Season one is book one. Season two is book two. That’s the way it usually is with fantasy adaptations. But Amazon’s upcoming adaptation of Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series is taking a different approach.
“We’re approaching this as an adaptation of the entire series, not just each book individually,” showrunner Rafe Judkins said on Twitter. “So hopefully Season One will feel more like the entire book series of Wheel of Time than it does like Eye of the World.”
Eye of the World by Robert Jordan (real name James Oliver Rigney Jr.) was published in 1990. It was meant to be the first book of six in a larger saga called Wheel of Time, but in the years since, the epic fantasy story got bigger and bigger, and even after Rigney Jr. passed away in 2007, the series got even bigger, eventually ending in 2013 with the 14th book. It’s set in an unnamed world where time is both the past and the future and follows multiple adventures as people seek and hope to rally behind a reincarnated being. Amazon picked up the series for adaptation in 2018 after several years of it being in limbo.
Judkins did a brief Q&A on Twitter to celebrate the release of the first brief look at the show, in the form of the Heron Mark Blade.
Crafting the blade. #WOTonPrime pic.twitter.com/fD4X9n7Ocn
— The Wheel of Time (@WOTonPrime) December 2, 2020
Very, very cool stuff.
As for the revelation of the show not being a literal book to season adaptation, that’s probably for the best. Even the best shows these days don’t often get 10-15 seasons, so if you think there’s something great in a later book that, thanks to the nature of time in the franchise, can come earlier and make the show better, you do that. It’s a very smart approach.
Head over to Judkins’ Twitter to read more interesting tidbits on the show, mainly in regards to the impressive swords and other manners of production design. Wheel of Time does not yet have a release date.