The first season of Amazon Prime Video’s highly anticipated “The Wheel of Time” series is set to premiere soon. Despite legal hurdles, COVID-19 problems, and the typical labor that goes into producing a quality high fantasy series, everyone involved in the production poured a lot of time into the show — and this was only the start of a long journey.
“If you’ve read the entire series, the thing really wraps up beautifully in Book 14,” The Wheel of Time executive producer Mike Weber explained to GQ. “I don’t know how many seasons that would be. I mean, that would be, like, the rest of my professional life if we did that. But at a certain point, while maybe condensing some books, I think bringing this entire series to a conclusion is everyone’s goal. And that is certainly, like, a daunting reality for everyone involved. But you know: this is what you wish for.”
Rafe Judkins, the showrunner and co-screenwriter, also spoke up, claiming that he has been working up to 100-hour weeks on set to keep things moving smoothly. “I thought that was a joke–that people did that in movies about Wall Street,” he said. “But then I actually did it. That’s the reality of where we are right now.”
Season 1 of “The Wheel of Time“ concluded filming in May, five years after the television adaptation was announced. Despite the fact that Season 1 of “The Wheel of Time” has come to an end, filming for Season 2 of the series has already commenced. Two months later, in July, the show’s Twitter account posted, “And the wheel keeps weaving… Filming for Season 2 of our series kicks off today!”
In terms of the future of the series, Judkins said that around eight seasons of content for “The Wheel of Time” had already been prepared. “I think you really need to know the ending of your story before you tell it,” he explained. “I sat down and broke out what I thought eight seasons of the show might look like before I started writing the pilot because I felt like you have to build in this knowledge of where you’re going and how you’re going to get there from the very beginning in order to tell the stories the best you can.”