Amazon’s Wheel of Time tries a little too hard to be Game of Thrones

The Wheel of Time is Amazon’s second-biggest TV bet ever. “I want my Game of Thrones,” CEO Jeff Bezos is reported to have said. And The Wheel of Time, along with Amazon’s eye-wateringly expensive Lord of the Rings show coming in September 2022, are the results. It’s a big adaptation of even bigger fantasy novels, an attempt to beat HBO’s blockbuster hit at its own game and give Amazon a prestige genre series of its own.

But for all the money and effort that’s gone into the show, Amazon hasn’t made a Game of Thrones successor, try as it might. The Wheel of Time is an interesting attempt at adapting Robert Jordan’s behemoth of a book series, but it’s also dragged down both by its unwieldy source material and its efforts to twist itself…

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