The Wheel of Time (or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Adaptation)

In this inundated market of half-hearted literary adaptations, where the only competition seems to revolve around who gets to produce the single most mediocre and insulting take on a popular story, I find that I have a particularly absurd relationship with The Wheel of Time on Prime Video, which purports to be a live-action television retelling of the story that I love and adore with all my heart.

Long gone are the days when people jovially hailed Game of Thrones as a worthy successor to The Lord of the Rings, itself an anomalous thing of the past; a relic of a bygone age that seems to have accommodated artists who actually cared about what they were getting themselves into, or whether they had the intellectual means or the filmmaking knowledge to capture the full breadth of an important literary work. Long gone is the pure-hearted incentive that moved these insane creatures, these unfathomable beings of immense creative power, to make their efforts worth our time. Or so we’ve been told.

You’ve probably heard the stories, and like every story, there’s probably a grain of truth to them all. But it’s not as if the human race or the newer generation of producers and writers suddenly ran out of ideas or found their inner inspiration well dry. The problem most of these projects are facing is a matter of schedule, costs, and the overall trend with which Hollywood has been hell-bent on bringing its entire business model crashing down. All of these are, as they say, a topic for another occasion, so I won’t broach them just yet.

What I will say is that only a handful of works in the entertainment industry today even capture my attention, let alone stoke my intrigue. It seems to me that I always knew, somewhere deep down, that a project like The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power was doomed to fail. I knew that The Wheel of Time wouldn’t be able to live up to my expectations. And yet, I always hoped. I always wanted to believe that the sensation we so rarely feel when an adaptation gets a story right is something that either of those shows could capture as well. But it’s been a while since I faced a tantalizing sense of disappointment in that manner, my mind left to brood over its own folly as the dust slowly settled on yet another missed opportunity.

And yet, I find myself sitting down every day and foolishly counting the days until the next season of The Wheel of Time arrives on Prime Video. It’s a terrifying realization; that the disappointment I’m almost guaranteed to feel when I do watch the show again is nothing compared to the frightening alternative of not having anything to live for. Perhaps that is what makes the hope so irresistible, and the temptation so innocently childlike.

I’ll always have The Wheel of Time that I fell in love with, so I guess when it comes down to it, I’ve somehow finally managed to apply Dr. Strangelove’s brilliant, timeless insight to the aspect of my life that matters the most to me. I’ve finally learned to stop worrying and love the adaptation.