Hacker Cinema
The Wheel of Time
2021 · TV series · 3 seasons
Created by Rafe Judkins
The lives of five young villagers change forever when a strange and powerful woman arrives, claiming one of them is the child of an ancient prophecy with the power to tip the balance between Light and Dark forever. They must choose whether to trust this stranger – and each other – with the fate of the world before the Dark One breaks out of His prison, and the Last Battle begins.
6 positive21 negative2 mixed19 neutralfrom 48 commenters
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53 comments on Hacker News
I was hoping for a Snow Crash series (like a multi-season upfront commitment to one, not something with a possibility of not showing an ending. Two seasons or three maybe) for years, but that book now seems so quaint that I doubt it would even make sense as a television series now. Neuromancer seems like such a cold, relatively emotionless book to adapt. I might give the first episode a go.
Replying because it seems we both look for books we have read to sort of match up with our mental representations of filmed versions them.
Was myself grossly disappointed with the Wheel of Time series.
Where I live the building emits a low rumbling like a spaceship in a sci-fi show. After binge-watching The Expanse then Wheel of Time I had this dream: In order to penetrate the forsaken's magic one must send a sequence of signals, and according to Naomi Nagata on the Rocinante, the sequence of 12 signals resulted in a temporary bypass of the magic, the /count/ was the key. I woke up and wondered what problem this applied to, then tried it with a recent PRNG problem I was having where George Marsaglia's XOR-shift sequences were mostly useless for GLib.get-monotonic-time() as the seed...
You can add the Wheel of Time to the list :(((
But, the Expanse is not that bad really. Books were much more immersive with regards to the micro-G and low-G environments, but that is something almost impossible to film (at least until we learn how to control gravity).
I guess I mean that I can learn about something from sources other than ads. How do Ads compare to, say, reading something on Reddit? Or do social media posts also count as ads to some degree?
The things you've mentioned can be done by ads, but to me, it seems you can learn about them in other ways that aren't directly considered ads (though they might be indirectly considered ads).
I prefer to have things presented to me passively (there's a Wheel of Time recap for ep 8 in my YouTube feed) vs directly (TV ads). I grew up changing the channel or turning the volume down for that shit cause they were often low quality garbage that got in the way of my tv shows and now I don't like them.
I read the Wheel of Time just before the TV show came out.
The community around WoT was easily the kindest, most welcoming, helpful that I've found around any book series (maybe any work of fiction).
Sad to see they didn't get the TV series they deserved.
So stop watching it. That’s the answer.
The problem with all this “modernisation” (what a euphemism) stuff going on in entertainment is that you’re trying to transform and change existing characters and franchises.
It’s just a money grab to capitalise on existing characters with existing fan bases.
Inevitably it’s ruined. Bond fans aren’t watching Bond movies thinking “this is sexist”. LoTR fans aren’t reading a fantasy series with influences from Christianity and a white guys experience in WWI thinking “we need more representation of people of colour and genders”.
The solution to this is also trivial: Forget all the old stuff. Write new characters and stories. Or build fans for modern works.
We’re already seen this done: Avatar (not the blue alien one), Dragon Prince, Wheel of Time.
> What makes you think ".. had everyone loving it" and "the majority of people who watched it loved it"?
"the majority of people who watched it loved it"
Because why someone who doesn't like something watch it all the way through. The majority of people who watched Wheel of Time loved it. Sure, some people who disliked it or weren't interested would have watched it all the way through, but most people don't. Did the majority of people who watched only an episode or two love it? I don't know. But that was never my claim.
Maybe you can share why you think people, outside of being reviewers, will watch things they don't like? Am I the odd one out? Seriously, if I don't like a book I stop reading it. If I don't like a show I stop watching.
"JordanCon/WoTCon had everyone loving it." (completely different from saying "everyone loving it")
Because I attended them, and everyone there was loving it. Judging by the cheers and the interest at the associated panels, and well everyone I spoke with.
> I imagine the commenter you're replying to will find "That you don't [love these things] is fine. Not everything needs to be for you." to be patronizing
Facts hurt?
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When talking about new, great content, parent mentioned only sci-fi and fantasy content: Marvel TV Shows, Wheel of Time, Foundation, House of the Dragon, the Mandalorian, Rings of Power, etc
So, it seemed that if you are into that stuff, you have some amazing content. But what if you are not?
I wish I had a way to quantify it, but it also seems like _investment_ has skyrocketed. 20 years ago HBO might make a high quality, high budget show. Now we have shows like the Marvel TV Shows, Wheel of Time, Foundation, House of the Dragon, the Mandalorian, Rings of Power, etc.. that all have MASSIVE budgets. A lot of that was funded by free money, but I think the quality and expectation of TV shows has gone up quite a bit.
