How ‘The Rings of Power’ Navigated Great Expectations and a Racist Backlash
thewrap.comThis story first appeared in The Race Begins issue of TheWrap’s awards magazine.When Amazon set out to make a “Lord of the Rings” TV series, they didn’t scale down the world of J.R.R.
Tolkien for the “small screen.” Instead, for the first in a planned five-season storyline, the studio looked to meet the scale, ambition and prestige of Peter Jackson’s Oscar-winning film trilogy. “I’m glad that from the very beginning, Amazon had the ambition to try to match that bar,” J.A.
Bayona, who directed the first two episodes of the series, said. “And because we were going to the origins of the story, to places and characters in a way that we had never seen before, that gave us the freedom to create our own thing.”Pulling from Tolkien’s work, “The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power” takes place thousands of years before the events portrayed in The Hobbit or Lord of the Rings, in a time of peace and prosperity throughout Middle-earth.
And while it features younger versions of characters fans know and love (the elves Galadriel and Elrond and the series’ big bad, Sauron), the 10-episode first season takes place across four fully realized—and wildly different—realms populated by different races.Visually, Bayona embraced the freedom to bring a cinematic approach to storytelling in a prestige TV series — not despite its fantasy genre trappings, but in celebration of them.
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