Imagine my surprise when I heard that The Wheel of Time was being canceled...
- john raymond
- May 24
- 3 min read
Imagine my surprise when I heard that Amazon’s The Wheel of Time was being canceled after season three. You might think that I was surprised they didn’t see it through to the end. You might assume I thought it was too good to be canceled. No. Only if you guessed that I was shocked it made it past season one are you anywhere near the truth. The project was so garbage—so shit, so utterly useless, so artless and devoid of merit—that I had all but excised its existence from my memory.
It was a wound to the genre, and not in the way art demands. As someone who writes fantasy myself, I could not stomach even thinking about Amazon’s rendition. So to discover it had not just limped on, but lurched through two more seasons before someone finally pulled the plug, I was stunned—not by the cancellation, but by the sheer momentum of crap that carried it this far.
The truth is that The Wheel of Time—at least as adapted by Amazon—never began as art. It was stillborn. And if you understand the anatomy of art as laid out in the four poetic temperaments—Wound (Story), Structure (Craft), Imagination (Radiance), and Music (Pulse)—then season one of WOT was a case study in failure across the board.
Wound (Story): Nowhere to Be Found
The first requirement of real art is Wound—a moral or emotional rupture that drives narrative gravity. Jordan’s original novels are steeped in it: duty versus desire, prophecy versus personhood, the heavy toll of power. But Amazon’s version had none of that. Characters didn’t bleed metaphorically or literally. They posed. They read lines. They reacted to things they didn’t earn. There was no moral crisis. There was no thematic risk. It wasn’t story—it was a shadow play of story-shaped gestures.
Structure (Craft): Scattered and Arbitrary
Even if the story was empty, some might argue structure could carry the day. But structure was absent, too. There was no coherent rhythm to the arcs, no understanding of acts, no pacing that built momentum. Setups led to nothing. Payoffs dropped out of the sky. It wasn’t structured like a television series, nor like an adaptation, nor even like a well-organized fantasy campaign. It was a shuffle of fragments trying to masquerade as worldbuilding.
Imagination (Radiance): Confused for Aesthetic
Fantasy rises when Imagination elevates the Wound into myth. In Jordan’s books, that meant folklore, prophecy, dreams—all woven into a tapestry that felt as lived as history. On screen? Imagination was reduced to a set of vague powers, a drab palette, and CGI fog masquerading as mystery. Radiance became noise. Instead of a mythic world, we got a muddled slideshow of uninspired costume and lore dumps that had the gall to be boring.
Music (Pulse): Flatline
In the absence of all else, sometimes the beat of a show can save it. The music of a story isn’t the soundtrack—it’s the cadence of emotion, the rhythm of tension and release. But this show had no pulse. It started limp and never quickened. Scenes had no breath. Conversations had no urgency. Even the moments meant to inspire awe or dread landed like wet paper.
To borrow from a metaphor I’ve used elsewhere: if Gregory Orr gave us a compass for artistic temperament, then this show never even stepped on the trail. Wheel of Time failed because it didn’t understand what art is. Not just what fantasy is—not just what adaptation is—but what storytelling itself demands: risk, pain, coherence, transformation, and breath.
What’s more maddening is that it didn’t have to be this way. One can adapt boldly. One can stray from canon. But one cannot fake the core. What Amazon’s WOT lacked was not budget, not source material, not talent per se—it lacked conviction. It lacked wound.
So no—I’m not surprised it was canceled after three seasons. I’m surprised it ever made it to two. The only miracle in all of this is that anyone still thought there was life left in its bloated corpse after season one.
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