When "The Wire" came out, "The Sopranos", "Breaking Bad", "Better Call Saul", I thought "woo hoo! We are in the golden age of television!"
Then I read about the billions(!) being dropped into new productions of classics like "The Wheel of Time" or a spinoff of "Lord of the Rings"
This was a great feeling!
Then all of those billions started delivering. If you were _lucky_, season one was put together with tons of care and picked over. It was also based on a novel series where the author had done the same. If you were unlucky, the TV became like the radio used to be: just background stuff while you do something else. You don't even pay attention to it.
No matter what, season two almost always had the dramatic quality of a baked potato.
And heaven forbid the algorithmic numbers don't work. Then the thing is a dead series walking no matter what the quality.
You can't make quality art by throwing money at it. Very strangely, it actually has the opposite effect: people stop wanting to take risks. You can make a somewhat mathematically-sound four-quadrant marketing pitch hoping to hit the right taste clusters with a guess at whether it'll work or not, but you're not looking at emotional impact over time. Hell no. Hence the current tidal wave of edgy mediocrity.
I leave the TV on in the afternoons when I'm not working and trying to decompress. I have seen a few good series. They are all lower-budget attempts by high-quality artists using a preexisting literary work. Too often, without a solid canon of literary work, season one is great and the rest of it is just doubling down on whatever stimulus was in season one that the algorithm said people liked.
My opinion is that people are going to like "classic" TV the same way they like classic rock. There'll be something about it that they'll argue about endlessly, but there'll also be a lot of derivative work trying to recapture the lightning of actually knowing what the hell you're doing and being lucky.
Huh, I wonder if it was intentional to leave it ambiguous. I have recently (3-4 years ago) gone through vaguely similar conversations about various characters in the Wheel of Time, albeit those conversations were generally a lot more acrimonious. Overall, I just think it's weird how people get so hung up on ethnicity specifically. I understand it if someone's got a sore spot about not being historically represented in the culture they live in, fair play, but some people get really involved in it with no such concern. About the Wheel of Time, there were some people saying that they couldn't watch the show because some of the cast didn't match their headcanon in terms of appearance, and it's just like... if the obsession is that bad, maybe you should reframe this as "I can't deal with adaptations" rather than targeting it at the cast specifically.
Anyway, sorry for getting sidetracked. I just can't stop thinking about Wheel of Time since the second season finished, what an incredible series of television. I haven't felt this way about a TV show since early Game of Thrones.
What's the difference between
/Wheel of Time /TV Series/Wheel of Time /Video Game/Wheel of Time
and
/Wheel of Time /Wheel of Time (TV Series) /Wheel of Time (Video Game)
This was interesting, although I feel the author was making two separate points here. One point was about the popularity of young adult (YA) fiction with adults, and the other was something to do with a book about queer kids being criticized and an attempt to remove it from a public library because children might find it. The thread that connects them was supposedly that the library system circulates 135 copies of 50 Shades of Grey, but how exactly that related to YA lit I'm not sure. The link is certainly weak, or lost on me. (The author started writing fan-fic for YA novels?). Smut has existed forever, certainly before the arbitrary transition period the author of the article has come up with, so I'm not sure I understand the link.
Anyways, of the two points, I find the latter one boring and tired, and so I'd prefer to talk about the first one. The author states:
> My husband and I spent several years putting on pleasant faces when talk over cocktails drifted to “Which Hogwarts house would you belong to?” It all felt so juvenile and regressive. And I believe it was.
I was unable to escape this feeling at the time when Harry Potter was sweeping through the world. I'd just finished Lord of the Rings and, while I picked up a Harry Potter book, I just found it tough to get into. Then I watched the same thing happen with series like Eragon, Wheel of Time, Twilight, Song of Fire and Ice, Hunger Games and more (might have the order mixed up). I've read at least a single book from all those series (except Twilight) and while I've gone back and re-read Lord of the Rings 4 times since, I've never felt compelled to read those series, or watch the movie/TV adaptations.
I've spent actually a not insignificant amount of time wondering why those books never clicked with me, while watching them become sweeping, generation-defining cultura phenomena. It's bothered me, because I've been left out of a lot of "which Hogwarts house are you" type of conversations. But the thing that's really strange is that I kept waiting for everyone to outgrow those books and move on. On the one hand, I understand mass appeal, and I understand not understanding mass appeal. Not everything is truly for everyone, and it never bothered me that those books missed me, but what bothered me was that we never let go of them as a culture. I still know people who call other people "muggles", for instance, even though we're all well into our 30s by now.
