"Many moons ago (well, 2017), Jeff Bezos had a prophesy that Amazon Studios would produce shows to outperform Game of Thrones, and so there’s a lot banking on The Wheel of Time – $10m an episode, in fact. But this creation is far more YA in tone than its HBO rival. The cast is largely young and clean-cut, playing “dentally sound peasants”, and morality is as central a conceit as it is in Lord of the Rings (the rights of which Amazon has also bought, for $250m). The frequent earnest exposition monologues threaten to outnumber the gruesome deaths, and future headlines in the vein of “Game of Thrones walks fine line on rape: how much more can audiences take?” seem unlikely.

As Madden says, “The darkness definitely creeps into the series as we go along further, but I don’t think there is a glorification of physical violence or sexual violence in our story, which is quite unique for the fantasy genre.”"

Of course, the same article, as well as Madden herself, suffers from the unfortunate tendency of trashing the books without ever having read any of them*, making all sorts of stupid assumptions based on some vague rumour of the books' female characters being not very well written. That's remarkably prevalent in the reviews I've come across. Or possibly they based it on the extremely vituperative review in the Guardian from some days ago, by someone who did read the books ten years ago and now skimmed through them again before trashing them.

*Not really sure how much Madden has or hasn't read - based on interviews from some months ago, I think Stradowski had read the first few books at least, but the other main cast members haven't gotten anywhere near as far.