I didn’t know this was in the works, and I am really excited about this!

Amazon reinvents ‘The Wheel of Time’ for the small screen, with surprising turns

You won’t need to have read the sprawling, 14-volume fantasy saga to know instinctively that what you’re seeing on the Amazon series only skims its surface.

Feints are made to indicate the scope of Jordan’s world, and its history — a bit of dialogue here, a snippet of song there. Characters gets a moment or two to invoke their homeland, or their ancestry. But the ultimate effect is to cause the world underpinning the events depicted — the world that always seems to hover just offscreen — to insist upon itself, and always compete for our attention with the story we’re watching.

It’s not that the show looks cheap, by any means. There are plenty of breathtaking vistas and vibrant, richly textured costumes and elaborate sets. It’s just that it can’t help but feel scaled down, reduced, distilled, made for television. Something about the quality of light in certain scenes seems a bit too sharp, too clean, for a world lit only by sun and fire. The sinister Children of the Light, for example, wear cloaks so blindingly and pristinely white, even as they trudge through muddy forests, that you can’t help wondering about their OxyClean budget.

If the world of The Wheel of Time doesn’t come off as satisfyingly grimy and lived-in as the world of other fantasy series, and it never quite musters the sweep and scope of its older brothers — Jackson’s Lord of the Rings, HBO’s Game of Thrones — it does manage to tell its story in a way that’s compelling, unique and, frequently, surprising, full of narrative twists and character turns that even the most jaded fantasy reader might not see coming.

npr.org