Roy Price was an executive at Amazon.com for 13 years, where he founded Amazon Video and Studios.
Roy Price was an executive at Amazon.com for 13 years, where he founded Amazon Video and Studios.
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Thoughts on Lord of the Rings: Rings of Power and on moving forward.
OBJECTIVE RESULTS
To its credit, many people sampled the show and it generated more discussion than the average show. No surprise that people would check out a big LOTR show.
But did they like it? Is it attracting new subs and inspiring retention?
Rotten Tomatoes: 39%
IMDb: 6.9
Ratings appear to have been removed from Amazon.com, but it appears to be around a 3.3.
These are fairly consistent with each other.
I’d classify that as Needs Improvement.
For context, most of Amazon’s shows have been >>6.9 on IMDb.
Maisel 8.7
Fleabag 8.7
Boys 8.7
Bosch 8.5
Transparent 7.8
Jack Ryan 8.0
Terminal List 8.0
I’d estimate that the 95% range of IMDb scores are 6-8.9. A 6.9 is like a ~2 from 1-4.
The weak spots on IMDb are men and ex-US viewers. With a fantasy/action property you’d normally expect to land the male audience. On the bright side, that should be taken as the low hanging fruit opportunity moving forward.
The aud that likes it the most is women 45+ (7.7). Still not love. W <18 v negative (6.0).
On Reddit, the House of the Dragon community is 613K vs ROP’s 45K. 13.6X enthusiasm gap. That is an indirect measure of “people who really love it.” Makes sense.
So ROP attracted attention, which comes w the territory, but, it seems, did not deliver results.
MY SUBJECTIVE ASSESSMENT
One challenge with high end TV today is that the bar is high. There really isn’t a film world and a TV world. There is just one world. It’s as if we used to have the NFL and college football, but now there is just one league. If you’re not tier A, you can’t hide. Day one in the NFL is going to be a very, very long day. And that’s basically where I think we are here.
To begin with, there were too many small issues to get into. On the show with a budget like this you should be able to insist on the highest standards and paint both sides of the fence. Small issues distract. The accents are often inconsistent. The armor is arguably too clean and polished. It just doesn’t feel “gritty” or real. The fight choreography and physics aren’t awesome. High pitched emotions are often not earned. There are constant, long pauses with many solo violins. There are sincere expressions galore. Everything is always momentous without necessarily earning that momentousness. Too few scenes have complex and interesting evolutions with turns. Well written scenes go from a to b to c where each step offers revelation about the characters. The pauses in the archaic dialogue are so theatrical and frequent that sometimes I was expecting the actor just to say “line?” Those are writing and directing issues.
A lot of the key warriors seem honestly too young and frail to be credible Medieval warriors. They look more like St Laurent models than Medieval knights.
In general, I felt like this owed less to Tolkein than to modern broadcast TV. Maybe Lost. Or Marvel.
All of these together make it easy to go to the kitchen and make tea or catch up on Twitter. Minor distractions add up.
But none of that is as important as the central issue — there is no lead character. That is, there is no lead character here who is relatable and who you might pull for. It plays like a lost Pirandello play — “6 secondary characters in search of a lead.”
Totally Charmless Galadriel is by turns petulant, bitter, entitled, self-important, narcissistic, grouchy and psycho. 5,000 years old, she nevertheless comes off as someone who is still bitter about that loss 4,982 years ago in the race for class treasurer and she is going to show everyone.
What she never is: intimidating. Or wise.
She has all the appeal of Grand Moff Tarkin.
Meanwhile Elrond is stiff and dull. He comes off as an Elven attorney. It’s mainly the role. It just never became a charismatic thing that you wanted more of.
The thing I have learned about 5,000 year old magical elves is this: a little goes a long way. When you have a larger than life character like Yoda or Obi Wan or Ahab or Gatsby or ET, it doesn’t work to have a long lunch with them or watch them floss. You don’t make such grand characters the lead. They’re the Magical Other character. Instead, you create another character who is the audience entry point who is more relatable.
