Why the Wheel of Time TV Series Could Be the Next Game of Thrones
Yesterday, Tor editor Harriet McDougal, widow of the late Robert Jordan, announced a television show based on the fantasy epic The Wheel of Time is moving forward with a new production company.
“Legal issues have been resolved. The Wheel of Time will become a cutting-edge TV series! I couldn’t be more pleased. Look for the official announcement coming soon from a major studio.”
This, a year after a strange adaptation of sorts aired on the FXX, an apparent rights grab by the company that held the rights. It’s welcome news: a proper Wheel of Time television show could be the next great fantasy television series, and a great successor to HBO’s Game of Thrones.
At 14-books, The Wheel of Time is one of the longest and most successful fantasy epics ever published. The first volume, The Eye of the World, introduces a whole host of main characters: Rand al’Thor, Mat Cauthon, Perrin Aybara, Egwene al’Vere, and Nynaeve al’Meara, a group of friends and allies who are drawn into world-changing events and a fight against an evil that threatens to overshadow the entire world. One of the three youths is the Dragon Reborn, a prophesied savior of legend; together, they take up a great task to counter the Dark One and save the world.
Jordan (who’s real name was James Oliver Rigney Jr.), originally planned out a trilogy, but his series grew in the telling. Over the next 13 years, he released volume after volume as the series became a major bestseller.
Jordan announced he was terminally ill in 2006, and worked on what was to be the last book in the series up to his final days, intending to finish it but planning for the worst, leaving behind notes for another writer to complete the story in the event that he wasn’t able to finish. In September 2007, he died, leaving the final book, A Memory of Light, unfinished. Harriet McDougal selected fantasy author Brandon Sanderson to complete the series; the book was eventually split into three volumes: The Gathering Storm, Towers of Midnight and A Memory of Light, the last of which arrived in 2013.
Rumors of a movie or a television show have swirled for years, but now might be the perfect time for it to finally move forward.
Rich fantasy world
First and foremost, Jordan created a rich, enormous fantasy world that could easily rival great works of motion picture fantasy like The Lord of the Rings. From varied climates to epic vistas, it offers the fantastic settings the genre is known for, and which just about every television show or movie has exploited to some degree (usually by filming in New Zealand).
Moreover, there’s a lot to the story: complicated relationships, epic quests, and battles on a titanic scale—there’s a reason the novels stretched into more than a dozen volumes. It’s a complex, detailed story that hits all the right buttons. We’ve already seen evidence this sort of storytelling works well for television: the show can take time digging into the characters, explore the world in detail, and develop a labyrinthine narrative—if done right.
A completed story
Unlike Game of Thrones, which has overtaken its source material this year, The Wheel of Time is finished, giving a TV series plenty of material to work with—more than enough, really. With 14 novels to draw on (11 by Robert Jordan, with the remaining three authored by Brandon Sanderson after Jordan’s death), the producers will likely have to worry about going the other way: paring down a massive series into a manageable, cohesive narrative.
These are massive books, averaging 800 pages or more each, and any adaptation will require a lot of picking and choosing to determine what storylines to focus on. Fortunately, as fans have pointed out, the middle of the series slows down the action considerably, offering ample opportunity for consolidation.
Above all, the producers will know where they’re going. Sanderson engineered a resounding finale, providing any adaptation a good roadmap to follow.
Grimdark, this isn’t.
A faithful Wheel of Time adaptation will be decidedly less grim than Game of Thrones; the novels are more along the lines of J.R.R. Tolkien than George R.R. Martin. Considering the brewing backlash against the explicit violence (including sexual violence) on the HBO series, that’s probably a good thing.
If The Wheel of Time aimed for a lighter touch, closer to what we saw in the first season of The Shannara Chronicles, it would prove to be a shining beacon in a fog of war. A fantasy show that earnestly embraces a fight between Good and Evil, rather than complicated moral quandaries and a parade of headless corpses, would be a nice change of pace.
Audiences are ready
Who could have predicted, back in 1990, that the most-talked about television program two decades later would be an adaptation of a fantasy novel? Thanks largely to The Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter, the genre has roared into the mainstream consciousness; the paperback novels that we geeks hid away in our backpacks at school are being enjoyed by millions around the world.
More than that, television has demonstrated that it can handle the sort of long-form storytelling that defines the modern fantasy epic, encompassing complicated relationships and ambitious plot arcs that take a thousand pages (or 10 episodes) to play out.
Game of Thrones is ending
Finally comes the biggest reason of all: Game of Thrones is on its way out. Sure, it’s been renewed for a seventh season, and might extend into an eighth, but once the curtain falls, audiences will be looking for their next fix, and it could be The Wheel of Time.
It might or might not work: it’s tricky, making an epic fantasy that connects with an audience (consider the mixed reaction to The Shannara Chronicles). But something will fill the gap left behind by Game of Thrones, and of all the books out there, Jordan’s epic fantasy stands a perhaps the best chance. It’s a series with a wide-ranging cast, high stakes, and an story that has, and will, keep fans coming back for more. Keep your fingers crossed.