Why Can't Amazon Make Good Fantasy Adaptations?
Galadriel, Rings of Power. Image courtesy of Amazon Studios.
The hype for Amazon’s Rings of Power series was huge. It has been marketed as the most expensive TV spectacle ever, its inclusive and diverse cast was heavily discussed, and it generated a huge amount of backlash from a certain type of Tolkien fan. It’s become a kind of cultural lightening rod that I’m sure will be discussed as a seminal moment in American media in doctoral dissertations for many years to come. But at the end of the day this show needed to deliver on one thing. It needed to be good. No one will ultimately care about all that other stuff if the story is compelling, if the characters are interesting and sympathetic, if the dialogue is engaging and witty.
Amazon’s Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power is none of those things. It is, in fact, atrociously written. It opens with a scene set in Valinor where a young Galadriel is bullied and then gets a life lesson about why rocks sink and boats float. The dialogue, the plotting, the characters - they do not ever get better from there. At one point, right before she is to enter Valinor, Galadriel jumps into the ocean and just starts swimming. You are telling me writers being paid huge sums of money were sitting around in the writers room and they all agreed that this was a good idea?
Later, a random sea monster attacks, for no reason. This becomes characteristic of much of the show, with random things happening to inject some spectacle into the proceedings. It’s OK if you change the lore in ways that make sense for narrative or character or structural or other practical purposes. But hardly anything makes sense in this show and you never care about the characters.
The dialogue is hideously bad. Virtually all of it comes off as a forced and terrible attempt to sound like Tolkien. This has all been covered in some detail by other reviewers. Even among those who approached the show in good faith, and were rooting for it, most of them have given up at this point. The smart ones jumped ship when they heard the rock thing. Not a single person on Earth is enjoying the Harfoot subplot.
It’s OK if a middling fantasy show that is just supposed to be third-tier genre schlock is bad. But this is Lord of the Rings. This is the most expensive show ever made. It is absolutely mind-boggling that writing of this quality was allowed to be put into production. Actors were hired to speak these lines and do these things, surrounded by expensive CGI backgrounds. So who is to blame for this debacle?
If it were a one-off it would be one thing. But this is kind of starting to seem like an Amazon problem. An institutional problem. For one, whoever negotiated the rights obviously did not understand what they were getting or what they were doing. Amazon reportedly spent $250 million to acquire the rights to the book material and the appendices, not the Silmarillion or any of the deep lore that would fill out the time period in which the show is set. The show is thus heavily restricted in terms of what it can and can’t do.
Had they been aware of these restrictions it seems unfathomable that any lawyer or executive of sound mind would have signed off on paying $250 million for such a very limited set of rights. To me it seems more likely that a corporate team was tasked with acquiring the rights, but they didn’t know the lore and so didn’t fully understand what they were buying. They got swindled, but nobody wants to admit it. It’s the only explanation that makes sense.
The fingerprints of corporate mismanagement don’t stop there. One of the big complaints about the Rings of Power is the way it is structured. It begins by jumping around Middle Earth between a handful of different and mostly unconnected characters and story arcs. As Season One plods along, some of these narrative threads start to come together. But none of it is done naturally. It doesn’t feel like it was structured this way in order to tell the best story in the most compelling way possible. Instead it feels like a corporate executive told the writers the show was going to run for 5-seasons, and to map out a narrative strategy for filling 40 to 50 episodes of epic fantasy television.
Consequently, a lot of this just feels like filler because Amazon expects the show to run for a certain period of time. Characters do things and move between locations and show up at certain times simply because this Masterplan calls for it. This is exactly what started happening in Season 3 of Marvelous Mrs Maisel, an otherwise terrific show that in the third season was suddenly bogged down with pretty awful filler that just seemed designed to stretch the series to five seasons. I originally thought this was the fault of the showrunner, but because it keeps happening in Amazon productions it seems like it might be an institutional issue. Amazon wants a certain amount of content, and they want the plot to do certain things, and will happily sacrifice good writing in order to hit their quarterly goal or whatever.
The problems in Rings of Power can also be found in Amazon’s test run fantasy epic, The Wheel of Time. The writers changed entire characters and plot points and invented new ones for no real reason at all. It struggled with finding a narrative structure that worked for the story, and instead did dumb things like build the entire season around a ridiculous Whoddunit, the kind of thing you could definitely see coming down in studio notes from an Amazon executive (or even from a showrunner) who doesn’t understand or care about what made the source material good.
So much daytime soap opera drama was pumped into Wheel of Time, and it was also waylaid by the same kind of bad dialogue and nonsensical character beats as Rings of Power. There is more source material for The Wheel of Time to work with, which probably helped it to be at least somewhat more enjoyable. But it struggled with the same fundamental problems of adaptation as Rings of Power and made many of the same kind of bad choices.
That is why, ultimately, I think this may not be a single show-runners fault but a bigger institutional issue with the way executives at Amazon are trying to develop these shows. There are really bad and obvious technical faults - in terms of fight choreography, writing, plotting, character development, you name it. But this may flow from a corporate structure at Amazon that doesn’t understand these properties and is thus fundamentally incapable of adapting them properly.
That would help explain why Wheel of Time and Rings of Power are bad in the same ways, and also why the Rings of Power spent so much money to get so little in terms of rights. It doesn’t make sense from a rational economic actor point of view, but it does snap into sharper focus if our baseline assumption is that the muppets running the show at Amazon Studio have no idea what they are actually adapting or what makes stories - especially fantasy stories - enjoyable.
