One of the key spokes in Amazon’s efforts to become a major name in fantasy TV has just snapped, as Deadline reports today that Prime Video’s adaptation of Robert Jordan’s Wheel Of Time books has been canceled at the streamer. The news comes a few weeks after the show released its third season, and apparently arrives after heavy deliberations at the service about the show’s fate.
On paper, Wheel Of Time fulfilled many of the requirements Prime went hunting for after Amazon’s Jeff Bezos infamously demanded his newly minted TV service bring him “a Game Of Thrones” several years back. Built off a well-loved series of fantasy novels, and with name talent like Rosamund Pike at the top of the call sheet, the show certainly looked like it could offer up some sword and sorcery spectacle to help establish the streamer’s presence as a major force. But somehow, that conquest of the zeitgeist never seemed to come together. Maybe blame Jordan’s first book, which served as the source material for the show’s first season, and which is a far more generic fantasy story than the WoT books end up evolving into. Or maybe point to Amazon itself, which ended up giving the series a bit of short shrift when it realized it could really blow some money by getting the TV rights to The Lord Of The Rings, and pushed that as its big fantasy project, instead.
To be fair to Prime execs, they do seem to have genuinely liked the show, which is why it took a month for them to kill it off after releasing season 3. (Which we weren’t huge fans of, unfortunately.) Per Deadline, affection for the series ended up getting balanced against cold, hard economics: It’s not cheap to make a fantasy show on this scale, and one that gets shrugs from critics (and not enough attention from viewers) can’t survive even with executives’ indulgence. All of which means Wheel Of Time has now been doomed to end on a cliffhanger, less than halfway through its overall story.
