Amazon Reportedly Has a Very Expensive Disaster on its Hands as the 'Rings of Power' Audience is Cratering

Contrary to what you might hear about the audience for nerd culture content, your fans of SciFi, fantasy, superhero, comic book and gaming entertainment like to like things. Sometimes it might seem like they prefer content to be terrible so they can bitch about it. And for sure there's a lucrative industry of YouTubers who seem to perpetually have their glasses fogged up with nerd rage over the latest desecration of some Intellectual Property or other. 

But generally speaking, I come down on their side. Because for the most part, they tend to be the ones who have supported these various franchises, bought the tickets and the merchandise, and made them the successes that they are. And when other, less creative people get their hands on the same IP and diminish the quality, those fans are right to be angry. To me, it's really not much different than being emotionally attached to a sports team that used to compete for championships but now is perpetually near the bottom of the league. (Patriots and Red Sox fan here. I can relate.) It's only natural you're going to call out the people in charge and demanding they make things as good as they used to be. 

So it is with perhaps my favorite work of fiction of all time JRR Tolkien's Lord of the Rings. I devoured the books when I was in middle school and have been going back to them ever since. I waited decades for a decent film adaptation to come along and do the books justice, and 25 years ago Peter Jackson delivered a triumph. Nothing less than the best movie trilogy of all time. Then, for a variety of reasons, he dropped the ball on The Hobbit films. Mostly because he took a fairly short, straightforward book for young audiences and watered it down into three excruciatingly tedious movies. An unnecessary trilogy I never finished and never will. 

But The Hobbits were The Godfather Saga compared to Rings of Power. Jeff Bezos paid a quarter of a billion dollars for the rights to some of Tolkien's footnotes and appendices. And as far as I was concerned after watching S1 E1, he would've been better off handing that money to Sam Bankman-Fried:

And like so much of nerd culture these days, the audience agreed. Even if the critics didn't:

And now that Season 2 is underway, the public has spoken. In the loudest way for an audience to speak. With their TV remotes:

Source - According to data from Samba TV, 902,000 U.S. households tuned in for the premiere episode within four days of its debut, which is down quite significantly from the first season.

 In fact, it’s half the audience that the first episode of Season 1 drew in less time. Samba says that, within three days of viewing, 1.8M U.S. households had watched the first episode. 

Samba TV doesn’t measure mobile, however, their sample includes a panel of 3 million terrestrial TVs, weighted to the U.S. Census. By contrast, Samba TV’s panel is nearly 100x larger than Nielsen’s household footprint of 45K homes. 

Therefore, Samba’s data doesn’t tell the whole viewing story, though it does give a pretty good picture of the episode’s performance — and it indicates a steep drop in interest season-over-season.

It should be noted that no one knows for sure what the numbers are because Amazon won't release them or comment on them. But even if these ones are off slightly, it's still losing, give-or-take, half it's audience year-to-year. There's simply no positive way to spin a $250 million TV series that's expected to go five seasons having 50% of its viewership lose interest so soon. 

Why that is exactly, your guess is better than mine. Because I checked out long before the rest of that 50%. Though it could be the fact that the showrunners have introduced the concept of the Orc Family:

Daddy Orc, Mama Orc, and Li'l Baby Orc. A nice nuclear Orc family. Loving. Sympathetic. Devoted. Where Papa Orc is bemoaning the fact he and his Orc buddies have to go off to war to serve the Dark Lord, when he'd rather stay back in the cave helping Mom with dinner or taking Junior out into the Plains of Mordor to throw the ol' ball around. I mean, Professor Tolkien just portrayed their species as the embodiment of evil. Cruelly twisted by their ancient master long, long ago into sadistic monsters who take pleasure in others' sufferings and who exist just to wipe out the Free Peoples of Middle Earth. The gang in the writer's room over at Prime HQ have turned them into the Seavers from Growing Pains. 

There are other reasons. The introduction of Tom Bombadil, an immortal figure of godlike powers so mysterious and strange as to be unadaptable. But from the trailer of S2, they just made him drab and boring. There's a scene of Sauron pleading with his Orc army to follow him. And the guy who is clearly supposed to be Gandalf but who isn't called Gandalf. And with all the subtle complexities of his supernatural being removed. And Galadriel seems to remain a petulant child who is constantly in a snit. PASS. 

I'll just include here what I said during Season 1:

This isn't Tolkien. It's a Tolkien tribute band. … [P]eople who are trying to imitate the author's style. And they are not up to the task. Like not at all. As the wizard Saruman the White says of King Theoden in the original novels, "You are a lesser son of greater sires." That sick burn applies to these showrunners. …

I can still pick up LOTRs, go to any random chapter, and lose myself in Tolkien's prose. The best description I've ever heard of the world he wrote about is that it's like he didn't actually create Middle Earth; it always existed, and he's just the one who discovered it. That's how complete his vision is, how compelling and fleshed out his characters are, and how vivid his language is. 

Rings of Power has none of that.  Even more than an incomparable storyteller, JRRT was a linguist. A student of ancient languages who at one time worked as a lexicographer, translating dictionaries. In school his class was assignment was to give speeches in Latin. He did his in Gothic, which is a dead language. And as you read LOTRs, he uses this talent in his world building. The Elves are the oldest characters, so they speak in an ancient tongue. The Dwarves language is borrowed from Norse culture. Men speak in English of the Middle Ages. The Hobbits, who are more or less are stand-ins for us, speak modern English. All while going on quests and adventures, facing peril and fighting major battles. By comparison, the TV show sounds like mediocre FanFic. 

And since 900,000 former viewers can't be wrong, I'll argue I wasn't wrong. This is a disaster for Prime Video. And no doubt they'll blame the toxic, Tolkien fandom. But this is entirely on them doing such a garbage job adapting the world that literary genius created. Again, I want to like things. This is not one of those things.