For fans of high fantasy (swords, magic, kings, and monsters, etc.) movies and shows, some great news was announced during Comic-Con@Home recently. The long-awaited Amazon show The Wheel of Time has been given an official launch window. We’ve known since early this year that the series was in the works (and really longer than that) but there has been no news of a release date. While we still don’t have a specific date, we know the show will be hitting Amazon Prime in November 2021!

You can check out the way too early primer we wrote about the series earlier this year, but we’ll include an overview below.

Amazon’s Game of Thrones

It seems that after HBO struck gold with Game of Thrones, every streaming service with an internal production house was on the hunt for the next great fantasy series. Amazon actually doubled down, as they have an upcoming spinoff of Lord of The Rings and also bought the rights to Robert Jordan’s The Wheel of Time series of novels.  

The Wheel of Time Novels

In 1990, author Robert Jordan (pen name for James Oliver Rigney Jr.) published the first novel in a planned 6-book series. The first book was The Eye of the World and while it actually functioned reasonably well as a standalone novel, it set up a sprawling adventure that builds on many standards of the hero’s journey, and traditional fantasy fiction like The Lord of the Rings. What started s a 6-book series grew to an eventual 14 books published over the course of 23 years (the final book was published in 2013). The series actually outlived the author, who passed away in 2007, with the final 3 books being written by another author (Brandon Sanderson). 

The novels follow the journey of eventual hero Rand al’Thor who grows from a young man into the world’s only hope against the apocalypse brought on by the ultimate evil Dark One (Shai’tan). However, it’s not that simple, as the path to the eventual confrontation with the Dark One is drought with twists and turns in a complex and well-developed medieval world.

Magic abounds, monsters lurk in the shadows or in massive armies, political intrigue across many kingdoms, and personal challenges are ever-present among the numerous key characters. The books are long and the narrative style is to give each of the key characters plenty of space to have their own stories told, with chapters dedicated to each one as their adventures bring them together and send them apart from each other as the story evolves over the series.

Who is in it?

The cast features a number of younger and lesser-known actors, taking on the major characters. The most well-known actor is Rosamund Pike (Gone Girl) who plays Moiraine, a pivotal character in the novels as a sorceress who escorts three young men on a dangerous quest, believing that one of them is destined to become the Dragon Reborn and face the Dark One to save the world - she just isn’t sure which one of them it is. 

Season 2?

It’s rare that before a first episode even hits the airwaves (digital waves?) that a second season is already confirmed, but that is exactly the case with The Wheel of Time. Filming and production for Season 2 is reportedly already underway.  So, you can be fairly assured that if you get sucked into Season 1, you will at a minimum get one more season of the show.