I watched the first season of The Wheel of Time on Prime, and liked it. Like a lot of today's streaming shows, it moves too quickly, trying to jam as much as possible into eight episodes, when it needed at least double that to tell the same story, which although the outline and broad idea are very interesting, tend to give it a "then this happened" feel, over and over. Its hardly the only show that suffers from that though. The production values are really high. Top, top end sets and costumes, and very solid special effects. On par with a second-tier Hollywood movie. The cast is largely made up of unknowns, and most of them young and raw, and there are times that it shows, but most of them have talent and potential. I never felt that any one or two actors was bringing things down, as they all hold their own. The show is shot and directed in a way that reminded me of others made in Australia and New Zealand, such as Xena, except that this one is purely serious and fairly dark. At the end of the day, its a quality show, but as I said I wish that each story was stretched out to allow for more character development, more explanation of what is happening and why, and more moments where the mood could be lightened, rather than pure peril and stress at all times. Season 3 was just released, so I intend to watch all of them through the end, and am looking forward to it.
If they film the whole series of books, it'll need to be 25 seasons at least, lol. Think there were 12 (very long) books in the series or something like that, although I gave up on them after 8 or 9, was just taking too long to tell the story...and in a very long winded way, he was infamous for taking pages and pages just to describe what someone was wearing! The author died before he finished it, although think the last one was written by someone who knew what the ending was going to be. Edit - it was 14 books, with the last 3 written by another author. Apparently he died when writing the 12th and final book, but left extensive note and the replacement author then dragged it out for another 3 books instead.
That's good info! I didn't know any of that. Hopefully they get as long as they need to in order to do it justice. I read that Rosumund Pike, who's both the star and the producer of the series, is a big fan of the books and was excited to make it happen.
