Right now, Prime Video is airing the third season of The Wheel of Time, its sprawling fantasy series based on the beloved book series by Robert Jordan. While the show had some ups and downs throughout its first two seasons, largely due to the COVID pandemic and the unexpected recast of a central character which resulted in a "complete rewrite" of the story, the third season seems to be going over exceptionally well. Even critics who didn't enjoy the first two seasons are getting on board; as of this writing, The Wheel of Time season 3 holds a 94% critic rating on Rotten Tomatoes, the show's highest yet.
All this is to say, The Wheel of Time is gaining steam and shows no sign of slowing down. This is good news for Amazon, which has long desired its own massive mainstream fantasy hit.
Back in 2017, Variety reported that Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos had issued a mandate to the then-struggling original TV arm of his company: bring him the next Game of Thrones. This was late in Thrones' run when it was at the height of its popularity, and while it would be a few years before streaming services hopped on the fantasy television bandwagon, the seeds of that movement were already taking root.
“I do think Game of Thrones is to TV as Jaws and Star Wars was to the movies of the 1970s,” former Amazon Studios chief Roy Price said at the time. “It’ll inspire a lot of people. Everybody wants a big hit and certainly that’s the show of the moment in terms of being a model for a hit.”
Price wasn't talking explicitly about fantasy, but it's clear that that's what a lot of streamers were thinking. We got shows like The Witcher and Shadow and Bone on Netflix, HBO's own Game of Thrones spinoff House of the Dragon, and Amazon's two big contenders: The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power and The Wheel of Time. There were many others to be sure, but most went the way of Ned Stark and faced the axe after only a season or two.
It's no secret that the fantasy show Amazon bet the most on is The Rings of Power. It currently stands as the most expensive TV series ever produced, with the studio committing nearly half a billion dollars just to secure the rights and produce the first season. The Rings of Power is planned to run for five seasons total. Since it has the name recognition of the most well known modern fantasy story of all time attached to it, it makes sense that Amazon remains committed to making it its flagship fantasy series, even if viewership was reportedly down a sobering 60% in its second season.
I've talked before about why I think Amazon should be betting on The Wheel of Time instead. It boils down to the fact that these are both massively popular fantasy series, but The Lord of the Rings has already been done in Peter Jackson's films. The Second Age story that The Rings of Power is adapting is C-tier lore from Tolkien's mythos, which Tolkien himself spent relatively little time on compared to the First or Third Ages. By contrast, The Wheel of Time is Robert Jordan's opus, and has the advantage of being a fresh series that can give viewers something new while still building on one of the largest existing fanbases in fantasy.
The Wheel of Time is only going to keep getting better
Now that The Wheel of Time is into its third season, I think something else is becoming clear: this show is catching on in a big way. No, it's not at Game of Thrones-levels of popularity, but it's been on the rise from its divisive first season to now, where it's on its way to becoming the premiere fantasy show on TV. Yes, House of the Dragon remains excellent even if season 2 had some issues, but The Wheel of Time has a broader scope in the same way that Game of Thrones had a broad scope. House of the Dragon is a Shakespearean tragedy; The Wheel of Time will fill viewers with wonder and awe as well as joy and sorrow for the characters and their stories. These are simply different types of tales.
This becomes clear when you look at the sprawling cast for the series. When putting together a character guide for season 3, I was shocked at the amount of main characters who are now in the series — and that's not even getting into its vast supporting cast. It's far closer to Thrones in that way than any other show we've had recently, even House of the Dragon. Throw in the fact that The Wheel of Time is a much more naturally diverse show than any other fantasy series on the air, with characters of all sorts of ages and backgrounds, and I think it has the potential to speak to a much wider audience.
Then there's the point we're at in Robert Jordan's books. The Wheel of Time hasn't always been strictly faithful to the source material, but it's clear that it's doing its best to pull as much of Jordan's world into the series as possible. Season 3 adapts The Shadow Rising and adapts it well. The next two books, The Fires of Heaven and Lord of Chaos, are among the strongest in the entire saga. The Wheel of Time could have a run of three exceptional seasons ahead, which would help propel it farther into the cultural zeitgeist.
There's also an X factor that I struggle to define. The short version is that when you've been covering shows as long as we have here at the site, you sometimes get a feeling for when a series is firing on all cylinders. The production design is top tier, the costumes are inventive and striking, the actors feel utterly perfect and comfortable in their roles, the action is consistently thrilling, the writing reaches a new peak, the visual language is strong...there are any number of indicators. I'm seeing enough of those indicators in The Wheel of Time right now to make me think that if the show goes on, it has the potential to really explode in popularity. It reminds me of Stranger Things — the only recent genre show to become a cultural phenomenon in a similar (if smaller) way as Thrones. That show is both a massive success as well as a massive passion project for the people working on it. The Wheel of Time is exuding a similar air, and with season 3 it has reached new heights that only stand to be eclipsed again and again if the series goes on.
