- The Wheel of Time‘s cast hope that they’ll return for a fourth season
- Amazon hasn’t renewed the high fantasy series for another installment yet
- The Prime Video show’s best-rated season indicates that it should be, though
The Wheel of Time‘s cast aren’t sure if Amazon will continue to weave its incredibly dense source material into a fourth season.
Speaking to TechRadar before the show’s third season began airing in mid-March, Josha Stradowski and Daniel Henney revealed they hadn’t heard if the high fantasy series would be renewed again. It’s possible, then, that The Wheel of Time‘s third season could mark the end of the road for Prime Video‘s TV adaptation.
However, Stradowski and Henney, who play Rand al’Thor and Lan Mandragoran, are holding out hope for some good news once the Amazon TV Original’s latest chapter ends. And, with season 3’s final episode due to be released this Thursday (April 17), there’s a chance that a season 4 announcement could be made in the hours or days after its arrival on one of the world’s best streaming services.
“We don’t know much,” Henney told me when I asked if anyone had informed them about the show’s renewal. We’re just hopeful and have all of our fingers crossed.
“Season three is something we’re incredibly proud of,” Henney continued. “Watching it back, I couldn’t be happier with how it turned out. I’m sure Josha will agree that this is The Wheel of Time we set out to make.”
“Yeah, we’re confident [that a fourth season will be greenlit],” Stradowski added.
“When I was reading the book series, it wasn’t until book four [The Shadow Rising, which season three is based on] that I thought ‘Wow, okay, now I understand why so many copies have been sold’. I feel like season three is where we found our form, so we’ve all got our fingers firmly crossed.”
May the Light protect you
It’s hard to determine if one of the best Prime Video shows (in my view, anyway) will get a fourth outing.
For starters, Amazon rarely reveals official viewing figures for any of its new movies or shows. On the off-chance that it does, it’s usually to boast about the millions of people who tuned in to watch the premiere of a new TV Original or the debut of any of the new Prime Video movies it develops in-house.
The best information we have from a viewership perspective, then, is from third-party sources, such as audience engagement experts Nielsen. Companies like this are our best bet at understanding how The Wheel of Time season 3 performed, albeit with a couple of caveats.
Indeed, Nielsen’s weekly viewing figures only take a project’s US audience into consideration. Additionally, their data is based around the number of minutes viewed, which can somewhat skew the figures when trying to work out how many people actually watched the show.
All of that said, Nielsen hasn’t released any numbers for season 3 yet. The audience aggregation firm releases figures one month behind where we’re at in the calendar. For example, the latest weekly Top 10 information comprises viewership data for the week running March 10 to 16. At the time of publication (April 14), that’s around 30 days ago.
With The Wheel of Time‘s third season not debuting until March 13, it’ll be a few more days before we find out how well its three-episode premiere performed. That’ll give a clearer picture as to whether a fourth season will be greenlit.
There is hope that Amazon’s TV retelling of Robert Jordan’s best-selling novels will get another installment, though. Based on its Rotten Tomatoes score, season 3 is the highest-rated entry yet, with general audiences (82%) and critics (97%) loving what they’ve seen. Compared to season 2 (80% and 86%) and season 1 (61% and 81%), this season is by far the best since the show made its debut in August 2021.
I was similarly effusive in my praise for this chapter, too. In my review of The Wheel of Time season 3, I called it “a spellbinding return to form for Prime Video’s fantasy TV underdog”. Based on this season’s seven episodes to date, which I really enjoyed, I’d be gutted if it’s canceled just as it’s starting to get really interesting, too.
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tom.power@futurenet.com (Tom Power)
