The Wheel of Time is a Sitcom

or, the power of comfort

Amazon’s first season of The Wheel of Time is premiering this week, so I thought I’d say something about the book series, and epic fantasy more broadly.

A sense of impending doom, of unnamable horror, beset me when, in 2011, The Office released Michael Scott into the wilds of the world beyond the fictional documentary. At this point, many of us had no trouble describing The Office as a series in decline. Losing Steve Carell seemed like an alarm the network set off letting us know they felt the same.

And then there were two more seasons.

What happens to a beloved world when it distorts?

We have a phrase to describe this: Jumping the shark. When the world crafted by a sitcom begins to collapse and corrode all around us, we feel it in our teeth. It horrifies us and disgusts us to watch a once loved world, once loved characters, become unrecognizable, become parodies of themselves. And we feel that betrayal viscerally because of the meticulous worldbuilding and characterization that made us care in the first place, that tricked us into loving these hyperreal and surreal people. We spent years with them. We talked about them like they were our actual friends with our actual friends. When Ross and Rachel went on a Break, real life people fought over it. Real life journalists continue to write essays about it on the real life internet, which barely even existed when the notorious Break began.

There’s a comfort when we return to Dunder Mifflin or Central Perk or Pawnee or Greendale Community College. We’re entering a familiar, cozy world where we grew to love imaginary people living imaginary lives that we willfully suspended our disbelief for. More than that, we’re connecting to them in tangible, real ways, to the point that they define our own real life lives, give us a vocabulary to describe the real life world we real-lifely inhabit.

I accidentally cried in 2009 when, for the first time, I watched Ross show up at the airport to stop Rachel from leaving, even though I kind of hated their relationship, didn’t even want them to be together, already had known this moment was coming since 2009 was five years after the show had already ended. I cried like an absolute baby in 2010 over the beautiful friendship of JD and Turk. I cried, smiling, in 2015 when I got to glimpse Andy and April’s future in Pawnee. Even now, thinking about Jeff Winger being the last of his friends at Greendale Community College makes me want to weep for the hollowness inside all of us sometimes.

And, strangely, I’m reminded of The Wheel of Time by Robert Jordan, which they should be adapting into a sitcom rather than a spectacle driven high budget epic fantasy.

Epic Fantasy is a sitcom. Before you close out of this tab, give me a moment to infuriate you further.

Neither sitcoms nor Epic Fantasy originated in the US, but I would argue that both are, at this point, distinctly American. While a sitcom requires and relies on the comedy, the reason we return to The Office or Friends or Seinfeld over and over again for the rest of our lives, even debating whether or not you need another streaming service just to get that fix that Netflix can no longer provide, the real draw of the sitcom is the comfort. The comfort of coming home to these characters, these sets, these situations, the endless loop of jokes and relationships you know so well you dream them into reality, quote them constantly, even in the quiet of your own lonely skull.

I didn’t grow up with fantasy, epic or otherwise, the way I did with sitcoms. Yes, I’d read The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings and then the Silmarillion and Unfinished Tales and then read them again and, of course, obviously, one more time, just for good measure, just to make sure everything was still there after I had looked up for a while, that the dream was still real, dreaming itself and the dream of me. But this obsession never expanded to other fantasy writers. I couldn’t tell you why, but it wasn’t until I was an adult that I returned to the genre that held such a powerful grip on me. Since rediscovering my love for fantasy and encyclopedic imaginary worlds, I’ve read a lot of Epic Fantasy. A lot a lot. Hundreds of thousands of pages of it. You could say, ultimately, I’m a late-coming casual here to tell you what your favorite genre really is, buddy.

And you’re right.

Somewhere between the fourth and eighth book of Robert Jordan’s expansive, exhausting Wheel of Time, I remember coming to two important questions:

1. Is this even good?

2. Do I even like this?

The strangest aspect of these two questions is the third question, which is, in a way, its own answer to both: Does it even matter?

This became a burning question not only at the center of one of those enormous books in that enormous series but a question relevant to the entire genre of Epic Fantasy, as far as I’m concerned.