There are a lot of things I liked in my youth that I look back fondly on now, but realize they aren't for me as an adult. Music, movies, TV, books (I had my own YA novel preferences), that, at some point, I just walked away from. Some of them were quite good, some of them were of broad appeal, but eventually, I outgrew them. What confuses me so much is society's inability to outgrow a lot of these recent YA novels. The same way I'm confused about how Taylor Swift is still so popular with her original demographic.
There used to be a certain strategy that if you paid attention to, many media companies (especially Disney) would employ: They'd release some media series, say, Star Wars. Then they'd wait until the people who originally were kids/young adults got older, had their own kids, and they'd re-release the property, or release sequels/prequels, etc. (Star Wars being a good example because they've done this 3 time now, with the originals in the 80s, prequels in the early 00s, and the latest batch in the 2020s). You could see clear generational gaps between surges in popularity. But that seems to have just gone away now.
All in all, it's not a real problem. I'm still just as tired of these media properties as I was a few years after they came out, but it's not like it really affects my life. It's just really strange to see the level of persistence, and I can't find any historical comparisons.
I don't think people are buying television show ratings. Usually, when a TV show is way off the rating you'd expect, it's because it got really bad at the end of the season and critics only screen the first few episodes. For whatever reason, Rings of Power also had serious podcast energy behind it, like nerds with their own shows really wanted it to be good just to be worth talking about. This is related to the complaint from the article about RT starting to count small self-published critics. A lot of them are not really "critics" in the normal sense. They're extremely enthusiastic superfans that cover some subset of a particular genre and like virtually everything that gets made in that genre.
I have seen Rotten Tomatoes apparently just glitch out scores, too. Wheel of Time season one has 94 reviews with 64 positive, which is 68% positive, yet the tomatometer says 81%. Sometimes that is because of the episode-by-episode reviews, which are overwhelmingly from recap blogs that only cover what they like, but even in this case, that doesn't make up the difference.
Rings of Power is ok. More flash than substance. And the dialog and writing is genuinely bad in places. In one episode you had two characters pull the "don't kill him, we may need him" trope on each other within a minute of each other over the same character. And nothing had really changed otherwise. They both wanted to kill the guy and both stopped the other from killing him because, I don't know, show.
It's a solid C+. Like Wheel of Time or Foundation. Not horrible. Not great either. Not the best take on the source material, but it's fine I guess.
I don't know, I feel like both the people who say it is great and the people who say it is horrible are both wrong. If you would ask me for an opinion, I would say it is a show that I watched.
> One thing Amazon could do is adapt the Lord of the Rings into a TV show. 60 one hour episodes could be interesting.
Presumably Amazon decided on an original prequel series for reasons; perhaps that they didn't see a need for an LOTR series after the Peter Jackson films (and other adaptations), or perhaps there were rights/exclusivity issues.
I found the first season of Rings of Power visually stunning, and some of the characters and environments were appealing as well, but it's hard to beat the original material. On the other hand, I feel like Wheel of Time could turn out great by cherry-picking the best parts of its source material.
> Depends on the sub.
It depends on the size, and your opinions. I don’t like movies and enjoyed the Wheel of Time TV show, people like me are not wanted in /r/fantasy.
But it is a big subreddit (3 million), and that just comes with toxicity. I’d say anything with over 100k subs (probably even less) will have toxicity, it’s just that it tends to stay hidden until someone says the wrong thing (/r/selfhosted with 250k had some crazy drama a while ago).
I think the release cadence can be a double edged sword for viewer retention.
Certainly with Wheel of Time I felt that there was a few weak\boring episodes in a row and I hit the point where I dropped it, for me wasn't worth waiting a full week to see if quality of subsequent episodes improved.
If there had of been a buffer of episodes available I could probably power through the bad episodes until the show picked up again but with weekly release cadence it just caused me to give up on it.
I suspect what Amazon did with wheel of time and rings of power to be a less brutal method: weekly episode release. Disney does this too.
If they have enough “must-watch” shows that are staggered then you lose out unless you’re paying constantly.
It’s what they want: gets them som earned media/socialmedia hype, and prevents the binge+drop discount watching approach.
So... worth watching?
I put this off after being burned by the Wheel of Time. I don't mind a slow start and thought it would get better, but it did not.
to be completely fair to netflix, Amazon spent like $80-100m releasing season 1 of wheel of time and those 8 episodes also looks like lifeless garbage.
No they can’t because they need to be seen as the “official adaptation”. Something similar doesn’t get the same PR/marketing blitz appeal.
