The Rings of Power bosses are “listening” to fan feedback for season 2

The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power wrapped up its first season with a bang; Sauron was revealed, the titular Rings of Power were forged, and a bearded wizard who certainly isn’t Gandalf set out east alongside Nori the harfoot. The show got a lot of criticism, the show found an audience, the show will be back for a season 2. But was it the huge success that Amazon was hoping it would be?

“I’d say, you would probably have to ask Amazon what success looked like for them in terms of the business standpoint of things,” showrunner J.D. Payne told Vanity Fair. “They have a very complex way that they measure how viewership impacts the platform, and what their goals are, and all those things. For us as storytellers, success means people engaging with the material in a way that impacts them.”

And did people engage with the material in a way that impacts them? Certainly yes, as Payne illustrates. “We receive notes from people that you say, ‘Hey, I got together and watched this with my family, and we haven’t had a reason to get together for a while, but this brought us together on Friday night.’ And they say, ‘We were all talking about it for hours afterwards.'”

"It’s a thing that brings people together, whether it’s families or friends or groups of people who like Tolkien, or who like fantasy, or just like TV in general. There were moments people found very emotional, that move them in some way, or lines that they found meaning in. And each of those things was immensely gratifying."

The Rings of Power season 2 was (mostly) already planned when fan responses came in

That is very heartwarming, but there are a lot of people who criticized the show. Some of that is best ignored, like the contingent of people mad that there are Black dwarves, but there are also Lord of the Rings fans who objected to show’s disregard of canon, like the reveal that mithril is actually a side effect of lightning striking a Silmaril or something.

Tolkien never established how mithril was created, and it seems odd to go routing around in his legendarium about it now. It was also odd to say that mithril was the key to the elves being able to stay on Middle-earth, hence why (on the show) mithril is incorporated into the three elven rings of power. “We wanted to make sure that the rings themselves are invested with this otherworldly kind of power and energy,” Payne explained. “As they’re making it, it’s made with a special kind of process. But we wanted to put a little extra spice on top of that and say, ‘Does it actually have some kind of light that comes from beyond what mortal or even immortal beings could generate?’”

That to me seems pretty silly, and I hope the writers do a little editorializing come season 2. But according to Payne, changes aren’t really in the cards. “In terms of how it’s impacted season two, we wrote most of season two before season one came out,” he explained. “We’re refining the last bits of it now as we’re starting to shoot. But really, the cake was kind of baked before the audience response came in.”

"Certainly, you look at audience response, and you see what characters people love, and what kinds of storytelling moves them. I wouldn’t say we’re over-correcting for any of it, but we’re certainly listening to people’s responses."

Payne’s coshowrunner Patrick McKay also weighed in. “I think in some ways the audience response, we’re a year ahead of that because we saw it a year ago, and we were like, ‘Here it’s really seeming to work, and here it’s maybe not working as well as we might have hoped or thought it would.’ So to the extent there’s a course correction, it’s just us building on the strengths of the show and on the strengths of our actors and our designers.”

"[G]enerally, when you sift through the noise, I think we feel that people see the same show we do. And the things we love, they love. And the things we know maybe, “Oh, we got away with it there. We’ve got to do better next time,” were things people called us on."

All of this sounds like there won’t be many changes in direction when the second season of The Rings of Power premieres on Amazon Prime Video, probably sometime in 2024.

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