'Wheel Of Time' Showrunner Rafe Judkins Responds To Amazon Canceling His Show

Wheel of Time showrunner Rafe Judkins, who admitted earlier this year he had turned the show into a vehicle for LGBTQ+ propaganda, has issued a lengthy statement in response to the show being canceled by Amazon.

On his Instagram, Judkins began by addressing whether or not he knows why the show was canceled by Amazon. He claims he does not know, “And the truth is, I don’t know. I wish I could say something clear and tidy that explains to all those who love it why it’s coming to an end, but sadly, I can’t.”

He then attempted to claim the show was popular despite it losing a massive amount of viewership over the course of three seasons. He wrote that it “was also watched by huge numbers of people all over the world, appearing in the Nielsen Top 10 for nearly 20 weeks, a feat very few shows have been able to match in the last decade.”

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When the show first debuted on Prime Video, it’s three-episode premiere recorded 1.163 billion minutes viewed. The season 2 premiere, which also released three episodes, only brought in 515 million minutes watched. Similarly the Season 3 premiere, which also debuted three episodes, only brought in 534 million minutes watched.

While the Season 3 premiere seemingly saw an increase in total minutes watched compared to Season 2, Nielsen in collaboration with Variety reported the show only failed to breach its top 100 most watched shows for the 2024-25 TV season. The show did manage to tie for 98th on the most watched shows in the 18-49 age demographic with Power Book III: Raising Kanan, Watson, and School Spirits with 1.9 million viewers.

To put that in perspective, Prime Video’s Reacher was 8th on the 18-49 age demo chart with 5.9 million viewers. That means Wheel of Time performed nearly 70% worse than Reacher in that age demographic. Furthermore, Reacher attracted 17.3 million viewers among all age demographics, which was good for the fourth most watched show of the season.

The show also performed worse than other Prime Video shows in the 18-49 such as Invincible, which saw viewership at 4.4 million, The Rings of Power (3.8 million), Beast Games (3.7 million), Cross (3.6 million), On Call (2.3 million), The Bondsman (2.2 million), and Secret Level (2 million).

Furthermore, Deadline’s Nellie Andreeva claimed the show was canceled due to finances. She wrote, “As often is the case in the current economic environment, the reasons were financial as the series is liked creatively by the streamer’s executives.”

Nevertheless, Judkins then made the claim that “One of my core goals in making this show, even from the earliest crafting of the pitch, has been to tell the whole story. Because the Wheel of Time books do what television has always done best — get better as they go. And as our actors and team came on board, they too could see the potential if we were allowed to finish this incredible story.”

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However, while promoting the show’s third season Judkins made it clear this was not true as he intentionally turned the show into LGBTQ+ propaganda. While speaking about his decision to make Moiraine and Siuan into sodomizer, he told The Hollywood Reporter, “It felt essential that their relationship be textual. It is one of the most important relationships in the books for how it drives plot. It’s almost like the inciting incident of the show is contained within the relationship between these two. To me, the show didn’t make sense without that relationship being explicit because we are also putting more of the emphasis certainly on [Rosamund Pike’s] character, Moiraine, than there is in the books.”

“You’re also always looking as an artist for, ‘Why am I telling this story? I have to devote my life to this for years and years.’ It was worth devoting my life to telling this beautiful story, but also that the lead was a queer character. I’ve never seen a fantasy show where our lead was just casually a queer character that wasn’t only directed at the queer community. To have that was an important part of why I wanted to tell this story and why I fell in love with the books in the first place,” he added.

Earlier in the interview, he justified denigrating Jordan’s work by claiming the books were coded as gay. Ironically, he also admits that they were not gay.

He said, “A lot of it also — this is the ’90s and early 2000s — was very coded. It’s always, women are pillow friends. They’re not lesbians. But it’s all there. When you’re reading it, it felt like big billboard signs of: These are queer stories; these are queer characters, especially in comparison to all the other fantasy I’d been reading.”

“For me, it was very important to find that in the show today. I feel like part of our job as artists who are adapting something is to bring it to life, not just word-for-word but to also bring its context to life,” he continued. “And the context of Wheel of Time in the ’90s is very different from the context of reading the books today. I wanted to infuse that into the show and hopefully let people who weren’t seeing themselves in other fantasy shows see themselves in Wheel of Time.”

Judkins went on to admit one of his main goals with the show was to normalize sodomy, and he attempted to justify it with an alleged quote from Robert Jordan.

He said, “That’s something that we’ve tried to infuse into the world of the show and is something that comes from the books. Robert Jordan once famously just said casually, ‘I would say 30 to to 50 percent of people in the world of The Wheel of Time are probably not straight.’ That’s a huge thing that he was doing. We’re trying to infuse that in the show and not make it feel like the exception to a rule, but make them feel like a natural and central part of our world.”

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Judkins then observed, “Much has been written about this larger trend in TV toward fewer seasons with less episodes and finding quicker ways to acquire additional streaming subscribers. But I genuinely believe that this goes against the fundamental strength of television — long-form storytelling. It is an art form, much like epic fantasy, which at its very best, gives people a place to go and spend time with the characters that they love year after year after year. And I believe there are executives, studios, and networks who know that. I believe that we will find out way through this current iteration of the industry and back to what we do best — bringing great characters into people’s living rooms and lives every week.”

He then concluded by offering hope that the show might find a home on a different streaming service, “Will the Wheel of Time get to do that with another network and finish the story? Sadly, it’s not something that happens often. But it does happen. In fact, one of the reason we chose Amazon as a home for the show was because they were in the midst of picking up The Expanser after SYFY cancelled it. So, who knows, perhaps the Wheel of Time show will do what the books have always managed to do since day one — defy traditional definitions of ‘beginnings’ and ‘ends’. I certainly hope it does — because this book series and those fans deserve to see the story finished.”

What do you make of Judkins’ statement after The Wheel of Time was canceled by Amazon MGM Studios?

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