The Wheel of Time S1 is a Mess
I wont go too deep into this seeing as though I cover the majority of the review in my video below.
The Wheel of Time is a rushed mess of a show that was released to try and fill the high fantasy void left in the wake of Game of Thrones. The characters are lacking any form of development, the plot as paper thin, the set pieces are lame, the action is downgraded by poor CGI and several books filled with world building lore are skimmed right through to. It feels like Amazon just wanted to take the name of another incredibly successful book franchise and just throw a low budget at it hoping to make it stick with audiences. This could 100% have been achieved if they put any care into creating characters in a world that anybody gave a shit about.
Characters are so underdeveloped you never know how they actually engage with one another or how their relationships play out. They add in quick cliché backgrounds, like Matt being poor, and expect that to be enough to make viewers care about the character. They give no time to let them grow or establish themselves as individuals let alone the numerous amount of time the cast are supposed to split off into groups to develop in tandem with each other. Alongside the practically nonexistent character development, the world and lore building was clearly low on the priority list as well. You learn nothing of the Two Rivers or any other location they travel, minus the White Tower. The acting is serviceable with stand outs being Moraine and Rand, but again, it’s just so hard to give a shit about any of them with sub par writing and no attachments being made.
The Wheel of Time is a 15 book long franchise that requires a hefty time investment to be made for those wanting to explore the rich world Robert Jordan has created. Not just cutting corners, but cutting entire books in half to jam a plot on 3x speed into a show just isn’t going to cut it. Too much necessary information has been removed from the source material to just throw a show together and it will likely end up resulting in a severe decrease in viewership. Amazon needs to make the season several episodes longer and dedicate way more time to world and character building, otherwise, The Wheel of Time will face plant like so many other TV book adaptations have in the past.
