Amazon has officially renewed The Rings Of Power for a third season. That’s good news if you’re a fan of the series or a content creator who covers the series. It’s bad news if you’re a Tolkien fan who thinks the series is a stain on the legacy of Middle-earth.
While I think The Rings Of Power is a genuinely terrible TV series, I have a lot of fun writing about it and making videos for my YouTube channel. While I think the show is a garish display of profligacy and an amateurish adaptation of Tolkien’s work, I very much enjoy discussing the many ways The Rings Of Power fails at its task. Don’t get me wrong: I’d vastly prefer it were a great fantasy show that I could enjoy watching and writing about, but I’ll take all five seasons if Amazon will shell out hundreds of millions to keep providing us with this unintentional comedy (and I suspect they will, as it’s largely a sunk cost at this point).
The PR email that went out for the show’s renewal is very interesting. It spends a lot of time talking about the three directors of Season 3, which is now being filmed in the UK. “Additionally, we are announcing three directors, two returning and one new,” the announcement reads. “Charlotte Brändström, Sanaa Hamri, and Stefan Schwartz will be a part of this season. The globally successful series, which has attracted over 170 million viewers worldwide, continues to be one of Amazon’s strongest drivers for new Prime membership sign-ups.”
It continues to describe all the past credits for these directors:
Brändström’s extensive directing credits include Shōgun (FX), Scarpetta (Prime Video), The Outsider (HBO), The Witcher (Netflix), and The Man in the High Castle (Prime Video). Hamri, an acclaimed director known for her work on The Wheel of Time (Prime Video) and Empire (Fox), brings extensive experience spanning television, music videos, and feature films, having recently directed The Bondsman (Prime Video) pilot while continuing her creative relationship with Amazon MGM Studios through an overall deal. Schwartz, whose credits include The Boys (Prime Video), The Walking Dead (AMC), Luther (BBC), and The Americans (FX), rounds out the talented directorial team.
As you can see, all three have worked on far better shows than this one.
Then, at the very end of the announcement, we get a tiny little line about the showrunners: “The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power is produced by showrunners and executive producers J.D. Payne & Patrick McKay. They are joined by executive producers Lindsey Weber, Justin Doble, Kate Hazell, and executive producer-director Charlotte Brändström. Matthew Penry-Davey is producer and Ally O’Leary, Tim Keene, and Andrew Lee are co-producers.”
All three directors get portraits and bios to go along with the press release, but that’s all we hear about the series showrunners. Curiouser and curiouser.
Amazon also revealed a time-jump for the third season:
“Jumping forward several years from the events of Season 2, Season 3 takes place at the height of the War of the Elves and Sauron, as the Dark Lord seeks to craft the One Ring that will give him the edge he needs to win the war and conquer all Middle-earth at last.”
This is very funny to me, because the show has condensed several thousand years of Tolkien’s Second Age of Middle-earth into one very brief timespan, so I’m not sure how jumping ahead “several years” really matters at this point. Time is essentially meaningless in a show that has already discarded chronology, makes flagrant use of fast-travel (which not only impacts our sense of time, but also geography, making Middle-earth feel small).
I have very little faith that Season 3 will be any better than the last two, and I fully expect to see even lower viewership numbers. Season 2 already saw a huge drop from Season 1’s ratings, and this almost certainly means we’ll see a further drop in Season 3 and beyond, should Amazon continue to renew this massively expensive disappointment.
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