The most expensive TV drama ever made returned this week for its second instalment, and nobody really noticed. The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power has reportedly cost Amazon’s Prime Video service $1 billion or so already, and the final bill will come in a lot higher if the streamer keeps its promise of five seasons. For Amazon’s founder, Jeff Bezos, $1 billion is what you find down the back of the couch.
There has been much speculation about why the works of JRR Tolkien exert such a fascination for a particular corner of the zeitgeist, ranging from tech billionaires such as Bezos, Peter Thiel and Elon Musk to the US vice-presidential contender JD Vance and the neo-fascist Brothers of Italy party. The agitated reaction in ethnonationalist circles to the colour-blind casting of the first season of The Rings of Power might offer a clue; what is it about an epic saga of continentwide race war in which fair-skinned warriors defend their homelands against swarms of swarthy savages led by a duplicitous enemy within?
With its multiracial hobbits, dwarves and elves, the Bezos version of Middle-earth goes to some lengths to play down these resonances. Pity it couldn’t come up with a better storyline along the way, though. Part of the blame may attach to the Tolkien estate, which Amazon paid $250 million for the right to develop narratives based on the original Lord of the Rings trilogy but which also retained a say in key creative decisions. Famously, the family had reservations about Peter Jackson’s three films – smelling salts were reportedly required chez Tolkien after the dwarf-tossing gag in The Two Towers – and you can sense their clammy, wraith-like fingers on the lifeless Rings of Power script.
But you can also see why the deal might have made sense to Prime in 2017-18, when it was being negotiated. The Marvel Cinematic Universe was in its pomp; its Star Wars equivalent was spreading its tentacles across galaxies far, far away. Infinitely extendable and exploitable franchises generating streams of episodic TV and blockbuster movies seemed like the future of entertainment. Now? Not so much.
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[ Why does Lord of the Rings appeal to the radical right?Opens in new window ]
There’s also the fact that, even without the Tolkien estate, the world of Middle-earth is much less elastic than the bubblegum operas of Star Wars and the MCU. You can’t crowbar in contemporary references or stick Legolas and Gimli on a spaceship to another planet. Instead you’re stuck with the ersatz-Norse sagas and hey-nonny-ney verse of which Tolkien was a little too fond. (The top hey-nonny-neyer Tom Bombadil, whom Jackson sensibly dropped from his version, crops up in the shape of Rory Kinnear in the new season of The Rings of Power.)
Ultimately, though, the folly of The Rings of Power is more interesting for what it tells us about the new age of television than about the Second Age of Middle-earth. The current TV landscape of which it forms a part is, to use an adjective made popular recently by Vance’s electoral opponent Tim Walz, weird.
Consider Apple TV+. What is it for? It produces some very good dramas, from Severance to Sunny to Slow Horses. But it seems unlikely that many people subscribe to the platform year-round for its sporadic trickle of fresh content. And, yes, you get a free sub for a while when you buy a new Apple device (or a non-Apple one from some retailers).
But the idea that people are forking out €1,000 on a new iPhone because of a burning desire to see the new version of Presumed Innocent seems unlikely. Apple, like Amazon, is using a small portion of its vast riches to dabble in a non-core activity in which, to judge by the way it fails to promote its titles, it has only a passing interest and which will reach only a fraction of their potential audience. At some point, someone in the company will surely call a halt.
Meanwhile, the legacy broadcasters and cable companies still struggle to make the numbers add up on platforms such as Peacock and Max, while the business pages are full of speculation about possible mergers and reconfigurations. Even Disney+ is struggling badly. Only Netflix sails on, fuelled by a successful move into cheaper, ad-supported subscriptions and a shift to lower-cost reality shows and reruns.
So is that it? The age of prestige TV is over and Netflix won the streaming wars? Not quite. The fastest-growing entrant in the US market, Tubi, arrived in the UK this month (and presumably will come to these shores soon). Taking the new Netflix template to its logical conclusion, Tubi is supported by ads, not subscriptions, with a large catalogue of second-run TV series and bargain-basement movies. It’s free, mediocre telly, just like in the good old days. The circle, it seems, is now complete.
