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Collections: Why Rings of Power’s Middle Earth Feels Flat

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Submission statement for Southkraut: Bret Deveraux discusses everything The Rings of Power creators did wrong other than the culture war stuff. TLDR: they understand neither geography nor economics nor anthropology. Also, they are racist towards the Irish.

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I mean, every time the showrunners gave an interview, they just dug the hole deeper and deeper. Ten years working on scripts which never got made - but that was just down to mysterious causes no-one could anticipate, not because they were poor writers who only got work as script doctors and never had a credit of their own. And so then they decided "Hey, might as well try TV 'cos we're never gonna have our own movie" but they needed J J Abrams to pull strings for them even there:

“We had reached a point — we’d been writing movies for 10 years that should have gotten made,” McKay says. “Movies where the director was right, the cast was right, the script was right, the title was right and it was a big IP — and it still wasn’t happening. So [we thought] maybe we should try this TV thing.”

...The duo walked into their second Amazon meeting with full confidence. And then … well … “We did seven more pitches,” McKay says.

...At one point, Payne and McKay asked mentor and former boss J.J. Abrams to call Amazon to put in a good word, and he did. “We feel like that moved the needle,” says McKay.

...Amazon claims there’s been a coordinated effort to attack the show for daring to diversify Tolkien with strong female characters and people of color. “The hardest part was for people on the cast who have had things related to them privately that are just harmful,” Sanders says.

"Yeah, so we're talentless hacks who went for this project out of desperation, luckily we had an in with a guy who could get us hired because we sure weren't getting the job on our merits. But why people criticise our show, well that's just trolls and racists, you know?"

"Yeah, so we're talentless hacks who went for this project out of desperation, luckily we had an in with a guy who could get us hired because we sure weren't getting the job on our merits. But why people criticise our show, well that's just trolls and racists, you know?"

They don't care what we think. They're selling themselves to the industry as "we had experience, took us a while to get here, now we're here". You tend to see this a lot with actors who talk about their long struggle or how many rounds of auditions and screen tests they went in for a momentous role.

This usually works better when your movie /performance isn't a total flop (it usually happens on the promotional circuit before release) but, as you point out, they have a solution to that: hiding behind the alleged victims of racism and sexism.

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