![\"The](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/1784991609_656_0x0.jpg\")
<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
He’s Number One!<\/p>\n
Credit: Amazon Prime Video<\/p>\n
You have not seen what I have seen. Unless, of course, you\u2019ve watched the first two seasons of The Rings Of Power and the brand new trailer for its third season, which debuts on November 11 of this year.<\/p>\n
The new trailer for Amazon\u2019s wildly expensive and creatively disastrous epic fantasy series, very very loosely based on some rather dubious interpretations of the work of J.R.R. Tolkien, is out now and it promises a \u201cdarker\u201d Season 3. Amazon\u2019s marketing team said much the same about Season 2, but I\u2019m not sure \u201cdarker\u201d is what fans of Tolkien are really looking for in a show like this. Tolkien isn\u2019t some grimdark fantasy writer whose work is all about deadly weddings and the like.<\/p>\n
In any case, I\u2019ll have more to say about the trailer (you can watch it below) soon enough, but something else struck me about the big news revealed today about Season 3 and its release schedule.<\/p>\n
Like the first two seasons of the show, Season 3 will be comprised of just eight episodes, each one costing approximately one thousand trillion dollars (in Middle-earth currency) to make. It\u2019s a very expensive show. (The first season cost about $58 million per episode to produce not counting the $250 million Amazon spent on rights, and now we\u2019re on Season 3 so it\u2019s up to genuinely staggering sums at this point).<\/p>\n
In any case, the first Season released its first two episodes on September 1, 2022. Then it released a new episode each week, with the finale airing on October 14. This spread the season out over a couple months. That\u2019s a great strategy if you hope to generate a lot of positive buzz. Unfortunately, viewers left in droves over the course of the season, and Season 2 premiered to much lower numbers than the first<\/a>, despite suspiciously high Rotten Tomatoes scores from TV critics<\/a>. I watched the second season and it was every bit as bad as the first, so I cannot explain the positive reviews. Some TV shows, like True Detective: Night Country, seem magically immune to criticism. It\u2019s very puzzling!<\/p>\n An Orc, with a family. Probably a young daughter who wants nothing more than to become a ballerina. <\/p>\n Credit: Amazon Prime Video<\/p>\n In any case, Season 2 of Rings Of Power released the first three episodes of its 8-episode season on August 29, 2024. It then released a new episode weekly, with the finale airing on October 3. This was a slightly shorter window, but still plenty of time for people to get all buzzy on Twitter and Instagram and make their little Tik-Tok videos and memes and do all the hilarious and charming things fans do on the internet when it comes to pop culture phenomena. <\/p>\n But things have shifted rather drastically with Season 3. While Season 1 was spread out over nearly two months, and Season 2 dropped on Prime Video for a total of 6 weeks, Season 4 is releasing the first four episodes on November 11, 2026. Half the season drops all at once on that day. Then, the next two episodes release a week later on November 18 and the final two on November 25. That\u2019s just three weeks, a short enough span that Amazon might as well just drop the entire season all at once and get it over with. <\/p>\n The thing is, there are fans of this show still. There are people on forums and social media with Galadriel avatars (and I\u2019m not talking about Cate Blanchett). There are fans so passionate about this show that they think lines like \u201cThe Sea is always right\u201d are real bangers, or that anyone other than a teapot should spout the line \u201cThere is a tempest in me!\u201d<\/p>\n But what this says to me is that Amazon is afraid of the negative response and the downward ratings trend we\u2019ve seen since Season 1. If enough viewers watch all four episodes when they debut on November 11, Amazon can say \u201cLook at all these hours viewed! That\u2019s really good!\u201d because watching four hours of a TV show is clearly more than watching one or two. It inflates that initial sense of viewership. Beyond that, there\u2019s less time for ratings to really tank. If you release an episode a week and people keep dropping, you keep getting reminded of that every week when the numbers come in. Every week, people not only dissect just how lousy the new episode is, but how lousy it\u2019s performing.<\/p>\n Now they only have to endure three weeks of bad news, and it\u2019s much less likely that recappers will bother to recap every episode when they\u2019re released in chunks like this, so fewer bad reviews as well (on YouTube, blogs, etc.) This is all preemptive damage control, and it does not bode well for the new season.<\/p>\n Are you more of an eyebrow guy or a bushy beard guy or is the hair that does it for you?