I posit that it does not matter. It’s immaterial whether a single novel in an Epic Fantasy series is good or even if you like it because enough people like it that it will never end, even when it’s over, because there will forever be new teenagers drawn to books so heavy they hurt their wrists just holding them. Further, I don’t even think, at this point — the point you get to when you ask these kinds of questions about a series — that the enjoyment of the series comes from whether or not the novels are good or measure up to what it means to write a novel that’s worth reading, because, when you get to books this big, to series this large, the point and purpose falls away, leaving only one final question: Are you immersed?

You look around you and see the forests of Mirkwood, the deserts of Dorne, the jagged blasted landscape of the Spine of the World, feel the arid wind that once blew Mat Cauthon’s hair, that once burned a Targaryen’s lungs, that once made Frodo wonder if he had died, a long time ago, and he wandered, wraithlike, through the nightmare of a scorned god. You don’t see the words, the crafted scaffolding holding up the edifice of an entire world that even Atlas couldn’t hold up because these worlds expand beyond the pages, beyond our own words, spilling out to give shape and texture to our own lives.

I may never be Turin Turambar, forever cursed, but I wept over him when I was eleven years old, believing more in Middle Earth than I did in a place, like, say, Italy, or wherever. I wept for Feanor and his disastrous war against Melkor that still feels like the most deathmetal thing I’ve ever experienced — and I was, briefly, the lead singer of a terrible metal band! — and it still haunts me, for all the loss, for all the pain that flooded Middle Earth because of hubris, because of bloodoaths, insatiable vengeance, the unendurable weight of need.

Immersion is all that matters. Not only in Epic Fantasy, but in every genre. Immersion is a drug more intoxicating, more gripping than anything I’ve ever taken — and I have seen the face of god in a dragon’s mouth during a fullmoon night of hallucinatory howling. Immersion is everything because it becomes a comfort. These imagined places become lived in, not only by the characters, but by you, dear reader.

This is the appeal of the big series that never seems to end, regardless of genre. It’s the comfort. The familiarity. Like opening the dorm room of your best friend in college. Like returning to the couch in your bestfriend’s basement in elementary school to watch her older sister play Ocarina of Time for hours while you sat there in openmouthed awe.

I remember this quite strongly while reading The Wheel of Time.

The Wheel of Time is massive. Fourteen gargantuan novels to tell one story. I have many criticisms of this series, most of which you’ve probably heard before from dozens of different people, but the thing that got me through the frustrations was the realization, somewhere around book seven or eight, that Robert Jordan was just writing a sitcom. It explained the ballooning nature of what was planned as a trilogy. It explained how that story promised in the prologue of its first volume disappeared while thousands of pages of bickering Aes Sedai and Chosen Ones took its place. To me, what drove Robert Jordan were his characters. He fell in love with these people and simply wanted to write about them, possibly forever. Never mind the destinies, the cryptic prophecies; never mind impending wars and dynastic struggles; never mind his own terminal illness. Most of The Wheel of Time is spent with characters bickering in a way that was not so dissimilar from the way Chandler and Monica or Jim and Dwight bickered, the way Leslie Knope and Ron Swanson both found friendship and contentious combativeness in one another.

Here’s the thing though: I hated The Wheel of Time.

I hated most of the fourteen books I tortured myself through, forcing myself, again and again, to keep going through all those millions of words and thousands of pages, all because of the promise of the big narrative payoff that, to me, simply never arrived. I hated Mat Cauthon and Rand al’Thor and Egwene al’Vere and so many more. So many stupid names. So many stupid constructed people. So many wasted hours. And maybe the reason I kept going was because I hated myself and enjoyed the displeasure (the quiet joy of revulsion!) I felt at every cringe-inducing line, every painful metaphor for the unfathomable chasms between men and women, every terrible romance written by an old man who seemed to have never met a woman he liked in his entire stupid life. There were glimmers of brightness — even genius — but most of it was a dreary slog that reminded me more of a CW drama meant for preteens than anything remotely Tolkienesque.

Even so, even with all of that inside me, I found myself…missing it. Months after finishing, a part of me wanted to return to it, wrap that familiar world around me. And I hated that world! It was a broken, nonsense world, with fungible rules and squishy motivations all in service of PLOT, of which those fourteen books had sparingly little. It was then, months later, that I was stabbed with nostalgia, with the loss of a world, of people, that I not only didn’t care about but didn’t even like!