The Wheel of Time needs and deserves more episodes per season
However, there are a few substantial barriers to The Wheel of Time's success, and from where I'm sitting they have very little to do with the show itself. I've seen all of season 3, and one of the few real criticisms I would level at it is that each of its eight episodes is packed with so many story beats and developments that at times it felt like the show needed a little more space to let things breathe. In our current age of genre TV, eight-episode seasons are all the rage. And I get it; producing these big flashy shows is expensive for studios, and not every show needs the extra episodes. The Witcher, for example, is not a series I think necessarily needs more episodes. Andrzej Sapkowski's books are often on the shorter side, and so far at least, having too few episodes has never been a problem for The Witcher from an adaptation perspective.
The Wheel of Time however, is the perfect example of a show that needs at least 10 episodes a season to reach its maximum potential. The series is already doing one of the most mindbogglingly complex adaptations on television by condensing Robert Jordan's 15 door-stopping fantasy books into a proposed "50 or 60 hours" of television. It's true that The Wheel of Time books have some repetition and plenty of stretches that are ripe for reworking, but that's still a tall order. Add in a reduced episode count, and it's even harder to keep it all coherent.
This is not just speculation on my part. I spoke with The Wheel of Time showrunner Rafe Judkins ahead of season 3, and the reduced episode count is something he specifically mentioned as a reason the show has to be extra judicious about what it chooses to adapt or cut from the books:
"We have so much that we can't do because the books are so massive and you know, it's not even like Game of Thrones where you get 10 episodes a season, like we just have eight. So our timing is so limited, that I am always picking something of, 'does that help tell the emotional story that this character is on in this season and across the series as a whole?'"Rafe Judkins
The fact that The Wheel of Time pulls off season 3 as well as it does in eight episodes is a Herculean feat. But there is no doubt in my mind that this show would benefit from any extra time Amazon deigns to give it. And let's be real: no matter how big The Wheel of Time's budget is, we know that Amazon has the resources to give it more episodes. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos' net worth is over $211 billion as of this writing. He could basically fund those extra two episodes a season on the money he loses in his couch cushions, never mind the actual funding infrastructure at Prime Video.
Can Amazon recognize what it has with The Wheel of Time?
But really, the question of whether The Wheel of Time should get more episodes underscores a wider issue: Prime Video is only one small part of Amazon's corporate megastructure. Jeff Bezos' mandate for Amazon's internal studio to bring him the next Game of Thrones only means so much if the company itself isn't fully aligned behind it. Would Game of Thrones have become such a cultural phenomenon if HBO, a studio with a long history of supporting its shows, didn't recognize what it had and throw all its considerable weight behind it? I doubt it.
I think this is the place where Amazon's focus would make a difference in turning The Wheel of Time into a massive hit. The show itself is great, and only getting better. In terms of raw marketing, I think Amazon is doing an excellent job; this season especially, it feels like the team promoting the show is firing on all cylinders in much the same way as the production itself. But is it really in The Wheel of Time's best interest to drop three episodes — nearly half its season — all on premiere day? I've seen each of those episodes multiple times, and I'll tell you that I rarely watch them all in a row even though I love this show an inordinate amount. They are massive, excellent hours of television, and each could easily have tided over viewers for a week before the next.
At this point, this three-episode-premiere strategy seems fairly ingrained at Prime Video. I imagine it has to do with giving their internal numbers some kind of boost from these massive premiere days, or with driving more Prime memberships, rather than because it will especially help the individual show's longevity. In The Wheel of Time's case, it makes an already condensed telling of this story feel like it goes by even faster. We'll be at the halfway point in the season on only its second week airing, and the show will only air for five weeks total before we're into the wait between seasons. Compare that to the eight or 10 weeks that an HBO show might run, or the 10 weeks for Apple TV+'s Silo or Severance. It gives The Wheel of Time less weeks to linger in the public consciousness, compared to many of its competitors.
Another example: The Wheel of Time has not gotten a physical release, almost certainly because Amazon would rather keep it exclusively on Prime to drive memberships. That's fine for Prime, but there's no question that The Wheel of Time fans are the exact sort of obsessives who would turn out to buy physical releases in droves, and watch it with all their friends. That applies to all merchandise for the show, really. Why isn't there more of it? It smells like money left on the table to me, and less Wheel of Time show merch circulating in the world to help raise awareness for the series. More awareness for the series means more eyes on it, which means a higher profile for the show overall. I'm sure there are very complicated business reasons Amazon hasn't pulled the trigger on those things, but it's a stark contrast to the way HBO merchandised the hell out of Westeros to turn casual viewers into superfans whose homes were lined with so much memorabilia that it became free advertising for the Seven Kingdoms.
These are only a few specific examples, but the point is that The Wheel of Time is only one small cog in the lumbering machine that is Amazon's business interests. That's very different than Game of Thrones, which became the flagship series for a premium television studio which was owned by an even bigger media and entertainment company. Television was HBO's bread and butter, and its parent company Time Warner was largely aligned with that. Television is a side hustle for Amazon, and unless the corporation changes that approach, I worry it could result in an artificial ceiling limiting what The Wheel of Time can achieve.
Amazon wanted to be the next to sit the Iron Throne of fantasy television, and with The Wheel of Time, it finally has the show that could help it achieve that aim. The question now is whether Amazon has the foresight to understand what it truly takes to hold that coveted seat, and commit to it.
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