Mercifully, Tolkien never had to see “Rings of Power”… unless they have TV in Heaven.
I am a lifelong J.R.R. Tolkien fan, an unabashed admirer of his finished work, The Lord of the Rings. And it makes me see red, to see the liberties taken with his work by philistines and profiteers… who, incidentally, are not making any profit out of it.
Amazon Studios has stuck itself with a bomb, a massive prequel to Tolkien’s saga in which themes he developed in other works have been co-opted by yahoos and turned into this billion-dollar flubster, Rings of Power (https://www.breitbart.com/entertainment/2023/04/04/nolte-amazons-woke-rings-power-lost-63-percent-viewers/). Reviewer John Nolte called it “unsufferably woke and boring.”
Here’s the set-up. Amazon puts up a billion dollars to produce and air this thing over five seasons. Season One, eight episodes, went on the air last year and got off to a flying start–there are a lot of Tolkien fans out there. But by the time Episode 8 rolled around, 63% of the original audience had gotten off in the lifeboats, leaving only 37% still watching. Well, their TV sets were on… who knows if they were really watching?
Tolkien was a conservative Catholic. “Woke” would have made him shudder. To have his life’s work hijacked by a mob of wokies would have appalled him.
Dammit! There ought to be some kind of powerful advocacy group out there to defend the work of artists who are no longer alive to defend it themselves. They’ve gone after Tolkien like Attila the Hun went after Europe. Probably you could get a better deal from Attila. How many ignorant young viewers are going to wind up thinking Tolkien was another jaw-droppingly stupid gank like the rest of their professors at college? Ignorance can be fixed… as long as the truth still survives somewhere. They’re workin ‘ on that, too.