A loss I still sometimes feel. Somehow.

After all the words, all the hours spent with these people, living in this constructed reality, you begin to find comfort. You don’t really find yourself — though, in the best examples of the genre, you do; the way I found myself in Turin Turambar, in Arya Stark, in FitzChivalry Farseer and The Fool and even Kettricken — because, often, these aren’t those kinds of books, not even aiming in the direction of that level of self-reflection or beauty. But you find yourself returning again and again, the same way you keep lighting cigarettes even though you quit years ago, the same reason you keep going to that awful diner that gave you food poisoning years ago, the same reason you call your mother every other week even though you moved away, never wanted to talk to her in the first place; life is a dream and you’re in it, falling down, and all around you is this make believe reality of magical weapons and honorable men and legible morality because there’s a good god and a bad god and they have names, interact with our characters.

I’ve heard every criticism of the Epic Fantasy series I loved and hated. I’ve even thought many of those same thoughts. But let’s return to The Wheel of Time, to keep this more concrete.

I remember hearing about The Slog even before I began. The range varies, but it’s generally assigned to books seven (A Crown of Swords) through ten (Crossroads of Twilight), which, for those keeping count, makes up four of the fourteen novels, or about 28%. So between a quarter and a third of the books in the series are considered bad, or at least suboptimal, by fans of the series. This, by itself, is something I could write another 2,000 words about (keep your eyes on this space), but it’s an astoundingly substantial amount of the series which is considered, by many, to be the best modern Epic Fantasy has to offer.

People find this the weakest part of the series — I certainly did, though I’d stretch the range a few books on either side — and maybe it is. Maybe these are the worst books Robert Jordan wrote. At this point, I can’t even tell. Can’t even register this kind of thing. I can tell you that reading them reminded me of the times in life when I was reading the previous books in the series, including what many consider the best parts (books two through four), and so I wasn’t finding myself but I was, in a way, interacting with an older version of myself — as modulated by the Physics of the One Power — the one who liked The Wheel of Time, was surprised by how much I liked it, who believed, even if only briefly, that these books would live up to the promise.

The books in the Slog have all the same problems as the other books, but also many of the same strengths. If you’re still with me in this essay, if you’re reading The Wheel of Time right now, wondering if you should continue, I’ll ask you this:

What does it matter if Robert Jordan blows your goddamn mind? what does it matter if he delivers on promises made thousands of pages ago? what does it matter that characters live while others die, that the story you believed you were in transforms into quite a different one?

Does Robert Jordan pull off some of these twists or pay off on some big promises?

I ask you again: Does it even matter?

You’re going to read those books, assuming you’re still with me, with Jordan. You may not even like them. No, you may hate them. Hate them for all the very real and very good reasons to hate Robert Jordan’s writing. But after you finish that big dumb book, after you hate it, you’re going to pick up the next big dumb book too. Not because you hate yourself — though, let’s not rule that out — but because you still sometimes hangout with that one dirtbag from your high school who used to drink your Franzia and UV Blue and always made you drive, because even though you hated high school you sometimes remember it with a smile, remember all those people you despised and wonder if it was really as bad as you think it was, because, at the end of the day, familiarity is a comfort, even when the familiarity makes you want to kill yourself, and so you’ll keep on reading Robert Jordan, not because he’s good — he might be — or because you hate yourself — again, probably you do — but because you’ve already wasted all this time reading him, living in this world — his world, but maybe yours, too, now — finding a home there.

And a home is what this is all about. Whether it’s Seinfeld’s New York or Rowling’s England, we dive into serialized fiction because it’s a home built for us by an author who reminds us of who we once were. It’s a world built by another but for us. We manage to put our own mark on it, defining our own room in that preconstructed home, whether by inventing our own characters, creating our own art, or simply underlining the perfect metaphor to describe your own life, to make you feel alive, heard, understood. And even if you grow to hate that home or always dreamt of getting away, there’s still a comfort in knowing that old too-small bed is still there, waiting for you if you need to have a sit and cry just to feel like the you you once were, when life seemed easier, more manageable, when a song by a terrible band of teenagers making embarrassingly earnest music could melt your heart, when a boy discovering magic filled you with a certain kind of hopeful light.