Warring families, witchcraft, dragons, blood, gore — and gratuitous nudity. Sound familiar?
Based on a series of novels by American author Robert Jordan, new fantasy series The Wheel Of Time on Amazon is hoping to cash in on the massive success of Game Of Thrones.
The first three episodes of the show, starring British actress Rosamund Pike, premiered yesterday.
Here, ALISON BOSHOFF reveals how the show was brought to the screen and GoT superfan HANNAH BETTS gives her verdict.
Frankly, I bow to no one in my love for — yet acknowledgment of the ridiculousness of — Game Of Thrones.
For all its game-changing brilliance in the matter of script, scope and performance, there were also some utterly lamentable moments (the Ed Sheeran cameo, anyone?)
But, mostly, it was a wild and brilliant ride and I would not have spent the years between 2011 to 2019 any other way.
Will Amazon’s Wheel Of Time live up to this august and money-spinning predecessor?
For a start, I must stop referring to it as Wheel Of Fortune, which is a cheesy game show rather than some cheesy dragon-and-orc affair.
Horseplay: Rosamund Pike and (left) with Daniel Henney
We had been promised the greatest fantasy adventure of all time. On the strength of episode one, the jury’s still out, albeit there is a vast difference between watching bleary-eyed at 8am (when the series hit the UK) than 8pm glassy-eyed with wine.
Matters kick off with Rosamund Pike, steelily beautiful as sorceress Moiraine Damodred, going all Greta Thunberg as she dresses for a quest. ‘The world is broken,’ she intones.
‘Many, many years ago men who were born with great power believed they could cage darkness itself. The arrogance! When they failed, the seas boiled, mountains were swallowed up, cities burned, and the women of the Aes Sedai were left to pick up the pieces.’
Lady, we get it, this is all shades Cop26.
Much falls on Pike’s artfully padded shoulders in the subsequent 53 minutes. She bears the burden gracefully, if mysteriously, as glacially attractive fortysomething women tend to do in such dramas.
Her look is brown dye job Gone Girl, with no-make-up make-up, what is clearly an excellent horseback skincare regime and a great line in Matrix-style magic. And top marks on the sexy sidekick (dashing Daniel Henney) with whom she shares not only a hot tub, but the capacity for psychic communication.
Witchy Moiraine heads off to Hicksville, aka Two Rivers, to search for the Dragon Reborn, a messiah figure who will save humanity from The Dark One and the Trollocs (flesh-eating, horned man/beast hybrids).
There she unearths five proteges, older than we discover in the book, and thus up for flirting. We have The Heroically Cheekboney Youth; The Strong Dim One who conveniently kills his wife; The Sly Chancer with a Heart of Gold; The Good Girl with Powers; and The Other Feisty Female.
When it comes to the sex it’s implied but not seen. On the Thrones tick list, The Wheel Of Time boasts plaits, man buns, bad bleach jobs, craggy landscapes, medieval yokels, career-minded females, scary monsters, swords of significance, flaky mysticism, immortal love interests, chosen ones, impending evil and guts and gore aplenty.
Dialogue is of the ‘old blood runs deep in those mountains’ sort, while the silly-name quotient runs high. At £8 million an episode, it looks more expensive than early episodes of Game Of Thrones.
Most obviously, the requisite sass and menace that made GoT so compelling was not yet in evidence for Wheel to prove a winning successor. When Game Of Thrones was good, it was very good, crackling with wit, intellect and the screen’s most quotable dialogue.
Opener this may have been, but, in this, WoT episode one fell flat. A woke wonder, or a load of old Trollocs? Only (the wheel of) time will tell.
How they created The Wheel of Time
By Hannah Betts
Rosamund Pike (Moiraine Damodred) and Daniel Henney (Lan Mondragoran) in Wheel of Time
BATTLE OF THE BUDGETS
The rising popularity of streaming services means that TV no longer plays second fiddle to cinema. As a result, big production shows now have bank-breaking budgets.
The final series of Game Of Thrones cost £11 million per episode and both Star Wars spin off The Mandalorian and futuristic Western Westworld were not far behind.
The Wheel Of Time has eight episodes per series and a budget said to be between £55 million and £75 million, which works out at between £6.9 million and £9.4 million per episode, making it one of the costliest TV shows ever made.
Around 600 cast and crew worked on the production, including a 217-strong visual effects team.
Filmed mainly in and around Prague, Amazon received £11.1 million funding from the national government which represented 20 per cent of the costs spent in the Czech Republic, which means that they spent £55 million there.
FANTASY FEVER
It is no coincidence that Amazon is pinning its hope on a show in the same vein as Game Of Thrones: fantasy adventures are still considered TV gold.
As one TV critic observed: ‘Game Of Thrones didn’t just open the door to more fantasy commissions, it opened the floodgates. It told TV executives not just to pursue fantasy books or comics, but
