Prime Video hasn’t had great luck with its fantasy adaptations, but its upcoming Fourth Wing series could turn things around. The Amazon company’s most notable failure, The Wheel of Time, was an adaptation of the beloved fantasy book series of the same name by Robert Jordan, and its cancellation is still a point of bitterness for fans. The show wasn’t all bad, as evidenced by its 88% score on Rotten Tomatoes. However, The Wheel of Time just couldn’t recover from its rough start.

The first season of The Wheel of Time performed well with critics, but general audiences gave far more divisive reviews, with many complaining that Prime Video had strayed too far from the canon story. Season 2 was a marked improvement, and season 3 performed rather spectacularly across the board. Unfortunately, that shaky first season meant The Wheel of Time lost too many viewers. Given how expensive fantasy TV is to produce, Prime Video couldn’t justify continuing the series without a more substantial viewership.

Prime Video has taken another couple of stabs at adapting popular fantasy book series to no real avail. However, it looks as if that is about to change. Amazon has the rights to Rebecca Yarros’ Fourth Wing, which will be adapted into a TV show along with the rest of her Empyrean series. Though still in the earliest stage of production, this series is well set up to avoid The Wheel of Time‘s fate.

Fourth Wing Can Finally Be The Fantasy Series Prime Video Has Been Looking For

Prime Video has been on the lookout for its own version of Game of Thrones, but it was always unlikely that a show like The Wheel of Time would duplicate anything close to that kind of success. Jordan’s series is well-loved within the fantasy community, but those viewers alone wouldn’t be enough to sustain a TV show. The Wheel of Time had to draw in and grip audiences who were unfamiliar with the source, but it lacked the necessary wow factor. Add in the fact that season 1 alienated book fans, and the Prime Video show was set up for failure.

This isn’t the situation with Fourth Wing. The Empyrean book series is at the peak of popularity, having fully established itself among the BookTok crowd. Since this viewer base has yet to really receive a major fantasy adaptation, Fourth Wing is bound to be a massive deal for the community. Then, and perhaps even more importantly, Fourth Wing‘s high-stakes, high-intensity, and high-sex adventure is exactly the sort of thing that draws in mainstream audiences (like Game of Thrones did). People outside the book scene are unlikely to be familiar with Fourth Wing, but not for long.

Fourth Wing Can Also Avoid Rings Of Power’s Biggest Issues

Another notable Prime Video fantasy series is The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power. Unlike The Wheel of Time and Fourth Wing, this is a franchise just about anyone would be familiar with, thanks to Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy. This should have guaranteed a massive audience, and, based on the astronomical cost of the show, Prime Video thought so as well. Unfortunately, Rings of Power has been hugely divisive, with reports of lower viewership and lower seasonal completion rates.

The trouble with Rings of Power is that it covers a more niche period in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings legendarium. If viewers were hopping on board expecting something more like Jackson’s film trilogy, they were bound to be disappointed. Said and done, this is a show that appeals to only a small crowd, and even among them, Rings of Power has struggled to hold up against complaints of persistent changes to canon.

The fact that Fourth Wing isn’t as widely familiar as The Lord of the Rings will ultimately be a benefit, since expectations aren’t set so impossibly high. Prime Video can also learn from its mistakes and do everything possible to keep this upcoming TV show as faithful to Yarros’ books as possible. If book fans and general audiences alike can get on board with Fourth Wing, Amazon should finally have the fantasy success it has been so desperate for.