Wheel of Time TV Series in development.

[The Romulan Republic]

https://io9.gizmodo.com/the-wheel-of-ti ... 1773693457

After last year’s fight over the TV rights to Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time, Jordan’s widow Harriet McDougal has said that the legal situation is sorted and a new adaptation is already on its way.

Here’s the announcement published on Google+:

The following is a press statement that has been approved by the studio involved in contract negotiations:

Update: Wanted to share with you exciting news about The Wheel of Time. Legal issues have been resolved. The Wheel of Time will become a cutting edge TV series! I couldn’t be more pleased. Look for the official announcement coming soon from a major studio —Harriet
Last year, a Wheel of Time “pilot” aired in the middle of the night by Red Eagle Entertainment, apparently in a bid to keep the rights to Wheel of Time from returning to Robert Jordan’s estate. Red Eagle ended up suing McDougal over comments she made about the topic. Now, though, all of that is apparently settled and we’ll hear the details about a TV series fit for the epic scope of the books soon.

Prediction- if it ever gets made at all (it would not be the first abortive attempt to adapt this series), it'll get roundly bashed by fans for not being just like the books, because WoT as depicted in the books is essentially unfilmable due to its length.

Still, it might be interesting. I'm not a huge fan of this series, first and foremost due to how it handles sex and gender issues (the obsession with gender roles, the recurring bondage theme, etc.). But I do find elements of it highly intriguing, and it has that epic scope. I'll be interested to see if they can pull it off.

Edit: To be honest, I'm a little surprised its taken this long, despite the difficulties around adapting it. It fills a similar niche to Game of Thrones, and I'd expect to see more series trying to imitate its success.

Edit: I replaced the link and article with a different one because the link was giving me a warning that it might be pretending to be a different site than it actually was. Sorry about that.

[Guardsman Bass]

https://io9.gizmodo.com/the-wheel-of-ti ... 1773693457


Edit: To be honest, I'm a little surprised its taken this long, despite the difficulties around adapting it. It fills a similar niche to Game of Thrones, and I'd expect to see more series trying to imitate its success.

Edit: I replaced the link and article with a different one because the link was giving me a warning that it might be pretending to be a different site than it actually was. Sorry about that.

This blog post has a good description of what happened. Back in 2004, Robert Jordan sold all the film and TV rights to Red Eagle Entertainment for $600,000 - who then promptly did nothing useful with them for years, aside from selling an option for a film to Universal which never led to anything. Those rights were supposed to expire in 2015, at which point Red Eagle tried to retain them by making a shitty ashcan pilot based on Wheel of Time. It went to court, and things must be working out in terms of a deal if they're not moving forward on a series.

So, basically for ten years the Jordan Estate couldn't do anything with it unless Red Eagle did something, and they didn't do anything useful.

As for the series itself, I'm cautiously optimistic. There is a lot that's going to have to change in adaptation, especially since Wheel of Time is a very "high magic" setting where magic is frequently used. It's a good thing the costs and ease of CGI have really come down. On the plus side, the first season of Eye of the World seems very good for adaptation - it's structured as almost a self-contained story in of itself.

[The Romulan Republic]

"...the first season of Eye of the World..."?

Eye of the World is the first book, but you can't give an entire season to each book here, and I doubt that they'll try. Game of Thrones could get away with that kind of generosity because its only, what, half a dozen books? Wheel of Time is more than twice that, and supposed to take place over just a few years. In the somewhat dubious event the series even ran that long, you'd have to keep recasting roles as the actors aged out of them.

See, this is my point about it being hard to adapt due to length.

[The Romulan Republic]

My own approach, if I was doing something semi-similar to the books rather than just taking some of the more appealing basics of the setting, major characters, and themes and coming up with an original plot, would be something like this:

Season one- books 1-3. 3 makes a major shift in focus of the tone and direction of the series from "small band of adventurers" to "grand political intrigue/vast armies". It also has a degree of resolution, in case the show gets cancelled after the first season. A good pausing point.

Season two- books 4-5 or 6. Basically the rising of the Dragon Reborn to power.

After that it gets a little more iffy.

