The Wheel of Time

Rafe Judkins claims to be a big fan of the books, but you'd never know it after watching this bafflingly faithless adaptation. Longtime WoT enthusiasts (guilty) will be annoyed by the myriad changes to the story, characters, and tone, newcomers will be confused by the clumsy worldbuilding, and everyone will find the pacing too janky to connect to the characters or understand what's going on and why. Blood and bloody ashes.

This plus The Witcher Season 2 really emblematize the dearth of competent showrunners when it comes to straight-faced high fantasy. More playful approaches give more leeway but taking fantasy seriously demands a lot. You need believable characters and patient storytelling to immerse the viewer into the world. Faults (of which there are many here) hack at the verisimilitude and once it breaks everything crumbles and you are left with cosplayers on sound stages gesturing at the wind.

Ignorence is bliss when it's come to the book adaptations. I didn't read any of the books and enjoyed the first season, the characters worldbuilding etc.. It is not an excellent series by any means, sloppy storytelling time to time but there is lots of room for improvement, can be so much better in future seasons. The wheel of Time is interesting and attention grabbing enough for me to want and wait for more. I hope it lasts for several seasons... S1: 7/10 S2: 8/10

I gave it the benefit of the doubt until the end of the season but ... The show is a bastardised, stupidified, grim-darkified, soapy-fied mess. What a disgrace. It's barely worthwhile as its own thing. It's wretched as an adaptation of the books. They had an $80 million budget for the first season--that's $10 million per episode--and they produced this amateur show with sitcom lighting and styrofoam sets ... It's inexcusable. Just read the books!

When I was young, the books bored me to death and I don't remember much about them (except their weight, try to read a hardback of 1000 pages as a kid, it hurts your arms). Turns out that the setting is pretty cool and the first season brings a lot of punch and cool character development. The second season I found much less engaging and had a final which is too reminiscent of the first one; if they will keep on doing this, I will stop after the third season I think. Seanchan masks are great,

stats to get better after episode 3.

Plot and character focus changes aside, the complex and often subtextual political intrigue, deep lore, mystery, sense of scale and culture, and the terror Jordan’s descriptions of the Dark One and it’s followers induce are all reduced to schlock with a budget.

This rating is higher than it would be only because the trailers looked promising. The first episode was not worth finishing, and I don't care if it gets good later. This is a clear red flag that the show writers are too incompetent to do the most important part of the job: create an engaging pilot that establishes the show.

The best, I'm still pissed they cancelled it

It is possible to love the books and this screen adaptation too. Robert Jordan didn't get to finish his own stories and I do think he would be pleased with this adaptation. There are enough book lore sprinkled in and further development of characters, it is gold. Don't be a fool that cannot let the series be independent of each other.