Finished the first season of Wheel of Time. It was...fine? A lot of it felt very derivative of the Lord of the Rings movies, which I guess holds true to the books, but it still stood out. The Fades in particular...Jesus Christ. Not only do they look exactly like Ring Wraiths, but they use what sounds like the same screeching sound effect and it feels lazy.
The main issue with the show is that all of the kid characters, who are the show's main characters, are by far the worst characters on the show. The adults are far more interesting, with Rosamund Pike carrying much of the show on her back along with Daniel Henney.
From what I've read, this show really got hurt by pandemic-related shut downs, as the last two episodes were filmed significantly later than the first six. One of the five main "kid" actors, the one who plays Mat, also quit the show, which forced them to awkwardly write him out of the last two episodes with a presumed recasting next season. Similarly, they weren't able to revisit certain shot locations due to the pandemic and were limited in the amount of extras and stuntmen they could use. This leads to the battle in the last episode feeling really small scale and underwhelming, and it definitely hurts the show.
Honestly, it has a lot of the issues the first season of Game of Thrones had (although that was budget related, as we saw the show grow and become far more epic in scale as it gained popularity), only without the high points driven by the characters and politics that Thrones had right out of the gate. Probably the most interesting part of Wheel of Time is the two episodes they spend at the White Tower where politics started to come into play.
I'm hopeful that the show will find better footing in season two. It was an enjoyable but flawed first season and it was short enough that it never overstayed its welcome. The younger actors will have time to grow into their characters as well.