<\/p>\n Credit: Prime Video<\/p>\n Sorry, but getting funny-man Simon Pegg to voice the Balrog (The Peggrog as he shall henceforth be known as) is not going to save this show from the depths of mediocrity its dug itself into. Bringing Voldemort \u2013 er, sorry, Vecna \u2013 from Stranger Things into the fold won\u2019t magically resuscitate this wheezing, corpulent, bloated husk of an adaptation, if we can even refer to it as that anymore, so many liberties showrunners J.D. Payne and Patrick McKay have taken with Tolkien\u2019s original work. Besides, Jamie Campbell Bower would make a better Sauron than Charlie Vickers, who probably ought to be playing some ranger-type hero. I don\u2019t see Bower as Celeborn at all, but mostly this show had forgotten Galadriel was married up until now. She\u2019s gonna have some \u2018splainin\u2019 to do.<\/p>\n Oh, and the show has created its own new bad guy, the Nazgnag\u00f4l, an earlier precursor to the Nazgul of the Third Age, because why not just invent stuff for fun instead of telling the actual story of how the kings of men were deceived by Sauron and became enthralled to his will, slowly losing their humanity in the process? Nazgnag\u00f4l sounds like a Middle-earth prescription drug for acid reflux or something.<\/p>\n Okay, here\u2019s the trailer. I\u2019ll have another post going into a little more detail on the specifics of what we see here, but for now I just wanted to point out that the omens are bleak, the tidings, such as they are, ill. Things are not looking good for our plucky band of personality-deprived heroes. Saurrrrron and his Morrrrdor armies just won\u2019t quit!<\/p>\n I\u2019ll leave you with this quotation from Tolkien himself, who in Letter 210 to Forrest J Ackerman, in June 1958, was rather offended by a proposed script treatment for a film adaptation of Lord of the Rings by Morton Grady Zimmerman:<\/p>\n I would ask them to make an effort of imagination sufficient to understand the irritation (and on occasion the resentment) of an author, who finds, increasingly as he proceeds, his work treated as it would seem carelessly in general, in places recklessly, and with no evident signs of any appreciation of what it is all about. […] The canons of narrative in any medium cannot be wholly different ; and the failure of poor films is often precisely in exaggeration, and in the intrusion of unwarranted matter owing to not perceiving where the core of the original lies.<\/p>\n Another passage sounds like something Tolkien might say if he read the scripts Payne and McKay have penned:<\/p>\n I should say Zimmerman, the constructor of this s-l, is quite incapable of excerpting or adapting the ‘spoken words’ of the book. He is hasty, insensitive, and impertinent. …He does not read books. It seems to me evident that he has skimmed through the L.R. at a great pace, and then constructed his s.l. from partly confused memories, and with the minimum of references back to the original. Thus he gets most of the names wrong in form \u2013 not occasionally by casual error but fixedly (always Borimor for Boromir); or he misapplies them: Radagast becomes an Eagle. The introduction of characters and the indications of what they are to say have little or no reference to the book. Bombadil comes in with ‘a gentle laugh’!I feel very unhappy about the extreme silliness and incompetence of Z and his complete lack of respect for the original (it seems wilfully wrong without discernible technical reasons at nearly every point).<\/p>\n And one final line, just to drive it all home: “The Lord of the Rings may be a ‘fairy-story\u2019, but it takes place in the Northern hemisphere of this earth: miles are miles, days are days, and weather is weather.”<\/p>\n Put that in your fast-travel pipe and smoke it.<\/p>\n Side-note: This is one of the images from Amazon\u2019s Press Site. What is going on with this guy\u2019s sword? Is it . . . balancing on the back of his neck? Is this an AI image or something? I don\u2019t get it.<\/p>\n Uh-oh, Celeborn, looks like Galadriel might have a new love interest in Season 3.<\/p>\n Credit: Prime Video<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"He’s Number One! Credit: Amazon Prime Video You have not seen what I have seen. Unless, of course,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":567672,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[3281,93,61,60,73687,239532,239533,239530,239531,239534,239528,239529,116230,282],"class_list":["post-567671","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tv","tag-amazon-prime-video","tag-entertainment","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-lord-of-the-rings","tag-prime-video-release-schedule","tag-rings-of-power-news","tag-rings-of-power-season-3-release-date","tag-rings-of-power-season-3-schedule","tag-rings-of-power-streaming-release-strategy","tag-the-rings-of-power","tag-the-rings-of-power-season-3","tag-tolkien","tag-tv"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/567671","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=567671"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/567671\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/567672"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=567671"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=567671"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=567671"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}