Towards the end of the first episode of Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, I finally worked out what Amazon’s impossibly expensive show reminded me of. It was not New Zealand, where Peter Jackson’s beloved film trilogy, not-so-beloved The Hobbit prequels and this show’s first season were filmed. Nor was it the English countryside which inspired J. R. R. Tolkien’s sprawling novels. It was a photograph of an almost preternaturally green field in California’s Wine Country, taken by Charles O’Rear – also known as Bliss, the default wallpaper for Microsoft Windows XP.
With its cloud-scattered blue sky, it’s an eternally sunny place to zone out after sending an email. The Rings of Power, a supremely glossy offering, is reminiscent of such calming backgrounds but takes things a step further, with an extensive cycle of locations to gawp at. The action is so gently paced, you can miss 10 minutes and not have missed anything at all. This is screensaver TV; where zoning out is not only possible, it might even be encouraged.
This series, set to cost over $1 billion throughout its run, pre-dates Jackson’s trilogy by some 3,000 years, jumping from Middle-earth’s third age to its second. That means no Frodo, Aragorn or Gandalf. Naturally, immortal elves Galadriel (a very convincing Morfydd Clark) and Elrond (Robert Aramayo) are here, though their personalities are unrecognisable. Storywise, we are now off-script but still in the margins – the series is inspired by Tolkien’s appendices to The Lord of the Rings. There are some headline events but otherwise the studio has freer rein, something which Tolkien would probably approve of.
Despite, or perhaps because of, the author’s grandiose world-building, the plot is straightforward. Following a brutal war between the elves (good) and Morgoth (evil), Sauron (also evil) kills Galadriel’s brother. She swears revenge, roaming Middle-earth to oust all remaining traces of Sauron. The series kicks off as Galadriel returns from her mission, suspicious that evil is lying just out of sight while her fellow elves live in happy ignorance.
It is a show of moving parts, and some of those are more compelling than others. In the Southlands, elves keep an eye on humans, on the naughty list because they previously helped Sauron. Meanwhile the hobbits, technically an ancestral group called the harfoots, pick berries and avoid wolves. Lenny Henry, playing a harfoot called Sadoc Burrows, makes proclamations like, “The skies are strange.” The most intriguing thing here is the ubiquitous Irish accent.
Throughout the first two episodes, we are guided through Middle-earth hotspots. Lindon, the capital of the high elves; the Southlands, the lands of men; Khazad-dûm, the opulent underground world of dwarves. These worlds all glisten out-of-reach, like aspirational drone shots. They’re introduced in a wide shot and then the action takes place in closed-off places; under the shade of a tree or a dwarf’s living room.
This “look, don’t touch” policy is jarring, as though show runners J.D Payne and Patrick McKay are so proud of their beautiful world they don’t want anything to threaten it. An old-fashioned walk and talk between elf and dwarf wouldn’t go amiss.
Still, there are some striking shots. The cavernous city built by dwarves has a whizzy charm, with its Middle-earth-style lift. In Lindon, elven fireworks stream skywards, forming giant butterflies. An extended scene where Galadriel is bathed in the eternal light of the Valinor emits a sun-bed glow, probably unhealthy but impossible to resist.
The real test for The Rings of Power will be whether audiences are keen for its genre-bucking sense of escapism and earnestness. Eight years of Game of Thrones primed audiences for Internet-breaking death scenes, incest and so much sex that it launched a new trope (“sexposition”). It set a tone for wannabe follow-ups like The Wheel of Time, Vikings and Barbarians. The Rings of Power arrives like a glistening elven ship – peaceful, unthreatening. There are a few jump scares courtesy of orcs and a snow-troll, but nothing that will keep you up. There's some romance in Middle-earth, but no nudity.
That may test attention spans. At a time of endless feeds and algorithms, the show lacks a water cooler moment. In the opening episodes, there's nothing to make you text your friend, and certainly nothing akin to House of the Dragon’s season opening childbirth scene. That won’t bother anyone happy to simply spend time in Tolkien’s world, but pacing might be a problem for more casual viewers.
A suggested solution? Embrace the calm. Watch it on as big a screen as possible, turn your phone off (or at least upside down). When a character says something like, “should the elf forfeit, he will be banished from all dwarven lands forever”, do not laugh. Savour it. After two minutes in Middle-earth, I zoned out. After two hours, I had attuned to a new frequency of elves, dwarves and hobbits (sorry, harfoots). It was relaxing. For the eye-watering price tag, it ought to be.
You watch the first two episodes of The Rings of Power on Amazon Prime on 2 September. New episodes will be released weekly.
Henry Wong is a senior culture writer at Esquire, working across digital and print. He covers film, television, books, and art for the magazine, and also writes profiles.
