Wheel of Time Screentime, s1e1-2-3
I recently shared the screentime breakdown of the first three episodes of the Wheel of Time (see e1, e2, e3 for details). As those episodes were all released on the same day, many of the initial reviews of the show were based on the combination of these episodes (the only exception being from critics who got to see the first 6 episodes early).
So I thought it would be interesting to look at the screentime breakdown for those first three hours of the show, and potentially to look back at some of the comments people had on the show.
This is a very dense graph, but it contains all of the characters named on IMDb for those episodes. Most of those characters have very minor roles: half of them don’t go above 4min of screentime. Some of those characters were only seen for the first episode (maybe we will see them again in a later season), while others got briefly introduced in episode 3, to them be developed in later episodes.
Here’s the same graph, but restricted to our 8 main characters. While Rand hasn’t been the top character of any episode so far, he was 2nd to Egwene in ep1 and ep2, and 2nd to Mat in ep3. That consistency pushed him to the top of our list, with Mat 6min behind and Egwene 9min. Perrin is a bit further from Rand, with 18min less screentime than him. We then see our Aes Sedai/Warder duo, 23min and 29min behind Rand. Nynaeve is far after the others, which makes sense, as she was mostly absent in episode 2.
While the first episode of the show was well balanced in term of men/women screentime distribution, the second and third episodes were not (which is not a critic, as this was perfectly understandable considering the context of those episodes). As a result, screentime is shared between women and men at 40% women to 60% men, which isn’t too far from the distribution between men and women in our main cast: 3 women for 4 men actually gives a 42% women / 57% men division.
Which leads to my next point. when the first three episodes of the Wheel of Time came out, many comments and critics followed, some from book-purists and non-book-purists. Some of those notes were along:
Moiraine takes too much space.
The show focuses too much on Egwene as a potential dragon.
The younger folks of the Two Rivers don’t get any development.
[spoilery] We don’t pay enough attention to the Dragon Reborn.
To which I will share the following percentage chart and ask: “Or did we?”
As always, here’s a link to check all those numbers directly. Thank you for reading, I hope this was interesting!
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