Another way, to give you a bit more time for each book, would be to do two books per season, which works nicely since mid-season breaks seem popular these days, and you could have the end of each book be the mid-season/season finale.

The prequel novel would be a stand alone television movie (or maybe even get a theatrical release if the series was popular enough), and would air around the mid-way point of the series to fill that long Moiraine-less gap in the middle.

Edit: Two books per season would give us seven, which is respectable and realistic for a major SF series, being the same as or similar to Game of Thrones, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and three Star Trek series.

[Guardsman Bass]

You can do a lot of set-up with it that wasn't in the first book, but I really think the first season of the show should be centered around the basic Eye of the World plot - it's both very self-contained and a good intro to the series as a whole. After that it gets much easier to compress multiple books into single seasons. Books 2-3, for example, could be combined quite easily - but combining Books 1-3 would be really odd. The later books can be even more heavily compressed. You could still do it for seven seasons, which would allow the showrunners to flesh out changes.

One good suggestion I've read is to center the story much more on Rand and Egwene, paralleling each other's rise and growth both as channelers and as political leaders. That would not only save on budget costs (since Egwene spends most of the series in the camp outside of Tar Valon, or in Tar Valon - and Rand eventually hangs out in one location by the time Book 6 rolls around), but it would help pare back some of the other storylines.

I think Perrin Aybarra should be cut completely, even thought that might piss off the fans. I read his storyline over at the Wheel of Time wiki to refresh my memory, and he spends most of the series separated from the cast doing stuff that isn't critically important to resolving the main storyline. Maybe they could bring him in, and have him die early on in the series.

One nice thing about all this is that the series is complete in book form. The folks doing the adaptation thus know how all the storylines are going to resolve, and can much more easily make changes.

[Elheru Aran]

It depends a lot on how they do the first season. If you did it around just Eye of the World, I would expect a short season, similar to what Game of Thrones did with their first season. Both saves the studio money and time, and allows them to test the waters without making a heavy investment-- it'll probably be expensive enough as it is.

One thought for the first season, if it's Eye of the World centric: Weave an extended flashback to the Age of Legends throughout. Build it up, build up Lews Therin Telamon and the early Aes Sedai and how miraculous/wonderful the distant past was, all their fancy technology and channeling devices, all that. Then show the Breaking happening, and the finale where Dragonmount is created, in the second to last episode, before Rand comes into his own at the Eye of the World with the Green Man and the two Forsaken in the last episode of the season.

The whole 'turning of the Wheel' thing may be hard to convey, so I feel like you need to build up some understanding of what they had, what they lost, and what they could regain again. It ties well into how Rand and company keep turning up relics from the past throughout the series.

You can't cut Perrin though, he's fairly vital in how he helps pull together various polities and brings in the Children of the Light to help Rand at the Final Battle. No, he doesn't do THAT much, but he provides a link to 'home' when he returns to Emond's Field and helps clean it out, and he has the earliest romance in the series with Faile (the abortive Rand/Egwene relationship notwithstanding). By all means turn Winter's Heart into one or two fucking episodes though. What a waste of time of a book.

[The Romulan Republic]

Definitely some good ideas.

I can see the argument for doing a short first season around Eye of the World, possibly with some flashbacks to the distant past woven in.

Perrin I do not like, and I'd kind of like to cut him, but he's fairly heavily tied into the white cloak and Two Rivers plots, which I don't want to lose. I suppose they could try to rewrite him to make him less intolerable.

The idea of focussing on Rand and Egwene... that has some merit, even though Egwene is not my favourite character.

[Guardsman Bass]

You can't cut Perrin though, he's fairly vital in how he helps pull together various polities and brings in the Children of the Light to help Rand at the Final Battle.

I think they can give the political stuff to Mat, or give Rand more to do than mope. As much as I hate to say it, they could completely cut out the Two Rivers and Whitecloak plots later on, as part of focusing on other characters.

[The Romulan Republic]

The Whitecloaks would be a real loss to me.

They add an interesting twist and a bit more depth to the usual Light vs. Dark plot line, being one of the primary examples in the series of supposed good guys corrupted by overzealousness.

And I quite like Galad as a character.