Actress Rosamund Pike, who played Moiraine in Sony and Prime Video’s Wheel of Time series, claims the show was scrapped due “to the terrible churn factor.”
In May it was reported that the show was getting canceled following its third season. At the time, Deadline’s Nellie Andreeva claimed the show was getting scrapped due to poor viewership. She reported, “The Season 3 overall performance was not strong enough compared to the show’s cost for Prime Video to commit to another season and the streamer could not make it work after examining different scenarios and following discussions with lead studio Sony TV, sources said.”
Now, in an interview with Collider, Pike shared her own thoughts on why the show was scrapped. First, she admitted that the show struggled out of the gate, “The fans said Season 1 wasn’t good enough, which I think I agree with, for multiple reasons. We were beset by COVID in the middle of our shooting. We had some heads of department change.”
However, she claimed they righted the ship with Season 2, “hen, by Season 2, we knew what we were doing, and we offered up a much better season. By Season 3, I think we had our wings fully spread, and we were showing where we were capable of going, and there was a really well-acted, well-written, cohesive, deep show that was attracting powerhouse actors to come and play supporting characters. I think we showed what we were capable of doing with that material.”
As for why the series got scrapped, Pike speculated, “Of course, you wonder, had we started off at that place, would we not have been canceled? Maybe. I think we’re possibly victims to the terrible churn factor of people wanting to show that ‘We’ve got a new show.’ It’s all about what’s new.”
While the show will no longer continue at Amazon, Pike hopes that it will be picked up elsewhere albeit she does not believe that will happen, “In my dreams, another studio would be wise and pick it up. We have such an amazing team now. We have the ability to make a great final sequence of seasons for this show. … We know what to do with these books now, so who knows? But I think we have to accept that it’s over.”
It’s a good thing this show will no longer continue as its showrunner Rafe Judkins admitted the show was a vehicle to normalize and push sodomy. While discussing why he turned Moiraine and Siuan into sodomizers with The Hollywood Reporter, Judkins said, “It felt essential that their relationship be textual. It is one of the most important relationships in the books for how it drives plot. It’s almost like the inciting incident of the show is contained within the relationship between these two. To me, the show didn’t make sense without that relationship being explicit because we are also putting more of the emphasis certainly on [Rosamund Pike’s] character, Moiraine, than there is in the books.”
“You’re also always looking as an artist for, ‘Why am I telling this story? I have to devote my life to this for years and years.’ It was worth devoting my life to telling this beautiful story, but also that the lead was a queer character. I’ve never seen a fantasy show where our lead was just casually a queer character that wasn’t only directed at the queer community. To have that was an important part of why I wanted to tell this story and why I fell in love with the books in the first place,” he added.
Earlier in the interview, he justified denigrating Robert Jordan’s work by claiming the books were coded as gay. Ironically, he also admits that they were not gay.
He said, “A lot of it also — this is the ’90s and early 2000s — was very coded. It’s always, women are pillow friends. They’re not lesbians. But it’s all there. When you’re reading it, it felt like big billboard signs of: These are queer stories; these are queer characters, especially in comparison to all the other fantasy I’d been reading.”
“For me, it was very important to find that in the show today. I feel like part of our job as artists who are adapting something is to bring it to life, not just word-for-word but to also bring its context to life,” he continued. “And the context of Wheel of Time in the ’90s is very different from the context of reading the books today. I wanted to infuse that into the show and hopefully let people who weren’t seeing themselves in other fantasy shows see themselves in Wheel of Time.”
Judkins went on to admit one of his main goals with the show is to normalize sodomy, and he attempts to justify it with an alleged quote from Robert Jordan.
He said, “That’s something that we’ve tried to infuse into the world of the show and is something that comes from the books. Robert Jordan once famously just said casually, ‘I would say 30 to to 50 percent of people in the world of The Wheel of Time are probably not straight.’ That’s a huge thing that he was doing. We’re trying to infuse that in the show and not make it feel like the exception to a rule, but make them feel like a natural and central part of our world.”
As for how he’s normalized this, he admits he did it by twisting the Aes Sedai to fit into his homosexual vision of the White Tower as well as making Aviendha and Elayne sodomizers.
He explained, “In the White Tower, we have this place that is almost exclusively a female domain, and there are a lot of conversations about the different kinds of relationships that women have within it. One thing that I was very interested in was the idea of these pillow friends or, quite obviously, loving relationships that happen within the tower amongst women. That was one thing I wanted to lean into with the show because often with single-gender places, you see a lot of homosocial and homosexual behavior. That idea of this place where only women live was very interesting to me.”
Next, he admitted to twisting the Aiel’s First-Sisters, “Then in season three, there’s this world that we go into. One of the most fully formed cultures in the books is the Aiel, and in the books, they always had this very fascinating idea, which was called First-Sisters. Two women sort of marry each other first and they may have relationships outside of that with men, they may not, but that core relationship in their life was with their first-sister. You see we have three first-sister relationships in season three, and they’re all different from each other.”
He then declared he did this with Aviendha and Elayne, “We have two main characters Aviendha (Ayoola Smart) and Elayne (Ceara Coveney) who eventually become first-sisters in the books. Justine Gilmer, who’s an amazing writer, was a big part of pulling it up. How we pulled it up was to forefront that relationship and the loving nature underneath it early in the show, so when they eventually become first-sisters, it’s based on this relationship they already have with each other. I love that. I like having a multiplicity of queer relationships and a multiplicity of how different cultures approach queerness in the world of the Wheel of Time.”
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I look at those pictures and think how do you draw those short spears from you back if they are point up. Might as well put arrows in a quiver point up. They need to hire a consultant that will tell them that is a bad idea.
I watched about three episodes of season one and couldn’t recognize the books I fell in love with. Very disappointing.