’re never really super graphic with that kind of stuff.”

The first three episodes of The Wheel of Time are available to watch on Amazon Prime Video now.

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