The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power promises to be one of the biggest shows of the summer…of any summer. Amazon is spending a dragon’s horde worth of money on this thing: over $1 billion, if everything goes according to plan. This is one of the biggest swings in the history of TV.
In fact, it might be hard to even call this TV. That seems to be the feeling of J.A. Bayona, one of the showrunners on the series. “The Rings Of Power is not television,” he recently told Empire. “It’s a new form we’re creating here.”
Now, on one level, that’s a silly thing to say. The Rings of Power has eight episodes. It has seasons. It tells a serialized story with characters who return week after week. That’s TV. But on the other hand, I kind of get it. The lines between TV and movies have been blurring more and more of late. There are episodes of Game of Thrones that depict battles as epic as anything you’ve seen at the cinema, and the upcoming finale of Stranger Things season 4 is a staggering two-and-a-half hours long. It’s TV…but it’s not TV like most folk have ever known it, and The Rings of Power is playing in this same playground.
The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power has “a lot of action in it”
Bayona is directing the first two episodes of the series, and will be working alongside showrunners JD Payne and Patrick McKay to bring The Rings of Power to life. Per MovieWeb, Payne and McKay went into a little more depth about what to expect from this not-TV kind of TV show:
"The siege at Helm’s Deep is so iconic and amazing that it was like, ‘What’s a different thing that we can do that still feels like Middle-earth but is unique for this story?’ The show has a lot of action in it — more so than any television or streaming show that we’ve seen. Every episode has set pieces, creatures, battles and white-knuckle fights to the death. But instead of having 10,000 Orcs fighting 10,000 men, what’s it like to have one Orc in your face, in your kitchen? What’s it like trying to kill an Orc when you’ve never killed an Orc before?"
Okay, action’s nice. I hope they have the story to back all of it up.
The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power premieres on Amazon Prime Video on September 2.
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