I work in the industry and the above poster is mostly right. Executives buy IP for the sake of association marketing “Watch the adaptation of the best seller series”.
BUT the industry suffers from a dearth of competence. If you work in the visual arts or make creative work in some way you would be familiar with the process of ‘uglification’ where a client with no creative taste gets to destroy the work of a brilliant creative through an avalanche of notes and changes. The creative might want to protect their work but depending on your ability to protect it, they might not.
‘Uglification’ happens in the film/TV industry all the time. People with little knowledge of film history call the shots and they have terrible taste. The result is they hire bad writers, bad directors and produce poor output. And that uglification pipeline is how adaptations get destroyed.
In example:
Executive who doesn’t know anything about “Wheel of Time” owns rights. He hires a writer who doesn’t know anything either. Writer reads the book, doesn’t like it, decides to use it as a platform to write whatever he wants plus he also needs the money. He gives it “a modern spin”, executive likes it. Executive then hires hot advertising director who’s no good but is hot in LA. Director hates the books, thinks it’s dumb but sees it as his big opportunity to break through into narrative film. Everyone involved now doesn’t care about the original books at all, and thus they will do whatever they fancy.
It goes on and on and what you get at the end is mush. Unless someone at the helm - director, writer or executive - is absolutely resolute that he wants a good adaptation, nothing accurate will come out of it.
Hollywood will have to reinvent itself or will become marginal. Actors will be licensing their 3d models and do voice-overs in the beginning (after that even voice will be transferable), but gradually it will be more influencers/celebrities.
Imagine if "AI" would generate beautiful movie/tv show from reading given book series, with maybe minimal edits required to keep pace as expected, probably several versions with various trims for die hard fans as much as casual viewers.
No fan complaints about twisting original book into mess. Imagine things like Wheel of time, Malazan book of the fallen or Hyperion cantos done exactly as you read them, no 'creative' invented crap that somebody felt urge should be added just to increase views.
This all will be for old schoolers like us. What young will be doing on next generation of tiktok is anybody's guess.
Another example would be properly self-adjusting and generating games tailored to individuals, virtual world reacting to actions, be it singleplayer or mmo.
I cancelled netflix because basically all of its suggestions were in the 'dystopian' category. I cancelled prime video because it was much of the same, along with ruining properties I enjoyed when I was younger like Wheel of Time (a show I forced myself to watch for one season and then thought about analytically to decide if I could justify their changes for tv adaptation - I couldn't).
Modern takes on everything suck. The culture that produces modern tv/movies is not one I want to participate in, and their writers are terrible. Abrahms ability to ruin everything he touches while everyone celebrates is jusst another extension of this. The one thing the marvel MCU used to have was the ability to still tell hero stories. DC never figured it out (although there Z Snyder was at fault).
I'd rather not know what is being done now, and just cherish my memories and copies of the older material. It's less annoying and honestly there's nothing of value in the new stuff except sometimes cinematography.
>> Jeff Bezos loves this show and this whole endeavor as much as anybody possibly could. I’ve talked to him a lot about it. He loves the show, and I can tell he’s proud of it.
Doubt.
Even to those of us who are not hardcore cinemaphiles the horrible writing is obvious very, very much.
This article seems to be a damage control article for this Jen Salke so that she doesn't get sacked for this horror of a show, I mean how is it possible to have such terrible screenwriting?
450M$ and they couldn't hire another more experienced screenwriter to atleast go through the script to point out the stupidities?
There have to be some serious egos/SJWs involved in this.
Here is a potential explanation for why this shitshow of a tv series happened:
TLDR:
>> Then #MeToo swept through Hollywood like a typhoon. The head of Prime Video got caught up in it and had to be fired. Jennifer Salke was brought in to start making Woke content and one of her first decisions was to shitcan Conan on grounds of toxic masculinity. Put a gigantic pin in that one, we are circling back to it. She replaced it with Wheel of Time which is almost but not quite as big a disaster as The Rings of Power.
So basicaly Jen Stalke screwed up already once badly with the Wheel of Time, I think Bezos is just using this is a SJW excuse get-out-of-jail free card since if he gets on the SJWs bad side he can always point to Jen Stalke and her SJW shows and say "see, I'm on your side, look at how much money I gave to your woke productions, stop attacking me! I'm a friend of wokeness!"
https://arkhavencomics.com/2022/09/15/how-did-the-rings-of-power-happen/
I find all of these TV shows have the same pattern that breaks the immersion: too many close up face shots, and the characters look too clean. Watch the original LOTR and see the composition of the shots ("every scene a painting"): it's not just a close up of a face with a bokeh behind it; there is a visual composition and blocking like a scene designed for a play. The characters looking too clean is another issue, and the Wheel of Time series on Amazon has this problem as well. Every character is perfectly manicured, no dirt or grime despite the setting... it breaks the immersion!
