Hell on Middle-earth? The Rings of Power fails to spin streaming gold

The Amazon Studios chief, Jennifer Salke, seemed aware of the stakes when the Rings of Power television adaptation premiered in September 2022. Not only was the show taking on one of the most fiercely loved pieces of fantasy literature but Amazon had invested $1bn – a staggering amount of money that made it the most expensive TV series ever.

“This was not for the faint-hearted,” Salke told the Los Angeles Times at the time.

And indeed, like Frodo Baggins, Salke and the show creators have faced their own punishing journey.

Related: The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power season 2 review – needs to remember it’s a drama

Unfortunately for fans of JRR Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings saga and the Amazon founder, Jeff Bezos, many viewers and entertainment industry observers see the show, now in its second season, as a disappointment. At least when judged by the high standards of anything with a 10-figure investment.

Only 37% of US viewers who started the series completed the first season, according to the Hollywood Reporter , and about that same percentage of the audience gave it a positive rating, according to Rotten Tomatoes . Nor did the much ballyhooed series become a cultural phenomenon in the way that HBO’s Game of Thrones – based on a far less well-known fantasy series of books – quickly became.

It also dealt with a fierce row about being “woke”, with the showrunners’ decision to use a diverse cast of actors angering some fans of the books who claimed Tolkien’s masterpiece had been updated for the modern world in ways that altered the integrity of the creation.

Still, there are signs that the ongoing second season is, so far, significantly better than the first, and some hope Amazon fulfils its vision for five seasons, because the show, like some other famous series, could gain new fans as it progresses.

Whereas with traditional television, if a show received bad ratings, it was quickly canceled, “with streaming, in the end, with really fine shows, people find them,” said Robert Thompson, director of the Bleier Center for Television and Popular Culture at Syracuse University. “It sometimes takes them a long time.”

But it’s now bouncing off a low base of expectations. After the series pilot, some passionate fantasy fans quickly derided the work. The company implemented a 72-hour delay on user reviews of the show to prevent trolls from leaving fake reviews to make the show bomb.

“I like to think that that is a small amount of people. I like to think that’s not enough to completely turn a show around,” Thompson said. But “it contributed to a lot of general buzz about that show that was negative, and to somebody who has got a subscription to Hulu and Amazon and Max … with backed-up lists of what they want to watch, any little negative buzz can be enough to kind of say, ‘Okay, I’ll wait to do that one.’”

There were also plenty of people, Thompson included, who still watched the show and just didn’t think it was very good.

“It quite often isn’t anywhere near good. There are moments in almost every episode where I have found myself sniggering into my sleeve at how inept it is,” Stuart Heritage, a Guardian critic , wrote.

Thompson said the “dialogue seemed kind of stilted, filled with these narrative, clunky, ham-handed coincidences”.

The Rings of Power occurs thousands of years before the familiar Hobbit and Lord of the Rings stories in the “second age” of Middle-earth and is based on information from the appendices of the Lord of the Rings trilogy. Though it emulates the style of Peter Jackson’s film hugely successful film adaptations, the series operates in its own way and – based on far more sparse Tolkien material – has confidently created its own plots and characters.

The Rings of Power has now spent a significant amount of time establishing those characters and the basics of the narrative, which was required, said Corey Olsen, a self-described “ Tolkien professor ” who has a doctorate in medieval literature.

“Season one really asked a lot of people, asked for a lot of patience and asked for people to invest before they were fully drawn in,” said Olsen. “Clearly a lot of people were not willing to do it.”

Olsen is among those viewers who completed the first season – and who thinks the second season is much better.

“We are not just setting up characters and plotlines. We are actually moving forward into the big events, and it’s really good,” Olsen said.

Still, there are some critics who argue that the show is not faithful to Tolkien’s source material. Olsen sees that as “awkward and difficult”.

“The whole point of watching an adaptation is that … you are watching a particular person or particular set of people’s vision for a story, and of course that vision might be different from your own,” Olsen said.

For example, some fans complained that the character Galadriel , played by Morfydd Clark, was vastly different from the character in the books and from Cate Blanchett’s depiction in Jackson’s film adaptations.

“The criticism that these characters are different from how they are represented in a book which describes them at a point 3,000 years in their future seems to be a little unreasonable,” Olsen said.

Even if season two is better, it does not appear that most of the fans who left were ready to give the show another shot.

About 900,000 US households tuned in to the first episode of the second season within four days of its premiere, according to Samba TV , which provides audience analytics.

That is about half the size of the audience of the season one pilot.

Amazon has not yet fully confirmed that there will be a third season, but Patrick McKay, one of the Rings of Power showrunners, told the Hollywood Reporter : “All we can say is, we’re working on it. We’re cooking. Let us cook!”

Olsen would like to see Amazon fulfill its vision for five seasons.

“The whole project is a really interesting project. I would absolutely like to see it finished,” he said.

Thompson, of Syracuse University, said that studios do not cancel shows as quickly with streaming, unlike television decades ago, which could help Amazon with Rings of Power. He points to the way “Breaking Bad” developed a cult following and then gained millions of viewers during its fourth and fifth season when it became available on Netflix .

“People were catching up with it,” Thompson said. “These things almost have time to ferment, and whether they are good or bad, ultimately, kind of works itself out.”