Amazon has killed the wrong ludicrously expensive fantasy show

Telegraph

2 days ago

Abandon all spoke – The Wheel of Time has shuddered to a premature halt. After three seasons of sorcerous derring-do, Amazon has put the brakes on its $18 million-per-episode, Rosamund Pike-fronted adaptation of Robert Jordan's fantasy saga. The original novels run to 14 volumes. Prime Video made it through the first four and a bit. It's like pulling the plug on Lord of the Rings before second breakfast or killing off James Bond when he'd just only parked himself at the roulette table.
To WoT's considerable fanbase, the cancellation is a huge injustice (an online petition is, of course, already up and running). But in one sense, Prime's instincts were absolutely correct. It's about time the streamer pulled the plug on a mega-budget fantasy series that blatantly attempts to be the new Game of Thrones and is based on a beloved source material. The only error is that it flushed the wrong franchise away.
The obvious candidate for cancellation is Middle-earth prequel show The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power. Not only because it's terrible – its mishmash of awful wigs and even worse dialogue an insult to JRR Tolkien's meticulous world-building. More than that, the series has become a dead weight around the neck of Amazon – demonstrating the folly billionaires such as company founder Jeff Bezos can wreak with an unlimited budget and the conviction fantasy fans will swallow any tosh so long as it comes with wobbly prosthetic elf ears.
Bezos has been criticised for firing Katy Perry into high orbit on his Blue Origin rocket. But if anything deserves to be blasted into deep space, it's the appalling Rings Of Power – which comes with a mind-bending per-episode budget of between $60 - $100 million (depending on whether you factor in the $250 million Amazon paid at the outset for the right to make merry in Middle-earth).
In the case of Wheel of Time, the sheer amount of story to get through meant there was always a danger it would be killed off early. However, while the threat of cancellation was ever-present, the decision is widely understood to be related to the departure in March of Prime studio head Jennifer Salke. She had presided over a string of disasters, including Rings of Power and dead-on-arrival espionage series Citadel (a $1 billion budget and no viewers). With a track record like that, Prime was believed to have had misgivings about putting her in charge of James Bond after acquiring creative control of 007 from Eon Productions.
Even by the standards of a mega corporation such as Amazon, Wheel of Time was a vast undertaking. In 2019, the company commenced building from scratch a full-scale town on a dedicated site 25 miles outside Prague. It was to serve as a base for a production that, all going well, would run for a decade (all did not go well).
Pike – who played Gandalf-esque wizard Moiraine– had moved the Central Europe with her partner and children and expected to be there for the foreseeable. As co-producer on the show, she went all in on the Wheel of Time universe, even narrating several of the tie-in audiobooks (volume one, The Eye of the World, has a run time of 32 hours).
She was joined by a cast of literally hundreds. There were grand battles involving a mind-boggling 3,500 FX shots in series one alone (1,000 more than in Marvel's Endgame) and a globe-hopping schedule, that took in Morocco, Italy, South Africa and the Canary Islands. In all, nearly 1,000 people are thought to have worked on the production – comparable to a large scale Hollywood movie.
It was much better than Rings of Power too. Moiraine headed a solid cast that also included Peaky Blinders actress Natasha O'Keefe as a vengeful demon. The fight scenes were inventive, spectacularly violent and visually dazzling. Crucially, everything made sense – in contrast to Rings Of Power, which implied an absurd sexual chemistry between elf Queen Galadriel and the wicked Sauron.
Compared to some of Jennifer Salke's more prominent flops, Wheel of Time was by no means a calamity. Reviews for series three were positive; ratings were solid. The sub-par production values and fake-looking costumes that had hobbled season one had been put right, too. But WoT was perceived as one of Salke's projects and news that it has been cast into the void is not surprising.
The oliphaunt in the room is that fantasy is no longer a voguish genre. Amazon had acquired the rights to Wheel of Time after Jeff Bezos commanded underlings to present him with a project that had the potential to become the new Game of Thrones (the studio made its bid for Lord of the Rings around the same time). Going on for a decade later, Succession and The White Lotus have put eat-the-rich style social satire at the top of the Hollywood want list (see Julianne Moore's new Netflix project, Sirens). Long-haired weirdos running around in capes babbling about the Dark One simply doesn't cut it – especially not when each episode costs the best part of $20 million.
Where does that leave Rings of Power? The show has been consistently dire, featuring cheap-looking sets, cheesy dialogue and – for reasons best known to the producers – a tribe of hobbit ancestors who sounded like 'thick Irish builders' from a 1970s sitcom. Horrific on every level, its trajectory has been the opposite of that of Wheel of Time, which slowly built a loyal audience (though viewership admittedly fell off from season one to two). In the case of Rings of Power, just one-third of viewers finished the first series, while audiences fell by half in year two.
Why not cancel? The depressing answer is, as part of the rights deal, Prime Video is committed to making five seasons. Which means three more years of TV torture – for them and us. In a grim snapshot of television in 2025, a well-made (and much cheaper) show such as Wheel of Time is pitched into oblivion while the atrocious RoP gets to clop off into the sunset, scorned by practically everyone except the great unblinking eye of Jeff Bezos. It is a bleak end to a cautionary tale. One that, in years to come, is likely to be seen as a warning against Hollywood hubris and the dangers of throwing too much money at a billionaire's pipe dream.