Wheel of Time season 2 was confirmed before season 1 ended and season 3 was confirmed before any part of season 2 aired.
Amazon is doubling down. Expect more of this sort of "we'll buy your favorite property and change it and there's nothing you can do about it". Nothing that is still protected by copyright is sacred, you just need a rich enough business to buy it to change it.
That's fine, but Amazon isn't rewriting his books. I think it is impossible to infer Tolkien's reaction, and furthermore, quite silly to try and enforce that inferred reaction.
Take the Wheel of Time series. A lot of unhappy fans again. Robert Jordan isn't around to give his opinion, but Brandon Sanderson finished off writing the series after Jordan's death and has talked about what he thinks of the TV series. His comments are remarkably less hysterical than what fans say. He basically says he likes it and there are some things he would have done differently [1].
Ghost in the Shell is another example. The live action movie was bad. There was a whitewashing controversy about a caucasian actor playing the lead role. The original Ghost in the Shell anime director came out and said it didn't matter [2]. His comments are worth reading:
> ...Oshii said that because the main protagonist – Major Motoko Kusanagi – is a cyborg, the question of race and whitewashing is a moot point. “What issue could there possibly be with casting her?” Oshii said. “The major is a cyborg and her physical form is an entirely assumed one. The name ‘Motoko Kusanagi’ and her current body are not her original name and body, so there is no basis for saying that an Asian actress must portray her. Even if her original body (presuming such a thing existed) were a Japanese one, that would still apply.”
Oshii added that he thought Johansson was the best possible person to play Kusanagi in the Rupert Sanders-helmed remake, which is out next weekend in the US. He also argued that actors of different backgrounds from the characters they are portraying is part and parcel of the film-making world.
”In the movies, John Wayne can play Genghis Khan, and Omar Sharif, an Arab, can play Doctor Zhivago, a Slav. It’s all just cinematic conventions,” he explained.
”If that’s not allowed, then Darth Vader probably shouldn’t speak English, either.”
[1] https://winteriscoming.net/2022/01/27/how-brandon-sanderson-would-have-changed-the-wheel-of-time/
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/film/2017/mar/24/scarlett-johansson-ghost-in-the-shell-director-whitewashing
Mhhh yeah it was. But the real collapse in quality with Wheel of Time started with Episode 4 and got worse with every single episode.
In total Wheel of Time was terrible, and didn't look good. Rings at least has some good visuals.
Lets hope Rings gets better. Sadly for now it looks like both shows will end up rated button tier.
At least House of the Dragon and The Sandman didn't disappoint.
I managed to read all 11,898 page across 14 books of Wheel of Time but thought the Rings of Power was much more interesting than the first couple of episodes of Wheel of Time I made it through.
Say what you want about mediocre fantasy shows, but I thought The Wheel of Time, another Amazon show, was much more interesting than The Rings of Power after a mere two episodes.
I love the wheel of time book series. I knew the reviews of the tv show were quite poor, but decided to watch the episodes anyway. Deep regret.
I’m writing this while wearing a Lord of the Rings t-shirt. I love Lord of the Rings, but I’ve leaned my lesson. I’m going to trust the reviews and not waste my time watching this show.
Will check it out. I’m enjoying sandman. Not loving it but am enjoying it enough to continue.
I couldn’t continue wheel of time after 3 episodes.
They are not alienating their "core" audience - they were never the major target audience.
The reason why most of the Marvel TV shows, Star Wars, Wheel of Time, Rings of Power, Halo etc. all appear to be "dumbed" down is because the target audience are teens and young adults. It's the "catch them young" tactic - all these streaming services are competing to get teens hooked to their streaming services. The next gen spend more time hooked to their screens than our generation. And we "oldies", having seen tons of shows now can't be so easily thrilled with a new show. But even if a show is a damp squib, teens can still be excited by certain elements of it as it will be a new experience for them. Generate the right emotions, and you have them hooked ...
I was very surprised by the Wheel of Time reviews (they were almost entirely racist) because I thought the casting was great in that show. It was an eye opener when I finally looked up “what other people are saying” after I watched a few episodes.
Obviously for RoP, Amazon is hoping to avoid the WoT review mess.
I agree. The first two episodes of The Rings of Power are unbearably boring. But let's wait.
Anyway, IMDb ratings are getting totally unreliable to me. I wasted hours of my life that won't come back, watching some show called The Terminal List that scored a solid eight. Carnage of Asimov's Foundation is 7.4 and that... thing, The Wheel of Time 7.1.
