Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

End-of-season assessment: just another expensive soap opera, and I don't do soap operas. I changed it from five stars to two -- my original review is below. Season One concludes with a clear picture of what's to come: a long, long series. Rings of Power shows every indication of following the time-honored formula for a series: give it a beginning, give it a middle, then flog it until it dies. What we've seen so far barely qualifies as the beginning of a beginning. A couple of Big Reveals in the final episode offer a faint glimmer of hope that a cohesive story might eventually emerge: we know who Sauron is, we know who Gandalf is, and we see the forging of three of the titular rings. Since nineteen rings were made in all, plus the One Ring, we should file it under "This is gonna take awhile, folks." And another thing -- nothing about this story requires Hobbits, whose only discernible purpose is to be cute and spunky. Basically, they're Smurfs. Yawn, yawn, yawn. We have no idea if an actual narrative will ever materialize, or how long it will take to get there. The production is good, and the visuals are eye-popping -- that's the only reason it gets two stars instead of one -- but I really couldn't care less if another season is ever made. News flash, Amazon: spending a billion dollars doesn't make it good. _________________________________________________________________ Original review: I'm two episodes in, and the series looks very promising. The visuals are almost, but not quite, on a par with Peter Jackson's masterpiece. It seems well written, and the acting is sufficient for the material -- but it's not outstanding, yet. I haven't read the source material -- Tolkien's appendices -- for the better part of 40 years, so I don't have the foggiest idea if this is true to the author's story lines or not. It is, however, the beginning of what may turn out to be an excellent story. This brings me to my main concern about the series: A truly excellent series must tell a coherent story, and it must advance that story each and every episode. I've seen very few that accomplish this -- Breaking Bad, Better Call Saul, and The Americans are excellent recent examples. I've ditched a ton of these things after three or four episodes, once it becomes clear that that the series is going to be about the series, and not about the story. The poster child for a good series that was completely derailed by ditching the story line to flog out more seasons, was Lost. If they had told that story in two or three seasons, it would have been one of the great series of all time. Instead, they milked it for six seasons, and it completely sucked for at least the last three of them. So -- for Rings of Power to succeed and matter, it needs to do two things, and it needs to do them soon. The first is to establish a clear story line, and it hasn't done this so far (the first two episodes). If the series is going to be about following all the different story lines (there are at least five), without bringing them together into a consistent meta-narrative, then this is going to be just one more long expensive yawn-fest. The second thing Rings of Power needs to do is move its story forward, every single episode, without fail. If the producers think I'm going to watch in order to find out what happens next to the Harfoots, and Galadriel, and Elrond and Durin, and Arondir and Bronwyn, etc. etc. -- they're badly mistaken. I don't do soap operas. Season One is eight episodes -- if it's telling a clear story by then, I'll keep watching. If it isn't, I'll ditch it.