Amazon

Late on Friday, Amazon announced that it was canceling its TV adaptation of Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series, after several uncomfortable weeks of silence that followed the show’s third season finale.

Fans of the series can take some cold comfort in the fact that it apparently wasn’t an easy decision to make. But as we speculated in our write-up of what ended up being the show’s series finale, an expensive show with a huge cast, tons of complicated costuming and effects, and extensive location shooting only makes mathematical sense if it’s a megahit, and The Wheel of Time was never a megahit.

Adapting the unadaptable

I was sad about the cancellation announcement because I believe this season was the one where the show found its footing, both as an adaptation of a complex book series and as a fun TV show in its own right. But I wasn’t surprised by it. The only thing I found surprising was that it took this long to happen.

Two things conspired to make it impossible for this Wheel of Time show to ever reach the Last Battle. One has to do with the source material itself; the other has to do with the way the TV business has changed since Game of Thrones premiered in 2011.

The Wheel of Time actively resists adaptation. It’s a sprawling 14-book series spanning dozens of named point-of-view characters and impossibly dense politics. And it even spans multiple eras stylistically—the early books were more Tolkien-esque in their focus on small bands of adventurers and a limited number of perspectives, where later books could go for multiple chapters without putting you in the head of one of the series’ half-dozen-ish main protagonists. And even among the series’ die-hard fans, most will admit that there are storylines, characters, or entire books that feel inessential or annoying or repetitive or sloggy or wheel-spinning.

Any adaptation would need to find a way to stay true to the story that the books were telling, and to marry the tone and pacing of the early, middle, and late-series books, while wrestling with the realities of a different medium (in particular, you cannot realistically pay for infinite episodes or pay infinite cast members, especially for a live-action show).

That high degree of difficulty was surely one reason why it took someone so long to decide to tackle The Wheel of Time, even in the post-Peter Jackson, post-Harry Potter, post-Marvel Cinematic Universe, post-Game of Thrones creative landscape where nerd-coded sci-fi and fantasy were suddenly cool, where multi-part book adaptations were drawing dollars and eyeballs, and where convoluted interconnected stories could be billion-dollar businesses. The only stab anyone took at an adaptation before Amazon happened a full decade ago, when a fly-by-night production company aired a hastily shot adaptation of the first book’s prologue in an apparent attempt to keep the TV rights from expiring.

It’s also what makes the cancellation news so much more frustrating—over three seasons, showrunner Rafe Judkins and the cast and crew of the show became adept at adapting the unadaptable. Yes, the story and the characters had changed in a lot of major ways. Yes, the short eight-episode seasons made for frenetic pacing and overstuffed episodes. But if you grit your teeth a bit and push through the show’s mess of a first season, you hit a series that seemed to know what must-hit scenes needed to be shown; which parts of the books were skippable or could be combined with other moments; which parts of later books to pull forward to streamline the story without making those moments feel rushed or unearned. It was imperfect, but it was a true adaptation—a reworking of a story for a much different medium that seemed to know how to keep the essence of the story intact.

Ambition meets reality

The thing that doomed this particular Wheel of Time production from the start was the sky-high expectations that Amazon had for it. Both Wheel of Time and the heartbreakingly bland Rings of Power were born of Jeff Bezos’ desire to find his own Game of Thrones, which became an unexpected smash-hit success that dominated the cultural conversation through the 2010s. Most TV shows either launch strongly before slowly fading, or they build an audience over a few seasons and then fade after reaching their peak. Game of Thrones defied these trends, and each new season drew a larger and larger viewership even as the show’s quality (arguably) dipped over time.

Asking Wheel of Time to replicate that success would be a tall order for any television show in any era—pop culture is littered with shows that have tried and failed to clone another network’s successful formula. But it’s an especially difficult hurdle to clear in the fractured 2020s TV landscape.

Streaming TV’s blank check era—which ran roughly from Netflix’s introduction of its first original shows in 2013 to 2022, when Netflix reported its first big dip in subscribers just as a long era of low-interest lending was coming to an end—used to give shows a ton of runway and plenty of seasons to tell their stories. Shows like Orange is the New Black or BoJack Horseman that found some modicum of critical acclaim and ratings success tended to get renewed multiple times, and six or seven-season runs were common.

A commitment to reviving old critically beloved bubble shows like Arrested Development, Community, Futurama, and Gilmore Girls also sent a message: Freed from the restrictive economics of the Old TV Model and fueled by the promise of infinite growth, we can make whatever TV we want!

Those days are mostly gone now (except perhaps at Apple TV+, which continues to leverage its parent company’s deep pockets to throw gobs of money at any actor or IP with a moderately recognizable name). In the two years since TV streamers began cutting back in earnest, industry analysts have observed a consistent trend toward shorter seasons of fewer episodes and fewer renewals for existing shows.

Those trends hit at the exact wrong moment for The Wheel of Time, which was constantly straining against the bonds of its eight-episode seasons. It’s impossible to say empirically whether longer seasons would have made for a better show, and whether that “better show” could have achieved the kind of word-of-mouth success it would have needed to meet Amazon’s expectations. But speaking anecdotally as someone who was just beginning to recommend the show to people who weren’t hardcore book readers, the density and pacing were two major barriers to entry. And even the most truncated possible version of the story would have needed at least six or seven seasons to wrap up in anything resembling a satisfactory way, based on the pace that was set in the first three seasons.

The end of Time

Tellingly, the Wheel of Time‘s creative team hasn’t released faux-optimistic boilerplate statements about trying to shop the show to other networks, the kind of statements you sometimes see after a show is canceled before its creators are done with it. The same economics that made Amazon drop the show also make it nearly impossible to sell to anyone else.

And so The Wheel of Time joins TV’s long list of unfinished stories. There are neither beginnings nor endings to the turning of the Wheel of Time. But this is an ending.