I wonder if there's a way to see evolution of rating, for me Star Trek Discovery seasons are nine, seven, two, pass... but it's holding at 7 right now.
> where Wheel of Time and Rings of Power did not?
So far, Rings of Power has pulled in Infinity dollars per episode. Probably won't stay that way, but that seems pretty successful to me.
> Wheel of Time is a great example of the issue, though. In the early 1990s, a series where the most powerful organization in the known world is a multiracial women's group and men aren't allowed to channel because they'll just break things was very much in accordance with "The Message".
I take it you mean this? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wheel_of_Time
I had initially mistaken it for a A Wrinkle in Time, given your description seemed to fit my vague impressions (from ads, etc) of the film adaption that has Oprah (and I have zero memory of the book).
Sure — that’s why we’ve spent five years with terrible Star Wars and Marvel movies pandering to a niche audience.
But eventually the music stops and everyone leaves… which is what we’re seeing now:
Those companies haven’t produced quality within easy memory (5 years) and so people are overcoming their decades of inertia to find new properties.
You can look at the different receptions of Reacher and Terminal List versus Wheel of Time and Rings of Power, though, to see that putting The Message over quality doesn’t work.
> After Googling a bit, that Rippaverse thing seems like it's an opposite-polarity reaction, so it's still part of the problem.
You should listen to Rippa’s own description rather than the press around it:
He’s just trying to make a quality comic book, no explicit message.
That’s portrayed as “anti-woke” because not putting The Message front and center is a revolutionary act, these days.
Speak for yourself. Sometime one wants their thoughts "provoked," other times one wants to laugh, or relax, or be thrilled by something scary.
I continue to read the somewhat mediocre wheel of time series mostly because it's familiar and thereby comforting, and there's a lot of it. I listened to "parable of the sower" (a more high-brow fiction by Octavia Butler) audiobook recently and while it was more "thought provoking" it was also depressing, and I've got enough stressors in my life right now without spending my leisure time reading about made-up tragedies. So I instead opt for something less mentally challenging when I want to relax.
Most importantly, appreciating "real art" doesn't make you better than someone who likes to binge on MCU movies. It's condescending and superior to call someone "hypnotized" for liking something you don't, and comments like that tell us more about you than the person you're judging.
The Wheel of Time series was of such middling quality that I'm more skeptical of this than ever. Not that a Silmarillion tv show really has much appeal to me anyway.
Have to agree! I'm not sure what I was expecting with Wheel of Time, but I wasn't expecting it to look so cheap. Also one of the central characters wears a pullover in early episodes that's definitely dry-clean only, and had definitely just been dry-cleaned. While it sounds like a little thing, it's the little things that add up to an immersive world.
Considering how awful the Hobbit movies were I can't see how this could be worse.
In any case, after the horror that was Wheel of Time, I'm not watching any Amazon fantasy shows unless they get glowing reviews (from real critics, not tech news commentators).
> I’m not sure why you would think this. There is a huge segment of society that is very much against everything that could possibly be considered “woke”.
I agree. That was badly phrased. I was more talking about my experience in talking with people in my country and social circle.
But even then, shows like Arcane have very, very few people riled up about 'wokism' and whatever. I have not heard a single reviewer or commentator say anything negative about the lesbian relationship or the fact that the most powerful political operators are black women.
> you often eventually get rants about white genocide or some other conspiracies
That's like because people who have far more normal and common views don't engage in these discussion. I tend to stay out of them as well, but the economic angle of Netflix interested me and I got baited into responding to a comment.
:)
> I still don’t see how the “woke” part does the ruining
Just to be clear, I think the show is terrible in a whole number of ways. What we in general call "wokism" would not be in my top complaints about the show. Its something that I consider annoying not some great sin or something. But I do think that general approach did impact the overall approach they took to writing the show and it made the end product much worse.
> I have probably sat through over 100 full shows and movies where all of the women were defined solely by their relationship with powerful men. One more “boring” show that happens to be the opposite is not something I’d take to the internets to specifically decry, and if I did, I wouldn’t blame the boringness on the fact that this time the powerful important people were women.
As I said, nobody would decry such a show if it was not based on popular source material. And I am certainty not defending other bad media that have bad writing and those things have of course been criticized rightly. But the existent of the opposite doesn't mean we should stop criticizing it.
The reason I use it as an example is because it is source material that already has powerful amazing woman of different types in it. But the writers of the show felt the need to take this up to an almost absurd degree and did the opposite with the male characters.