Magical Other —> Lead character
Ahab —> Ishmael
Jay Gatsby —> Nick Carraway
Obi Wan & Yoda —> Luke Skywalker
Gandalf —> Bilbo
Your lead needs vulnerability. Aspirations. A sense of humor. Love. 5,000 year old magical elves can give you everything you need from them if they have 5 lines per ep, not 30. But they can’t give you the relatability that a Bilbo can give you.
Especially if they have horrible personalities.
Think about Harry Potter. We meet him as an orphan being taken to a new school, vulnerable and afraid. We spend a lot of time on fun sequences like the Sorting Hat Ceremony. We engage him from early on as a vulnerable and relatable human.
This takes us from the lead character issue to the closely related issue of tone.
The tone overall is one dimensional — it’s a war and revenge and seething resentment and hate sandwich. But The Hobbit and LOTR — the things people actually love — are about fantasy, friendship and epic challenge. Yes there are war scenes but they’re moving because we love the characters.
What happens in the beginning of the Hobbit? The dwarves come and have second breakfast with Bilbo.
What about LOTR? Bilbo has a birthday party. And later the Hobbits try to escape through the Old Forest and go on a singing march with Tom Bombadil.
Hey! Come derry dol! Hop along, my hearties!
Hobbits! Ponies all! We are fond of parties.
Now let the fun begin! Let us sing together!
Remember, the first book of the Lord of the Rings is called The “Fellowship” of the Ring. Not the War of the Rings. That friendship matters. Make people love the world and its friendships. Not everything should be about the giant battle. Tolkien brought charm and warmth to his stories and characters that were fundamental. That fellowship of the ring is missing here and must be restored.
LOOKING FORWARD
#1. New blood. Sorry. The issues here are major. And the many small details such as the accents are problematic from a showrunner pov.
#2. Tone. Fantasy, Friendship, Epic challenge and Adventure. Reorient.
#3. Elves to the back. Humans and Harfoots to the front. Relatable underdog leads.
#4. Get a star. They say TV makes its own stars. Not always I guess.
#5. Sell (do not assume) the fantasy elements— song, mithril, elves and trees that are alive. Lure the audience into this amazing magical world. Don’t assume they already know all that. Here it was not all explained.
I still believe that there can be a great LOTR series. But changes would have to be made.
Thoughts on Lord of the Rings: Rings of Power and on moving forward.
OBJECTIVE RESULTS
To its credit, many people sampled the show and it generated more discussion than the average show. No surprise that people would check out a big LOTR show.
But did they like it? Is it attracting new subs and inspiring retention?
Rotten Tomatoes: 39%
IMDb: 6.9
Ratings appear to have been removed from Amazon.com, but it appears to be around a 3.3.
These are fairly consistent with each other.
I’d classify that as Needs Improvement.
For context, most of Amazon’s shows have been >>6.9 on IMDb.
Maisel 8.7
Fleabag 8.7
Boys 8.7
Bosch 8.5
Transparent 7.8
Jack Ryan 8.0
Terminal List 8.0
I’d estimate that the 95% range of IMDb scores are 6-8.9. A 6.9 is like a ~2 from 1-4.
The weak spots on IMDb are men and ex-US viewers. With a fantasy/action property you’d normally expect to land the male audience. On the bright side, that should be taken as the low hanging fruit opportunity moving forward.
The aud that likes it the most is women 45+ (7.7). Still not love. W <18 v negative (6.0).
On Reddit, the House of the Dragon community is 613K vs ROP’s 45K. 13.6X enthusiasm gap. That is an indirect measure of “people who really love it.” Makes sense.
So ROP attracted attention, which comes w the territory, but, it seems, did not deliver results.
MY SUBJECTIVE ASSESSMENT
One challenge with high end TV today is that the bar is high. There really isn’t a film world and a TV world. There is just one world. It’s as if we used to have the NFL and college football, but now there is just one league. If you’re not tier A, you can’t hide. Day one in the NFL is going to be a very, very long day. And that’s basically where I think we are here.
