The Wheel of Time After Time After Time

The main ensemble from Amazon's Wheel of Time, season one

The Amazon Studios adaptation of Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time has obtained largely warm reviews, but mostly from critics who haven’t read the novels. A minority of critics have lambasted the adaptation for its lukewarm fealty to the source material; they’ve accused showrunner Rafe Judkins of not so much translating the source, as nesting inside it. I have a different problem. This series demonstrates the greatest problem of media in the streaming era: content bloat.

On one level, the series shows Peter Jackson’s influence on screen-based epic fantasy. Beautiful arboreal landscapes and rushing rivers, frequently viewed from high above with cameras in motion, create not only a sense of intricate world-building, but that real characters occupy this world, moving through space and time. Sprightly theme music underscores the lushly colored visual palette. The young, attractive ensemble cast wears vibrant, prismatic clothes, unsullied by dusty agricultural work or unpaved village roads.

These visuals call attention to themselves. Presumably the creative crew intended this, as they use many long, lingering shots of The Shire Two Rivers, the White Tower, elaborate medieval streetscapes, and primordial terrain. As shots linger, however, making the scenery itself the center of audience engagement, we start paying attention to the design. We start analyzing which shots were created on location, which virtually in 3D modelling, and which are composites, matted together in postproduction?

Like Jackson’s LotR movies, the series premiers with a wizard’s arrival in a bucolic village, followed by a party. This provides an opportunity to introduce characters through dialog and interaction. Lots and lots of dialog and interaction. Again, these scenes are beautifully designed, but they continue interminably. The introductions of character relationships, larded with soap-operatic detail, mount up relentlessly. When the Uruk-Hai Trollocks finally attack the village, we’ve grown bored waiting for something to happen.

Maybe Judkins and the creative team watched Jackson’s “long-expected party” scene and felt they needed one of those, except it occupies the entire first episode. That’s an hour of content. What Jackson completed in twenty minutes, Judkins extends for almost sixty. Each season of The Wheel of Time contains eight one-hour episodes, meaning that together, each season is longer than the theatrical release of the full LotR trilogy. (At this writing, there are two seasons.)

This pattern continues. Having fled the monsters, our ensemble of protagonists journeys with Gandalf and Aragorn Moiraine and Lan to meet destiny. The characters keep demanding explanations, but their self-appointed mentors keep answering: “Now is not the time.” Somehow, despite months of travelling together and long nights spent huddled around the campfire, now is never the time. The characters have identity-building encounters, and make occasional meaningful discoveries, but real exposition remains punted down the field.

Our ensemble remains mostly unified throughout the first season, though briefly separated for… purposes. They then spend the entire second season pursuing side quests, before unifying atop a wizard’s tower. Along the way, they encounter an ageless monarch, a lost nation, and an enemy thought destroyed three thousand years ago. Though the story arc doesn’t slavishly copy Tolkien, it’s nevertheless one giant spider away from matching the beat sheet in his first two LotR novels.

Some of this overgrowth comes from the source material. Full disclosure, I haven’t read Robert Jordan’s original novels; but I have it on authority from friends who have, that his writing often rambled, and later novels particularly suffered lack of firm direction. Yet the transition between media should’ve resolved some of this. Traditional broadcast or cable television would’ve forced the creative team to make hard decisions, because airtime is limited, and advertisers’ patience isn’t infinite.

With no requirement to fit into scarce, valuable airtime (or to empty the cinema for the next showing), Judkins and the creative team apparently feel authorized to keep creating more and longer scenes. Again, in fairness, these scenes are often beautifully designed, and individually, introduce interesting, thoughtful character moments. But as they accumulate, we increasingly see the story as constructed. We desperately wish we could tell the creative team to just make something happen, already!

Streaming distribution removes many limitations forced on traditional television. The one-hour format, advertisers who need appeased, and network Standards & Practices are out; graphic language, sex, and violence are in. But traditional limitations forced creative teams to make choices; what they omitted often mattered as much as what they included. Streaming doesn’t force them to cut anything. As content gets longer, with interminable exposition and vague resolutions, we start wishing someone made them make choices.