Let me give you an example of what I am talking about, I think you interpreted my comment very narrowly. I don't care that men have non traditional roles or are defined by their relationship to a powerful woman. Such characters are often part of stories and that is fine. I am more talking about turning characters who were more then that into that.
There are many examples we could talk about. To be clear, non of those individually are all that relevant or worth complaining about. Its only in aggregate when it gets worthy of critic.
Agelmar Jagad in the books is highly respected competent leader and general, living in a culture with very high respect for woman. His sister is competent highly respected noble woman is a trusted adviser and the second most powerful person in the city. Jagad will be a off and on relevant character for the rest of the books. Sound reasonable?
Agelmar Jagad in the show is portrayed as stereotype alpha male general with no brain. They forced a sub-plot into the show where his sister literally has to wear the ancient armor of the house (that the show made up) to lead a group of woman to fix what the men are to dumb to do. Ah and the sister who was non-magical in the book of course had to be elevated from just politically powerful to a super-powerful magic user as well. She is of course vital in winning the battle at the end, Jagad will of course be killed instantly like a total bitch, certainty nobody will miss this toxic male and he will likely not be mentioned again.
So the writers felt the need to totally rewrite that part of the source material. Why? These were pretty minor characters and the show runners already excused many of their changes on only being granted 8 episodes. Yet we had to spend major screen-time on another sub-plot where the evil alpha-male messes everything up and then the all-powerful woman to come in the save the situation.
Its a totally unnecessary plot shoehorned into the story with no relevance to the main story the show is trying to tell. The source material had brother sister team working together, but we can't miss an opportunity to rewrite it into incompetent alpha male/wonder woman narrative. That is a perfect example of force feeding 'woke-ism' into a story.
Again, this alone isn't a big deal. But this approach is pretty consistently applied.
> Agreed. But this applies to every single kind of message or moral of the story that the writer is attempting to convey. However, all I hear about here on the internet these days and from this forum is that woke-ism specifically is a poison pill.
I certainty agree that there is an over-focus on crisis of woke-ism and many-times unfairly so. For me this is not 'culture war' for civilization, rather annoying meme that makes TV show potentially worse then they could have been.
To give specific example in Wheel of Time. In the book the 'Two Rivers' is a part of Andor. Andor is basically the Britain of that universe. Given its history and isolation, 'Two Rivers' is very culturally and racially homogeneous.
In the show the 'Two Rivers' looks racially more like New York City. This certainty makes little sense from a story telling perspective. Cultures that are very isolated for 1000s of years simple are not that diverse. Now you can certainty change that from something based on white rural Britain to whatever other racial group want to insert.
You can of course explain this away in whatever way you want, its fantasy. Genetics might work different. Who cares. You don't even have to explain it at all.
One of my friends had a problem with this diversity suggesting it hurts the story and that priority should be an accurate representation of isolated cultures. He would have been fine with that being non-white of some kind.
I said, while I agree that it doesn't really serve the story, when creating a major 100+ million$ TV show with 5 lead actors all from the same village making them totally culturally and racial homogeneous isn't really all that practical. A am willing to throw overboard some story purity (or strict adherence to the source) as to give a diverse group of actors to chance to get a role in such a show.
PS: Pretty much all those actors doing a great job! That was the least of the shows problem. Fire the writers and keep the actors.
Nonsense, its simply that if writers are engaged in social signaling some of that results in much worse shows and that is seriously annoying.
Consider two shows that I watched in the same Week, Wheel of Time and Arcane. Both shows have a very clearly modern perspective, and are very much in line with what we might call 'woke' culture.
Arcane did this in a brilliant way, a great love story between female leads of the show. Genuinely showing lower class struggle, corruption and so on. Both the villains and the heroes (and in between) have a wide range perspectives, capabilities and identities. Great show, well executed.
Wheel of Time had a writer who made it a clear mission statement to transform the source material into a woke version of itself, going so far as to say 'this is how it would have been written today'. The show also has a female lead in a lesbian relationship, but one that feels forced and has little emotional core. Unlike Arcane there is a clear trend where females were powered up to a sometimes a hilarious degree, all antagonists were stereotypical boring men and all the main leading male characters were basically boring did basically nothing and their many story somehow relates to their relationship with a powerful women.
If 'Wheel of Time' was just another show, it would just be a badly written show. However that it is adoption of well known source material shows the writers bias and political message quite clearly.
Almost nobody is against LGBT characters or show that have woke politics in them. Its when it is badly done that it is annoying.
The same in the past would apply to war propaganda movies. If its a very well done and executed it can be great content. But most that produced with that goal in mind is just lame.
To suggest that the majority of people who criticizes shows for 'wokeism' are just LGBT haters is absurd. Its equally wrong as to suggest that all people who object to war propaganda movies are pacifists.
