The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power (2022)
All the lavish production design in the world can't disguise how inept at its core this show is. One of the most common criticisms of the show I've seen in online discussions is its lack of fidelity to the source material, and that's certainly fair, but even setting that aside, this show is simply incompetently written and structured. The showrunners - two complete novices without a single IMDb credit between them, but thankfully they're pals with J.J. Abrams, so the good ol' boys network threw them this gig - don't take the time to create interesting or relatable characters. They don't tell a meaningful story either in each episode or over the course of the season, instead just starting and finishing seemingly at random. Their approach to this show, as far as I can tell, seems to essentially be that because this is LotR, people should already be invested in this, and therefore this show doesn't have to do anything another TV show would to keep their investment.
There are a lot of things I could point to, both big and small, as being unconducive to good storytelling, but here's the one detail that annoyed me the most. This show follows four separate subplots, and when I say separate, I mean that they are all so segregated from one another that they might as well come from different shows. There is nothing that connects them either storywise or thematically. Three of the subplots do eventually intersect in terms of their characters meeting, but that has nothing to do with their stories coming together. The characters simply stumble upon each other seemingly coincidentally. I've never seen a show do something like this - have several subplots that simply don't coalesce into an overall story, or at least indicate how these subplots are all connected. What is this show about? How are these stories connected? It's not enough to just say that it's LotR and that's the connection. It's not how storytelling works.
Are there any redeeming qualities to this mess of a show? Yeah, sure. Everything looks fantastic for the most part, with large, detailed sets, nice-looking costumes, excellent makeup work, and so on. Elrond and Durin have an engaging odd-couple dynamic. The show's portrayal of a Harfoot society is charming, and the actors playing the Harfoots are arguably the most committed of the entire cast - although it would have been nice to have actually cast Irish actors to fit with the coding of the Harfoots as Irish. I also like the character of Adar, a mysterious antagonist who seems to challenge Tolkien's essentialist portrayal of orcs as always chaotic evil and argues that they are people who deserve to live as much as any other race. That's about all I've got. Pretty much everything else is slow, boring, clunky, and surprisingly reliant on modern clichés (just imagine Galadriel as the hardened cop who knows that the killer is still out there, Celebrimbor as the mad scientist who won't let anything stop his work, Isildur as the scrappy young rookie eager to prove himself, and so on) that feel jarringly out of place for Tolkien. It's a real shame. Unlike many LotR fans, I wasn't hoping for this show to fail, and I think we could have gotten something special in the hands of qualified showrunners with an actual vision for the show.