To begin with, there were too many small issues to get into. On the show with a budget like this you should be able to insist on the highest standards and paint both sides of the fence. Small issues distract. The accents are often inconsistent. The armor is arguably too clean and polished. It just doesn’t feel “gritty” or real. The fight choreography and physics aren’t awesome. High pitched emotions are often not earned. There are constant, long pauses with many solo violins. There are sincere expressions galore. Everything is always momentous without necessarily earning that momentousness. Too few scenes have complex and interesting evolutions with turns. Well written scenes go from a to b to c where each step offers revelation about the characters. The pauses in the archaic dialogue are so theatrical and frequent that sometimes I was expecting the actor just to say “line?” Those are writing and directing issues.
A lot of the key warriors seem honestly too young and frail to be credible Medieval warriors. They look more like St Laurent models than Medieval knights.
In general, I felt like this owed less to Tolkein than to modern broadcast TV. Maybe Lost. Or Marvel.
All of these together make it easy to go to the kitchen and make tea or catch up on Twitter. Minor distractions add up.
But none of that is as important as the central issue — there is no lead character. That is, there is no lead character here who is relatable and who you might pull for. It plays like a lost Pirandello play — “6 secondary characters in search of a lead.”
Totally Charmless Galadriel is by turns petulant, bitter, entitled, self-important, narcissistic, grouchy and psycho. 5,000 years old, she nevertheless comes off as someone who is still bitter about that loss 4,982 years ago in the race for class treasurer and she is going to show everyone.
What she never is: intimidating. Or wise.
She has all the appeal of Grand Moff Tarkin.
Meanwhile Elrond is stiff and dull. He comes off as an Elven attorney. It’s mainly the role. It just never became a charismatic thing that you wanted more of.
The thing I have learned about 5,000 year old magical elves is this: a little goes a long way. When you have a larger than life character like Yoda or Obi Wan or Ahab or Gatsby or ET, it doesn’t work to have a long lunch with them or watch them floss. You don’t make such grand characters the lead. They’re the Magical Other character. Instead, you create another character who is the audience entry point who is more relatable.
Magical Other —> Lead character
Ahab —> Ishmael
Jay Gatsby —> Nick Carraway
Obi Wan & Yoda —> Luke Skywalker
Gandalf —> Bilbo
Your lead needs vulnerability. Aspirations. A sense of humor. Love. 5,000 year old magical elves can give you everything you need from them if they have 5 lines per ep, not 30. But they can’t give you the relatability that a Bilbo can give you.
Especially if they have horrible personalities.
Think about Harry Potter. We meet him as an orphan being taken to a new school, vulnerable and afraid. We spend a lot of time on fun sequences like the Sorting Hat Ceremony. We engage him from early on as a vulnerable and relatable human.
This takes us from the lead character issue to the closely related issue of tone.
The tone overall is one dimensional — it’s a war and revenge and seething resentment and hate sandwich. But The Hobbit and LOTR — the things people actually love — are about fantasy, friendship and epic challenge. Yes there are war scenes but they’re moving because we love the characters.
What happens in the beginning of the Hobbit? The dwarves come and have second breakfast with Bilbo.
What about LOTR? Bilbo has a birthday party. And later the Hobbits try to escape through the Old Forest and go on a singing march with Tom Bombadil.
Hey! Come derry dol! Hop along, my hearties!
Hobbits! Ponies all! We are fond of parties.
Now let the fun begin! Let us sing together!
Remember, the first book of the Lord of the Rings is called The “Fellowship” of the Ring. Not the War of the Rings. That friendship matters. Make people love the world and its friendships. Not everything should be about the giant battle. Tolkien brought charm and warmth to his stories and characters that were fundamental. That fellowship of the ring is missing here and must be restored.
LOOKING FORWARD
#1. New blood. Sorry. The issues here are major. And the many small details such as the accents are problematic from a showrunner pov.
#2. Tone. Fantasy, Friendship, Epic challenge and Adventure. Reorient.
#3. Elves to the back. Humans and Harfoots to the front. Relatable underdog leads.
#4. Get a star. They say TV makes its own stars. Not always I guess.
#5. Sell (do not assume) the fantasy elements— song, mithril, elves and trees that are alive. Lure the audience into this amazing magical world. Don’t assume they already know all that. Here it was not all explained.
I still believe that there can be a great LOTR series. But changes would have to be made.
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