The reality is that these studies want shows with these kinds of messaging in them and that a great deal of content ponders to that political outlook. Just as in the past content providers have pondered to politics as well. It does not mean you disagree with the political outlook, it just means I don't need it to be shoved into my face at every opportunity by lazy writers.
In all of the examples, the smaller competitors banded together. Who are the "smaller competitors" here? Disney certainly isn't smaller than Netflix by any reasonable measure, and Amazon has a built-in customer base because of bundling with the free shipping.
Perhaps all of the "also-ran" services Paramount, Hulu, Peacock will band together, but I wonder how successful that will be vs. just leasing their material to Amazon or Netflix.
Streaming is also interesting because of the less-fungible nature of flagship content. The Witcher is not precisely a substitute for Game of Thrones and Wheel of Time is certainly not a substitute for either. The main reason to not switch from "Bank of my local village" to a Bank of America is friction, and "Bank of your local village" doesn't directly compete with "Bank of my local village" but both compete with B of A, so there is a natural alliance there.
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Also, VCRs; Betamax was more expensive and had a shorter runtime, while quality of self-recorded material was less important to consumers. VHS won by being cheaper and better matching customer use-cases; maybe that was because it was open, but it was not directly because it was open.
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> [Netflix] has pursued the wrong strategy, and doubled down at every opportunity. The company has spent billions of dollars on proprietary films and TV shows in order to create a position of market dominance with a totally closed system. But that was only phase one. We are already in phase two, with Disney, Paramount, and others removing their offerings from the Netflix platform, and trying to create their own powerful fiefdoms.
Netflix would be out of the streaming business today if it hadn't pursued this strategy; the writing was already on the wall for content-owners doing their own streaming before Netflix produced original content. Streaming platforms are being commodified, but streaming content is not.
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> Do you think Netflix can match that with its proprietary approach? The company will be forced to open up its own system, or face inevitable decline, perhaps even obsolescence
Again, Netflix isn't pursuing a "proprietary approach" by choice; if you want to sell Netflix any license for your content (exclusive or otherwise), they are more than happy to do so if the price is right. Look at everything available that isn't "Netflix Original" (and note that even some of that is not exclusive to Netflix, as they may have only partial ownership).
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> Here’s the bottom line: Netflix might be one of the largest companies in the world, but it’s far more vulnerable than it looks at first glance. And it doesn’t have the brand franchises it can milk like Disney—which can churn out Marvel and Stars Wars movies with reasonable assurances of market success.
This is the only paragraph related to Netflix in the entire article that I agree with. I don't know how the author can hold this truth in their head while blasting them for spending money like water trying to generate such a franchise through massive spends on content. If the author's thesis is that Netflix is doomed to fail, then Netflix should just shut down streaming operations right now.
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Isn't Roku already a bit of what the author wants? You can search across multiple streaming services and have them all in one place. Sure you have to actually pay for those services, but most of them can be signed up for in the Roku app, and nobody's giving their content away for free...
The recent season 1 of the Wheel of Time television show reminded me of how the Aes Sedai are magically bound "To speak no word that is not true".
Of course, they're all master manipulators, ironically able to lie better than the common people because they can leverage that apparent veneer of truthfulness to deceive even more completely.
Fantasy nerd.
Rhythm of War, book 4 in Brandon Sanderson's Stormlight Archive. Love most stuff by this author.
And in response to Amazon making a Wheel of Time tv show, rereading that. Pleasant experience, very nice to get immersed in this huge universe.
Foundation. Wheel of time. Lord of the rings. Marvel movies. James Bond. You’re right, lots of other media that drives book sales.
7 habits, win friends and influence people. There’s a decent amount of examples.
> I watched the sci-fi show "The Expanse" on Amazon Prime Video. Season 4 (the one made by Amazon Prime Video) felt like it had a tenth of the budget compared to season 1 and 2. A completely different show that I found very boring and unwatchable.
Ultimately that's one show though. Amazon have spent BIG on some of their series. The Grand Tour had an enormous, enormous budget compared to Top Gear. They are spending Game of Thrones money on Wheel of Time.
This happened with The Wheel of Time TV tights too; whichever company owned them released a piece of shit single episode pilot and nothing else, solely to keep the rights
Do you mean original as in first-as-a-series, or original as in something that hasn't been made for tv/movies yet? If the latter, there are tons:
- The Expanse
- American Gods, Good Omens
- Kingkiller Chronicles (being produced by Lin-Manuel Miranda)
- Wheel of Time
However, if you mean the former, then I agree, although there are new shows, they just don't have high budgets like those with followings already.