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.
In the land of Mordor, where (J.R.R. Tolkien’s) shadows lie
Following the massive success of HBO’s Game of Thrones, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos made no secret of the fact that he was eager to find the next big fantasy show. He wasn’t alone in this; many studios have tried to capitalize on the recent genre television boom. But Amazon’s case is interesting because The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power and The Wheel of Time represent two opposite approaches to this quest.
The Rings of Power has the enormous advantage of being set in a well-established and widely beloved fantasy world. Tolkien was the grandfather of the genre, and his work has influenced just about everything that has come after to some extent. It’s easy to imagine the board room conversations: “What’s bigger than Game of Thrones? The Lord of the Rings! Let’s make that one!”
If we try to think about this like an Amazon executive, something set in The Lord of the Rings universe would surely seem like the safer bet over a show based on a series of books that, while popular, have never been tested onscreen. There’s already a proven market for The Lord of the Rings in film, with millions upon millions of fans around the globe who love the movies created by Peter Jackson. It’s an enormous risk to invest nearly a billion dollars in any series, but doing it for a show like The Rings of Power would seem to guarantee more of a return on investment. More people would show up for your premiere, anyway.
On the other hand, The Rings of Power will forever be living in the shadow of The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit. Yes, it can be its own great thing, but the comparison is there and easy to make. Creating a successful spinoff or prequel series is challenging because finding a way to step out from the shadow of a hugely successful thing that came before is hard. HBO’s Game of Thrones spinoff House of the Dragon has done it by leaning into its own strengths, as well emphasizing both its similarities and differences from the mothership series, such as its ambitious time jumps.
The Rings of Power, by contrast, is trying to tell a story that feels similar enough to The Lord of the Rings to captivate fans of Middle-earth without straying too far afield of what came before. It hasn’t truly distinguished itself in terms of tone, storytelling, or style. The Lord of the Rings remains a cultural touchstone for fantasy series. The Hobbit movies were divisive, but the story itself is still massively influential. Expecting The Rings of Power to become the next television fantasy phenomenon is like hoping lightning will strike not twice, but three times in the same place.
The Wheel of Time is Amazon’s most important fantasy show
On the flip side, we have The Wheel of Time. The books have their own legions of fans, and while they don’t number as many as Tolkien’s they’re still formidable. It’s a series that has never been adapted to film before (no, I don’t count The Winter Dragon), which means there is no shadow for it to step out from. Yes, it will be compared to other fantasy shows, but it won’t be competing against itself.
There’s an adage that I think is relevant here, which is that writers have “one great story to tell.” I don’t one hundred percent buy into this; there are plenty of writers telling lots of great stories over the course of their career, but in the context of enormous fantasy series, it’s worth examining. When someone like J.R.R. Tolkien spends decades of his life fleshing out Middle-earth, it’s not much of a stretch to say that that is the great story of his lifetime. And the part of his legendarium he felt like writing the least about is the Second Age, which is what Amazon is attempting to make a mega-hit.
But The Wheel of Time is another author’s “great story.” Robert Jordan spent a huge part of his life working on the series. It’s one of a handful of fantasy book series that stands in the same legendary pantheon as A Song of Ice and Fire and The Lord of the Rings, Anne McCaffrey’s Dragonriders of Pern, Steven Erikson’s Malazan Book of the Fallen, and Ursula K. LeGuin’s Earthsea. While The Rings of Power represents Amazon trying to tap into a franchise they know works on film, The Wheel of Time is a true gamble. There are so many ways it could go wrong, but if the streamer manages to pull off the entire tale successfully, it stands to have far more of an impact than another Lord of the Rings story.
Instead of asking lightning to strike in the same place over and over, The Wheel of Time represents a whole new lightning rod. It might make less sense in a board room, but it makes more from a storytelling perspective.
The Wheel of Time needs more resources to reach its full potential
There’s one last reason Amazon should be investing more in The Wheel of Time over The Rings of Power, and that’s that The Wheel of Time actually needs the resources more. Wheel of Time showrunner Rafe Judkins asked Amazon for 10-episode seasons and was turned down, and while some of the show’s set pieces haven’t quite knocked it out of the park, others have been excellent. The show’s visuals aren’t as even as those on The Rings of Power, and I would bet that at least some of that comes down to budget. The Wheel of Time has the potential to become even better if Amazon puts more money into it.
The Rings of Power, by contrast, has reached a point where I think the diminishing returns of its nigh-infinite budget are becoming apparent. It is gorgeous to behold…but all that money isn’t making the story any better. It’s fascinating, because in so many ways the presentation of The Rings of Power is flawless, but in others it’s falling short. What The Rings of Power needs is not more money, but more creative solutions. There are other shows out there that are just as beautiful as The Rings of Power: Hulu’s The Orville: New Horizons, House of the Dragon, and Netflix’s The Witcher and season 4 of Stranger Things are all comparable. Yet those shows were made on a fraction of the budget of The Rings of Power, and still succeeded.
The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power is proving that tons of money alone does not a great show make. But if you have tons of money, you might as well put it into a show with the potential to give you the most bang for your buck. The great irony is that in its search for the “next Game of Thrones,” Amazon may be overlooking the very clear contender already in its stable.
To stay up to date on everything fantasy, science fiction, and WiC, follow our all-encompassing Facebook page and sign up for our exclusive newsletter.
Get HBO, Starz, Showtime and MORE for FREE with a no-risk, 7-day free trial of Amazon Channels