Blockbuster the long-awaited Mistborn film adaptation was canceled, it's no surprise that the author has some choice words to say about the state of fantasy TV right now.
At a time when a series of Stormlight Archive film adaptations, he'll continue to serve as such a good example of creative integrity.
Brandon Sanderson Is Right: Budgets Aren't The Problem With Modern Fantasy TV Shows
Major Streaming Platforms Like Amazon Are Equating Expense With Quality And TV Is Suffering For It
Sanderson, whose prodigious output in recent years is reminiscent of Stephen King, is the author of the wildly successful Stormlight Archive and Mistborn novel series, both of which are a part of his sprawling Cosmere multiverse. He was also the author selected to finish writing The Wheel of Time after its original author, Robert Jordan, ed away from cancer in 2007, and also consulted with Amazon on their adaptation of the series. Sanderson spoke to Polygon in January about his concerns for the current fantasy media climate:
Streaming has had a big problem with epic fantasy, and this has me worried. Rings of Power and Wheel of Time have not gone as well as I would’ve hoped. Shadow and Bone lasted only two seasons, after a very strong first season. Streaming hasn’t figured out epic fantasy yet.
Maybe this is a holdover from network television days, where they’re trying to make the episodes fit into the structure of how episodic television used to work, rather than filming an eight-hour movie and showing it in chunks. But maybe that’s a bad idea. All I know is, right now we haven’t seen really great epic fantasy film television since the early, mid seasons of Game of Thrones. Fifty million dollars per episode has not done it, so it’s not a matter of the money they’re throwing at it. The other thing we haven’t seen is any of these shows really taking off to the extent that I would like with the general public.
Sanderson's consternation about the budgets of fantasy shows is well-placed, given that the amount of money being spent on them is truly staggering. The first season of Amazon's The Rings of Power reportedly cost over $700 million dollars to film and render effects for, which is approximately the 2024 GDP of the Commonwealth of Dominicia (via the budget of the Lord of the Rings film trilogy.
Cost Versus Ratings of Major Streaming Fantasy Series |
|||||
Show |
Platform |
Season |
Cost (adjusted to 2024 USD) |
RT Review Score |
RT Audience Score |
The Wheel of Time |
Amazon |
1 |
$139.7 million (via WoT Series) |
81% |
60% |
The Wheel of Time |
Amazon |
2 |
$124.1 million (ibid) |
86% |
80% |
Rings of Power |
Amazon |
1 |
$715 million (via Hollywood Reporter) |
84% |
38% |
Rings of Power |
Amazon |
2 |
$485.2 million (via LRM Online) |
84% |
59% |
House of the Dragon |
HBO |
1 |
$200 million (via GQ) |
90% |
83% |
House of the Dragon |
HBO |
2 |
Unknown |
83% |
73% |
Stranger Things |
Netflix |
4 |
$270 million (via IGN) |
86% |
89% |
Game of Thrones |
HBO |
8 |
$70 million (via the Internet Archive) |
93% |
81% |
Yet even though fantasy showrunners now have more money at their fingertips than some world leaders, House of the Dragon showrunner Ryan Condal blamed budget cuts for the dismal reception of the show's second-season finale, in what can only be described as a staggering example of cognitive dissonance. Given that Rings of Power has already cost Amazon over a billion dollars – and that's with only two seasons out of the projected five complete – it's clear that there is zero correlation between a show's budget and its reception.
Stability Is A Huge Issue For Fantasy Shows On Streaming, But It's Not The Only One
Amazon In Particular Continues Take The Idea That There's No Such Thing As Bad Press A Bit Too Literally
With Rings of Power, House of the Dragon, and Wheel of Time each on their third season, it would initially seem that all is well in the world of epic fantasy. Yet each of those shows has attracted significant criticism; Rings of Power, in particular, saw painfully negative audience reviews during its first season, and while the show's defenders have accused the faceless masses of the Internet with having undertaken a campaign of malicious review-bombing, it seems only fair that people expect the most expensive TV show ever made to not also have a laundry list of obvious production flaws.
