The Wheel of Time should’ve gotten The Rings of Power’s huge budget

The war to become the next Game of Thrones-sized fantasy hit has been raging for a few years now, with many contenders vying for the throne. Some have already fallen away into obscurity, others remain on the rise. Two of the most ambitious shows in the mix come courtesy of Amazon’s streaming service Prime Video: The Wheel of Time, based on the epic fantasy saga by Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson; and The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, a prequel to The Lord of the Rings trilogy based on the appendices to J.R.R. Tolkien’s beloved novels.

While both of these shows are among the most expensive that Amazon has ever made, they are not created equal. Season 1 of The Wheel of Time was made for a reported $80 million. Meanwhile, the first season of The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power has been reported to have had a budget of nearly half a billion dollars, including the money it cost to acquire the rights from the Tolkien Estate. It is easily the most expensive TV show ever made.

You can see that budget on screen: The Rings of Power is visually stunning, with an incredible attention to detail in its sets and special effects. However, now that the first season of both shows are behind us, I’m going to adopt what may be a controversial stance: Amazon would have been much better off sinking that billion dollar budget into The Wheel of Time instead of The Rings of Power.

The Wheel of Time vs. The Rings of Power: let’s talk writing

Let’s get a disclaimer out of the way off the top, because both The Wheel of Time and The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power have some particularly vehement sections of their fandoms that like to rag on these shows based on bad faith arguments. I think both do things well and have areas where they could improve. What I’m here to argue today is that, on balance, The Wheel of Time has more going for it, and Amazon would have been better off unloading its spaceships full of money on that production instead of The Rings of Power, or at the very least distributing resources more evenly between them.

I think it’s fair to say that both The Rings of Power and The Wheel of Time had solid production values in their first seasons. Obviously, The Rings of Power holds the advantage here. But I’d argue that The Wheel of Time is a stronger show overall. To delve into why, we have to look past the visuals, because as important and impressive as special effects can be, most shows live or die by the quality of their storytelling. Can they get us invested in the characters, in the twists and turns of the tale?

For my money, The Wheel of Time stands head and shoulders above The Rings of Power in this regard; in fact, I’d say that writing is The Rings of Power’s single biggest weakness, which is a dangerous fatal flaw for a show to have. It looks gorgeous, has solid actors and a beautiful musical score. But its first season has consistently felt like it was moving down a list of bulleted plot points, rather than diving deep into its characters and getting viewers invested the way great shows do. A lot of that is personal preference, but I think that objectively, if you look at the way The Rings of Power navigated its storylines, it often did it in ways that weren’t especially compelling. The show strung viewers along on a few of the same mysterious plot points — who is the Stranger, who is Sauron, will mithril help the elves — instead of introducing new mysteries to keep viewers guessing and making each episode impactful on its own.

No doubt this is partly because The Rings of Power is not adapting an actual story in the traditional sense, but instead is drawn from appendices to The Lord of the Rings. This was always going to be an adaptation that took huge liberties. For instance, the show decided to compress the millennia long timeline from the appendices into a relatively short period of time. The Rings of Power had an uphill battle in turning what is basically a literal list of bullet points into a compelling story. When you add in the lackluster writing (note, not dialogue, though I do have issues with that as well; we’re talking conceptual level writing here), it becomes an even larger problem.

For all its highs and lows, by the end of the season The Rings of Power didn’t seem to have learned any lessons. The issues of plot and pacing persisted right down to the last, with a handful of highlights like the relationship between Elrond and Durin or the Episode 6 battle for the Southlands.

The Wheel of Time 

By contrast, The Wheel of Time did a much more solid job with its writing, both in terms of crafting compelling characters and navigating its story in a way that was never anything less than interesting. Despite criticisms, I was never bored by The Wheel of Time the way I was for large stretches of The Rings of Power. It never felt like things were being pushed along simply for the sake of getting from point A to B, or that characters were acting in illogical ways because the plot demanded it.

Part of that may come down to the skill of the writers themselves, but there’s also a question of source material. Unlike The Rings of Power, which is drawn from supplementary material at the end of The Lord of the Rings, The Wheel of Time is based on a series of novels, and incredibly detailed ones at that. A lot of the heavy lifting for who these characters are and what makes them tick is already laid out. The creative team doesn’t need to guess about how Rand al’Thor or Nynaeve al’Meara might act because we have 14 long tomes to draw from.

The plot is laid out very clearly as well. While The Rings of Power is facing the question of how to stretch out slimmer source material (Tolkien wrote relatively little about the Second Age as compared to the First or Third), The Wheel of Time has the opposite problem. There is simply no way to fit everything from all 14 books plus the New Spring prequel into the show, and because of that it has to make difficult choices in how to streamline events. The jury is very much out on how effective it will be overall, but from the first season of these respective shows, I think it’s safe to say that The Wheel of Time is having more luck. There were cuts, but the overall arc of the season still had much more dramatic tension and coherence than The Rings of Power.

I think there’s also a very clear case to be made for The Wheel of Time improving as a production over the course of its first season…to a point. By Episode 6, the show was so strong that it had moved me to tears multiple times, and felt like it was really hitting its stride. Then the pandemic happened, which threw a wrench into the final two episodes. Main cast member Barney Harris (Mat Cauthon) left for undisclosed reasons in the middle of production and pretty much all of the climactic action set pieces had to be reworked due to health concerns. More than three years after the COVID-19 pandemic began, it’s hard to think of a show in the fantasy or sci-fi space that was screwed over quite as badly as The Wheel of Time.

Yet despite that, it still managed a decent first season. Both shows had failures and successes, but I think The Wheel of Time had a stronger set of legs to stand on overall. Considering how many advantages The Rings of Power had compared to The Wheel of Time, that speaks volumes.

But beyond the quality of the productions themselves, I think there are also some good arguments to be made that The Wheel of Time not only needs the resources more, but that it would be a better bet for Amazon.