also the most-pirated television program of the week. The series had "the greatest average audience demand in the US in the first 30 days after its premiere of any new series" in 2021. According to Nielsen, season one accumulated 4.91 billion viewing minutes, making it the second-most watched season of a Prime Video original series on Nielsen's records. The first volume in the book series, The Eye of the World, saw a spike in sales that has been attributed to the series release. For the week of November 28, 2021, it was the second-most sold book across all formats on Amazon.com. It also made the January 2022 The New York Times Best Seller list in the mass market fiction category list and was number one on the audio fiction list. Reception Critical reception The review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes reports an 82% approval rating and an average rating of 7.05/10, based on 93 reviews. The critics' consensus reads, "The Wheel of Times revolutions can be a bit creaky as it tries to stand out from other fantasy series, but it succeeds admirably in making Robert Jordan's epic approachable for the uninitiated." Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned a score of 55 out of 100 based on 24 critics, indicating "mixed or average reviews". Ed Power of The Daily Telegraph gave the series 4 out of 5, writing: "In its early episodes this big Wheel has enough sweep, mystique and momentum to suggest that it can keep on turning and give Amazon the global hit it dearly craves." Keith Phipps of TV Guide gave the series 4 out of 5, writing: "Most importantly, it works as a piece of storytelling, creating an elaborate fictional universe but also reasons for viewers to care about that universe's fate and intrigue about what happens next." Lucy Mangan of The Guardian gave the series 3 out of 5, writing: "It's absolutely fine. It's got brio, it's got style and it's got enough portentous voiceover book-ending events to make everything feel high stakes." John Doyle of The Globe and Mail wrote that the series had "a certain charm in its depiction of ordinary people living in this beautiful but fraught place", but criticized it for what he described as "an overreliance on special effects and spectacle, to the point where you'd rather get back to the people involved." Preeti Chibber of Polygon stated, "The Wheel