The Rings of Power Season One: Final Analysis

****THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!! THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!****

My Rating: 1/2 star out of 5 stars

My Recommendation: SKIP IT. This series should be thrown into the fiery depths of Mount Doom.

Amazon’s The Rings of Power, which just concluded its highly-anticipated first season, was the tech behemoth’s attempted fantasy foray into the land of prestige TV.

So, was Bilbo Bezos’ billion dollar bet on building his one ring to rule them all in the form of a J.R.R. Tolkien TV universe worth those beaucoup bucks?

Nope.

It’s not hyperbole to declare that The Rings of Power is an unmitigated disaster as it’s gone over about as well as an all Hobbit (or Harfoot) team competing in the NBA.

It’s difficult to know the exact ratings for the series as streamers are coy about specifics, but it’s not difficult to see that the show was a catastrophe creatively and gained zero cultural traction except in generating memes that mocked it.

The sprawling series, which chronicled various, rather flaccid dramas across Middle-Earth in the Second Age involving Elves, Dwarves, Orcs, Harfoots and Humans, felt astonishingly small for something with such large ambitions and attempted scope.

The final two episodes of the series were touted as the episodes that would vault The Rings of Power out of the morass of the miserably sub-mediocre episodes that came before it and into the public consciousness. But boy-oh-boy that ‘twas not to be.

Episodes seven and eight were just as painfully amateurish as the rest of the series.

The big battle billed in episode seven was in practice a small skirmish that felt foolish and looked absurd, like something scrapped together from the cutting room floor of an episode of Xena: Warrior Princess, rather than something in a billion-dollar tv show.

Then there were the big revelations in the season finale that weren’t very revealing at all. Sauron was unmasked – even though any idiot with half a brain in their head already knew who Sauron was all along, and then there was the pseudo-mystery of the Gandalfian wizard who the lawyers haven’t figured out yet if they can actually call him Gandalf. Not exactly earth-shattering or even drama-inducing.

Aesthetically, the series, despite its bulging budget, looked and felt like a show on the low-rent CW network. The costumes and sets probably weren’t cheap but sure as hell looked cheap. And the paucity of background actors made every well-populated scene seem like a high school drama class rehearsal.

The writing on the series, in both the dialogue and the narrative, was shockingly pedestrian to the point of literary malpractice. Considering the showrunners, J.D. Payne and Patrick McKay, only previous experience was fetching coffee at J.J. Abrams’ Bad Reboot…oops, I mean Bad Robot production company, this is less than surprising. The only surprising thing is that Amazon invested a billion dollars to do business with these two simpletons.

Payne and McKay were considerably more committed to adhering to Amazon’s cultural political agenda of diversity uber alles and girl boss empowerment garbage than to staying true to Tolkien’s luxurious lore.

The other enormous issue with The Rings of Power is the abysmal cast. Much internet outrage and counter outrage ensued due to the series casting minority actors in what had been white roles in Tolkien’s written works and in Peter Jackson’s film versions. The question for me remains regardless of their race or ethnicity, why cast such bad actors? At their very best these are soap opera level actors…at worst they should be digging ditches in community theatre. Game of Thrones and its prequel The House of the Dragon, have some massive talent among its acting ranks – both well-known and newly discovered…so why couldn’t Amazon shell out some decent money for good, never-mind great actors?

What bothers me the most about the failure of The Rings of Power is that it could have, and should have, been great.

Tolkien’s writing is a rich and glorious garden from which many fruits can grow and prosper, but when the pesticides of cultural politics are introduced, they act not as growth agents but as poisons that destroy.

The evidence of this is plain to see in Peter Jackson’s highly-successful Lord of the Rings films, which while not perfect, are at least foundationally committed to Tolkien’s lore. In contrast, Jackson’s Hobbit trilogy takes a bite from the culturally/politically poisoned apple and is thus neutered of psychological power resulting in the films faltering. The same is true of The Rings of Power, which fails to understand the power of Tolkien’s myth and instead embraces the superficial (cultural/political), and ends up producing an insipid, if not insidious, piece of vapid non-entertainment that’s incapable of being satisfying on any level, most notably psychologically.

The best way to understand how universally shallow The Rings of Power is, and what a failure it is, is that even the people who claim to like it will never watch season one over again. Another damning piece of evidence is that even the sad sack sons of bitches who vociferously defended the series from the get-go, most notably establishment critics who fawned over the series due to its cultural politics, are now admitting the show is a “stinker”.

Regardless of what I, or the bevy of Bezos bought media shills, have to say about The Rings of Power, Amazon has committed five seasons and more than a billion dollars to the series. But considering how bad the show is, and trust me, it really is bad, the biggest billionaire flex of all would be for Bilbo Bezos to not give a shit what anyone else thinks and just keep setting his money on fire to produce a show no one but he likes or cares about.

Ultimately, all I can say about The Rings of Power and about a philistine like Bilbo Bezos having all that money to burn is…what a terrible waste.

©2022