Last Thursday, The Wheel of Time aired its season 3 finale, "He Who Comes With the Dawn." From Rand proving he is the Car'a'carn to a terrific magic battle between Moiraine and Lanfear to several unexpected changes from the books, it was a hell of a finale.
It also feels like it came a bit too soon. The third season of The Wheel of Time started airing on March 13, when the first three episodes dropped all at once on Prime Video. That means the whole thing lasted for just over a month. I know some fans would have preferred all the episodes drop at once so they could binge it. I think that works for some shows, but when the episodes are as big and meaty as these, I like having some space to digest. I can't imagine watching something like "The Road to the Spear," which is full of dense flashbacks and visions, and immediately moving onto the next episode. I want to sit with it and think about it. And I think I'd want that if I were an executive at Amazon: I'd want people to have a minute to talk and get excited and discuss theories. I'd want the show to develop momentum and word of mouth. That's harder to do when everything is over hours after it starts.
I'd be more willing to roll with this if we had more episodes each season. Although each episode of The Wheel of Time is pretty substantial, having only eight per season seems limiting when the show has to adapt a massive, 14-book epic fantasy series. Even showrunner Rafe Judkins seems to agree with this, although he'll only hint at that obliquely. "We are always playing a little bit with audience expectations. You have to, especially when you only have eight episodes," he told The Hollywood Reporter, emphasis mine.
I know The Wheel of Time is a complicated show to make and that Amazon has to think about how much content it's reasonable to produce for what it's spending. Still, I feel like there was a time not that long ago when a show like The Wheel of Time would have gotten at least 10 episodes per season. Game of Thrones, the show largely responsible for the current fantasy TV renaissance, had 10 episodes per season for most of its run. The first season of HBO's Game of Thrones prequel series House of the Dragon also had 10 episodes and was widely enjoyed...and then the second was cut down to eight, and it suffered.
With some exceptions, studios and streamers seem to have agreed that eight is the right amount of episodes for a big expensive genre series. At Prime Video, it feels like a sacred dogma. Reacher, the most popular show on Prime Video, has eight episodes per season. The Boys, a hugely successful superhero series, has eight episodes per season. The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, the most expensive series in the history of TV? Eight episodes per season. House of David, the streamer's new biblical hit? Eight episodes. I think they have "eight episodes per season" adorned on the walls over there.
Some of these big epic shows could definitely benefit from more space to sprawl out, although I recognize that the extra time in production might increase the already agonizingly long wait times between seasons; a wait of two years has become the norm. With waits that long, I'd want to make the season I have last as long as possible.
But maybe there's a way to work smarter. Maybe instead of having multiple huge action scenes each season, one could be left offscreen. Maybe there could be increased focus on character work, which wouldn't require anything more than actors acting. Maybe studios could renew successful shows early so the producers could get cracking on new seasons as soon as possible.
On that note, Amazon and Sony still haven't announced whether they're renewing The Wheel of Time for more seasons, which will only make all the problems I've outlined in this post worse. Maybe we can start simple: renew The Wheel of Time, Amazon and Sony, and then get to work on this other stuff.
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