Submitted by ScafellPike t3_104fw9c in television
I’ve now finished Amazon Prime's The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power.
The show has many, many faults, but most of all I do not understand how it is so poorly written - devoid of logic; little if any discernible relationship with the source material; undeveloped, inconsistent, and unengaging characters.
The whole plot relies on wild coincidence, transparent mystery, and baffling gimmicks. Far from characters driving plot, and plot driving set pieces, it seems to be a case of set-pieces driving plot, which then drive the characters.
It feels like it was written not by writers, but by an experimental machine-learning algorithm that has conjured it having watched Jackson's movies, and most contemporary fantasy shows, then worked out what bits proved most popular on the internet, and fashioned a show from that.
As such, it feels less like it comes from a human imagination, but more from what a machine might think we want to 'consume' and 'buy' having crunched all the data.
In other words, it feels exactly like what a big-data company like Amazon would make.
Apparently hundreds of millions of dollars were spent on this show. You’d never know unless someone told you. The sets are small and the costumes repetitive - the world feels almost claustrophobic. The CGI is nothing special, and often bad. The actors are unknown and mediocre. The show-runners had no experience.
So, what did they spend the money on? The only established, blue-chip talent in the whole thing seems to be Gennifer Hutchison, who was a key writer on the most emotionally intelligent show ever made, Better Call Saul. And yet, she can't have been allowed to do her job, as the writing is the worst thing about The Rings of Power.
In light of all the above, my theory is as follows: the vast bulk of the money went on developing an algorithm to write the plot by harvesting all the data Amazon has on how users watch all its content, and that this is all part of a long-term Amazon strategy to further hone its efforts to produce the shows the data tells them people will pay to see.
If this is the case, perhaps the showrunners were selected precisely for their lack of experience, for only guys desperate for real success after a decade of treading water would sign on to something where they had no creative authority. In them, Amazon then had fall guys if this massive corporate experiment all went wrong.
Gennifer Hutchison and the other well-respected writers were then probably employed simply to stop the algorithm-based plot from going too wildly ‘off-trail’, much like a human driver must still keep their hands on the wheel in experimental self-driving cars.
I am partly joking, but I'm also not. I would rather believe that the tragic state of this show is because a massive experiment in algorithm-based, DALL-E-esque narrative writing failed, rather then because everyone involved was bad at their jobs.
And it would make sense as a corporate strategy. Why did Amazon spend so much money on this single show? It cannot simply be because Bezos loves Lord of the Rings, or because they wanted a single hit show. It must be because they had something bigger afoot, some grander, wildly ambitious strategic plan which would save or make Amazon more money in the long-term.
In the context of its streaming service Prime, the holy grail - for a big data company like Amazon - would surely be to perfect the science of algorithm-generated stories. In its final form, if the algorithm was to be perfected, this could be a source of cheaply producible and wildly popular 'content', all in line with Amazon's interest in selling us things we don't even know we want yet (but they think they know we want because they have all our data, and the data of other people with similar viewing profiles to us).
The Rings of Power might well be a first (and flawed) effort at this. It was perhaps chosen as a trial run because LOTR is already established in the popular culture, and because the success of the Jackson trilogy provides a benchmark to compare against in terms of exactly the sort of popularity Amazon Prime would dream of achieving.
Indeed, the show’s errors, omissions, atonality, duplication of key Lord of the Rings beats, and particularly the myriad Chat-GPTesque word-salad pseudo-profundities, and the 'emotional uncanny valley' nature of much of the characterisation (such as the strange sociopathy of many of the ‘good’ characters including the Harfoots and Galadriel), strongly suggests that the plot and dialogue was written not by a professional writer, but by an algorithm. Throughout the show, the dialogue and characterisation is all just...off, and often uncanny - a narrative equivalent of the uncanny animation in films like the Polar Express.
I simply do not believe that so many good people were and are associated with this show, and produced something not only this poor, but this weirdly alien.
Most of all, I categorically refuse to believe that someone (that is, Gennifer Hutchison) who wrote one of the most subtle and complex characters ever put on screen (Kim Wexler in Better Call Saul) had anything to do with the writing of Galadriel in this Amazon show.
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Additionally, my one-star review of the show on Amazon was up for a few days before being taken down, and they did not let me re-post it, with the site telling me I 'have already reviewed the show'.
Because I can't stand the cynicism of removing it, I am pasting below my banned review:
The major problem with this show is that, instead of earning popularity, Amazon is trying to buy it. This is akin to the rich kid who doesn’t know how to make friends, so just tries to shower people with money.
The dollars are all there on the screen, if by this we mean what can be freeze-framed - the digital animation is reasonably good, although clearly computer-generated. But in terms of the old analogue animation - writing, acting, directing - the show is less than picture perfect, populated by bland characters, who make decisions based not on any established motivations (for where these exist they are largely undeveloped), but simply to serve the plot.
Indeed, the plot itself is not an end in itself, but rather a means to get to the next moment of contrived peril or the next special effects set piece.
This is TV made strictly to a formula; drama as if produced by some advanced algorithm based on what Amazon believes we all previously liked in our ‘content-consumption’.
The resulting ‘product’ (for it is a product, not a story) is bereft of nuance, of silence, of reflection, of originality, of relatability, of necessity. There is no reason for this show to exist, other than Mr Bezos having declared he wanted a hit. The Rings of Power is, in the end, a cynical product of a company interested in only one thing: market dominance. Bezos seeks only one thing: to forge the one streaming service to rule them all.
But perhaps Mr Bezos is about to realise that there is no algorithmic alchemy that can convert a tasteless amount of money into a piece of art that leaves people wanting more.