Each of the major flagship fantasy shows currently airing continues to struggle amid a vortex of online discourse and flagging viewer counts; regardless of any alleged review-bombing, there is obviously waning interest in all of these shows, and the solution isn't to just throw more money at the problem. If streaming-platform showrunners want to start rebuilding any goodwill with viewers, it's going to require a fundamental change in the production model for big-budget television.
Streamers Should Take Brandon Sanderson's Advice When It Comes To Episode Counts
Brevity Is The Soul Of Wit, But Counterproductive To Telling A Good Story
Sanderson's point about the flaws redolent in the current status quo of how shows are structured is one that cannot be sufficiently emphasized. With the increasing ubiquity of binge-watching and ease of access to media, studios rush to put out digestible chunks of shows quickly enough to keep up with the ravenous appetites of viewers, but this system isn't sustainable the way it was for broadcast TV even just a decade ago.
Back in the 1950s, it wasn't uncommon for shows like the hit sitcom The Honeymooners to run as long as 30 episodes a season, but even by 2017, the average number of episodes per season had dropped to just nine. (via The Ringer)
While TV shows of all genres were once thought of as long-form media, with story arcs that played out over months of broadcast time and episode counts per season often numbering in the mid-20s, the modern paradigm has streaming platforms rarely risking an order larger than eight or ten episodes. The number of streaming shows arbitrarily canceled before they were completed is a staggering display of how studios are too focused on profit margins and not bothering with such trivial concerns as if audiences are actually enjoying the show.
If studios want to adapt, this is one of the rare cases where they should take a step back and return to the production model that resulted in so many incredible genre TV shows in the 90s and early 2000s. From fantasy classics like Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Xena: Warrior Princess to genre-defying sci-fi like Star Trek: Deep Space 9, genre TV was able to tell incredible, powerful stories on shoestring budgets that would barely pay for a day's worth of post-production on Rings of Power.
9 Best Fantasy TV Shows Made On A Low Budget
While fantasy TV shows like Game of Thrones and The Rings of Power have a large budget to play with, these titles are just as good without big money.
The key factor in that was the larger episode counts for every season; Buffy ran for seven seasons, with 144 episodes, totaling almost 107 hours of runtime. Even if it makes it a full five seasons, with only eight episodes each season, Rings of Power likely won't 50 total hours in trying to tell just a small part of the story that was J. R. R. Tolkien's life's work. Without the freedom to explore and develop characters, and the screen-time to indulge a writing team's creativity, modern fantasy adaptations are going to continue to fall flat.
There's Another Glaring Issue With Recent Fantasy Adaptations
If Studios Are Going To Call Them Adaptations, They Should Actually Reflect The Books They're Nominally Adapting
Adaptation across mediums is a messy process; there are thousands of considerations that have to be made for a TV show that authors never have to concern themselves with, not just in of fantastical visuals, but also how the nature of pacing and narrative innately change from a book to a TV show. A book allows the reader to ride along inside the narrator's head, but few directors would be able to shoot an entire TV show in the first person.
10 Great Book Characters Failed By Movie Adaptations
Even in some of the best movies adapted from books, the greatest and most beloved literary characters can devolve into shadows of their former selves.
Of course, camera angles are only a small part of the adaptation process – the greater issue, and the one that continues to plague shows like Rings of Power and Wheel of Time, is that of faithfulness to the source material. Adaptation is by definition never perfect, so there will always be disappointed fans and viewers, but there's a difference between an adaptation changing a character's skin color in order to cast a talented actor, and another thing for an adaptation to make up a main character's wife just to kill her off in the first episode.
Studios need to stop milk-flogging the dead cash-horse-cow, because audiences are clearly sick of it.
If showrunners at Amazon or Netflix – or even smaller, independent studios – want to make fantasy TV that really shakes up the market and grabs viewers, they need to stop throwing money away. To mutilate a metaphor, studios need to stop milk-flogging the dead cash-horse-cow, because audiences are clearly sick of it. The insatiable nature of capitalist expansion means that streaming platforms will never be happy with the profits from their shows if those shows are held up to their unrealistic standards of financial success – and more importantly, audiences won't be happy with them either.
Source: Polygon, International Monetary Fund, WoT Series, Hollywood Reporter, LRM Online, GQ, IGN, Variety (via The Internet Archive), The Ringer
