Two years ago, Westeros and Middle-earth went head-to-head in the streaming wars. After Amazon’s Prime Video set its release date for The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power—by all accounts the most expensive series ever made—HBO elected to have House of the Dragon, its first Game of Thrones spinoff, premiere two weeks prior to it. HBO’s decision to intentionally overlap with another big-budget fantasy show was, frankly, the sort of political maneuvering that would make Tyrion Lannister proud. As HBO’s CEO, Casey Bloys, cheekily told The Hollywood Reporter: “It’s nice we ended up being a couple weeks ahead of time.” (When you play the Game of Content, you win or you die.) From HBO’s side of things, the gambit worked: House of the Dragon had the biggest premiere in the network’s history, assuaging any concerns that Thrones’ lackluster ending would turn away fans. Prime Video, meanwhile, had to lick its wounds: Rings of Power reportedly had a 37 percent completion rate domestically, meaning that just over one-third of viewers ended up finishing the first season. Not terrible, but not what you want from the world’s priciest show, either.
By any measure, between these two series, House of the Dragon won the battle of the first seasons: It was more popular with audiences, earned more critical acclaim, and collected more Emmy nominations. But crafting a cultural juggernaut is a marathon, not a sprint, and House of the Dragon didn’t do itself any favors in Season 2. It’s not that the second season was without memorable moments—there was Rhaenys’s fateful death, Targaryen bastards being roasted alive by the dragon Vermithor, mud wrestling—but for a show built around the promise of a Targaryen civil war, it sure has … skimped in the war department. The finale merely shuffled pieces across the board and felt like a glorified teaser trailer for Season 3, which rubbed viewers the wrong way, especially since it will likely take another two years to air new episodes. That’s a long time to keep audiences waiting; expecting them to return in droves could prove to be a fatal miscalculation.
Could HBO’s loss be Prime Video’s gain? This time around, Rings of Power premieres without any direct competition. (No shade to HBO’s Industry, which is awesome, but Succession Presents: Euphoria is not the kind of show that threatens to take attention away from Middle-earth.) If Rings of Power is ever going to live up to its massive price tag, then the summer of 2024 might be its best shot to steal some of House of the Dragon’s thunder. Of course, that’s easier said than done, especially for a series that has yet to deliver on sky-high expectations.
A quick refresher: Rings of Power’s first season is set in the Second Age of Middle-earth, a period between the events of The Silmarillion and the Lord of the Rings trilogy. We follow the warrior elf Galadriel (Morfydd Clark), who believes that Sauron is lurking in the shadows, waiting for the right moment to seize power. (Other subplots include the harfoots, the predecessors of our beloved hobbits, befriending a mysterious wizard who may well be Gandalf the Gray, and the Southlands falling under attack by orcs before it’s decimated and transformed into Mordor.) By the end of the season, Galadriel discovers that her human companion Halbrand (Charlie Vickers) has been Sauron all along, ingratiating himself to the elves in order to forge—wait for it—rings of power that would allow him to bend the myriad inhabitants of Middle-earth to his will.
Rings of Power was far from perfect out of the gate, but the mystery surrounding Sauron’s true identity was—for this writer, at least—more than enough to stick through the first season. (That, and the show’s outrageous production values offer a winning combination of gorgeous New Zealand landscapes and state-of-the-art visual effects.) But now that Sauron’s been unmasked, Rings of Power finds itself in a potentially precarious position. The Dark Lord is one of the most iconic villains in fantasy, but much of that intrigue lies in how little the audience knows about him. With the exception of The Fellowship of the Ring’s kick-ass prologue sequence, Sauron is mostly a supernatural presence, taking the form of a giant, disembodied eye in Mordor. Going all in on Sauron in Rings of Power could end up diluting the villain’s potency, like if Disney green-lit a hypothetical Star Wars origin story for Emperor Palpatine’s early days on Naboo.
For better or for worse, Rings of Power opts to lean into the Sauron of it all. The first 20 minutes of the Season 2 premiere give us an extensive backstory on the Dark Lord: how he tried to get the orcs to join his cause before the corrupted elf Adar (Sam Hazeldine) betrayed him, the arduous process of Sauron’s malevolent spirit taking on a new form (Sauron: Halbrand Edition), the decisions that led him to cross paths with Galadriel. This is a strange point of comparison—my brain is a curse—but everything about Sauron’s origins reminded me of Longlegs: The movie worked better when it coasted on sinister vibes, rather than attempting to explain everything about its eponymous serial killer. The same is true for Rings of Power: When Sauron is lurking in the shadows, your mind fills in the blanks; conversely, when the show feeds the audience too much information, he just seems like a weirdo obsessed with jewelry, like Middle-earth’s version of Howard Ratner.
For much of the second season, Sauron resides in the elven kingdom of Eregion, coaxing the famed smith, Celebrimbor (Charles Edwards), into kicking off a chain of events that could lead to Middle-earth’s demise. (Prime Video has forbidden me from getting more specific, but anyone with a passing knowledge of The Fellowship of the Ring’s prologue can connect the dots.) The dynamic between Celebrimbor and Sauron—taking on a new identity as Annatar, the Lord of Gifts—is among the more interesting work of the season, underlining that the Dark Lord’s greatest strength is his fiendish powers of persuasion. (“The road to hell is paved with good intentions” is Season 2 in a nutshell.) At the same time, Sauron’s grand designs are too one-dimensional to warrant this much screen time. Instead, Rings of Power would’ve been better served pulling a Leftovers and letting the mystery be.
Unfortunately, spending too much time with Sauron is the least of the show’s issues. A persistent problem for Rings of Power—one that’s even more pronounced this season—is that much of the ensemble isn’t up to snuff. In Thrones’ heyday, the series could bounce around Westeros and audiences would be hooked by most (if not all) of its subplots, led by the likes of Daenerys Targaryen, Jon Snow, Cersei Lannister, and Arya Stark. Rings of Power simply doesn’t have a deep enough bench of intriguing characters to lean on: We get frequent check-ins with Isildur (Maxim Baldry) and the Stranger (Daniel Weyman), yet I could sum up their arcs for the entire season in a single sentence. (The Stranger also has possibly the dumbest origin story for a character’s name since Han Solo.)
What’s more, while Rings of Power puts a lot of money on the screen, the decision to move the production from New Zealand to the United Kingdom has proved to be ill-fated. Without the former’s natural landscapes, the world of Middle-earth feels more confined and narrow in scope. Whatever the reason for the switch—budgetary concerns, new locales—the gambit didn’t pay off. And with the show’s narrative taking its sweet time to progress—cocreators J.D. Payne and Patrick McKay envision a five-season road map—Rings of Power draws unwanted comparisons to House of the Dragon’s second season: It’s taking far too long to get going, and by the time the characters get somewhere interesting, viewers will have to wait years for the payoff. (Assuming audiences want to return to Middle-earth in the first place.)
Given all the bad-faith criticisms of Rings of Power, I take no pleasure in the show’s sophomore slump. With all the money Amazon’s poured into Rings of Power, you’d like to think there’s still time to right the ship and that news of a Season 3 renewal will be a matter of when, not if. But with viewership not hitting the levels desired from such an expensive series, particularly one earmarked to be the “next Game of Thrones,” one has to wonder whether even a financial juggernaut like Amazon would consider cutting its losses. (Plus, the company will soon have competition from Warner Bros. with a Lord of the Rings anime movie and a Gollum stand-alone film.) For now, Rings of Power is stuck in a predicament not unlike Middle-earth as Sauron amasses power, where even the best intentions might not be enough to prevent a doomed future.