Rings of Power cost $60 million dollars per episode while House of the Dragon cost $20 million dollars per episode. These are astronomical figures, but RoP is arguably the most expensive television show in history. They are now approaching the ends of their season 1 runs, and we can make some evaluations and observations.
First, though I am aware of the fan hate on RoP before the first episode dropped, I thought it was a little overdone. I wanted the hold off judgment. And, some Tolkien fans were screened ahead of time and raved about what they saw, and I also listened to mainstream media people give props to what the showrunners did. I have no idea what these people were thinking. As someone who doesn’t follow media and how publicity is generated I now accept the validity of all the conspiracies about pay-for-play. There is no way that a genuine Tolkien fan would enthuse about RoP, and I assume the media coverage was due to identitarian factors. The show spends money on special effects, as there are some pretty intense scenes and unlike HoD it doesn’t make as much recourse to dark lighting to mask the CGI because it’s presumably of higher quality. But the writing is horrible, the world-building is a disaster, and the demographics of the Southlands and Numenor resemble a Midwestern American city in 1990. Mostly white. A large black minority, and a scattering of Asians and Latinx. Also, even though Numenor was populated mostly by the House of Hador, there are very few blondes among the Numenoreans (I am aware that the Lords of Andúnië ruled over a region that a lot of Beorians settled in).
But that brings up the issue of the “lore.” RoP is basically a fork, a Tolkien-themed show, but it does a bad job of creating something new. The character development is lacking, the plotting is weak, and the writing is often mediocre or even cringe-inducing. What did they spend all this money on? This is like the Fire Phone all over again. Bezos demands, and Amazon hops to, but there’s no execution.
HoD is not perfect. Because Fire and Blood outlines the whole plot in broad brush those of us who have read George R R Martin’s attempt to do the Silmarillion know what will happen. But there are many details to be worked out, and Fire and Blood couldn’t make the characters vivid in the way that narrative television can. Episode-by-episode HoD pales in comparison to RoP when it comes to special effects. The massive budget differential is on display in the darkness of HoD scenes and the relatively small number of shooting locations. HoD is to a great extent up until this point mostly people talking. But the plotting is serviceable, moving from torpid early on to acceleration in the last few episodes, the character development is good, and the lines delivered are usually not cringe-worthy. HoD is no masterpiece, but it illustrates that you can do this sort of show well, and with a far smaller budget than RoP and arguably less rich source material.
In fact, HoD is subject to even more crass representational changes, as the Velaryans are now black Valyrians of “pure blood” (as they declare over and over) as opposed to the Targaryens who are white Valyrians of “pure blood.” What pray tell is Valyrian blood then? The show positively seems to demand that we not notice this by alluding to blood constantly without clarifying if the Valyrians were a biracial civilization. No matter. Because on the whole HoD is a good show, people have ignored these incongruences.
RoP will be a case study in the fact that money can’t buy quality.
The Velaryon thing was a bit odd. I remember thinking they’d just say that the Velaryons never married as close in the family as the Targaryens because they were lesser Valyrian nobility who didn’t fly dragons, and Corlys’ father married a Summer Island princess or something like that for the trading rights (House Velaryon didn’t become really rich and powerful until Corlys himself made it so). But they didn’t.
You could say that it’s not our modern conception of “blood”, and the Velaryons are counted as “pure Valyrian stock” because they can trace their ancestry on all sides back to “time immemorial” aristocracy in Valyria itself, even if it at some point in the distant past they intermarried with Summer Islanders or Sothoryos folk (where they had colony cities) . Or that Valyrians are just weird in general genetically, having meddled with themselves using magic (implied to be how they control the dragons).
That’s the crux there. I do enjoy it generically as a mostly entertaining show with some characters I like, even if some plot points and themes really annoy me as a Tolkien fan. Mostly I just find some of the bad world-building stuff bizarre for show-runners who supposedly had an Encyclopedic knowledge of the books, like having two Durins around despite the whole thing about him possibly being the same Durin being reincarnated, or the weirdness with mithril.
I’ll have to disagree with you on the world-building, though – I think it absolutely looks worse than HOTD. HOTD just has better world-building even in the little stuff, like the excellent costumes (whereas one critic made a funny point about how Bronwyn’s dress looks like something she’d wear to a music festival in the early 2010s).
Sorry, that last paragraph should be “special effects”, not “world-building”.
Hard pass. I’m frankly sick and tired of pop media producers injecting nonwhite (mostly black) characters randomly in time periods and places where they shouldn’t be. It used to be just an eye-roll for me, but now I skip right away if I see that. Mind you, I am not averse to seeing heroic nonwhites or blacks on TV/movies (“The Book of Eli” and “Glory” are two of my favorite films), but casting should be appropriate to the story, not for the sake of conformity to social fads.
I guess I should still be grateful that Bezos/Amazon didn’t destroy “The Expanse” when it took over the franchise and gave it an ending of sorts.
I pretty much agree with you on the show quality – Hot D is quite good, The Rings of Power is at best meh. I’m really only enjoying the Elrond/Durin plotline, as it seems to be the only part of the series where they remembered that characters are supposed to exist as anything other than shallow plot devices. I’m far from a Tolkien superfan, but what they did to Galadriel (turning her into a textbook Hollywood “strong woman” who is really just the toxic masculine action hero transplanted into a woman’s body) is a travesty.
Regarding “representational casting” my two cents are you have to do it one of two ways to get it right.
1. Treat TV casting like theater casting and stick with it. Then a black father can have an Asian wife and a white daughter, and no one gives a fuck about it.
2. Actually reference race within your show to some extent and make it at least part of the background of your world.
In Hot D, while the black Velaryon is a little distracting, I finally realized it was basically a case of #1, just a bit modified. Casting doesn’t mean nothing, but the black Velaryons is just visual shorthand to let the audience know easily about who has the “true blood.” This became clear to me in Episode 7 with the discussion between Corlys and his wife, where she gestured to his hand. It also made me realize why they made what I initially thought was the curious casting choice of having Daemon and Laena’s children just look black (look like the actor playing their mother, but not like Matt Smith at all). The important thing for the story is that everyone knows they are Velaryon, so the showrunners cast them to look black, because Velaryons are represented as black people.
The Rings of Power though is a fucking mess when it comes to this, as it is in many ways (as you noted). For awhile I was hoping that it was a case of #1 – just “stage casting.” But then in an episode they had Nori’s mother basically admit in dialogue that she wasn’t her birth mother, which is something I didn’t think was needed at all, because it just reinforced how fucking weird it is that a small band of tribal gatherers has roughly equal numbers of black and white Harfoots, rather than everyone having mixed to an intermediate shade.
This all makes no sense, because if Amazon wanted “representational” casting, they could have just had all of the Harfoots being black. Or all of the humans in the Southlands. Or maybe all of the dwarves even. All of these casting choices could have said something through representation (about indigenous peoples, the effective colonization of the Southlands by the elves, or using racial casting to parallel the traditional distrust between elves and dwarves respectively) but by sprinkling a few POC everywhere, it effectively means that the use of diversity in casting means ABSOLUTELY NOTHING!
Agree with everything but one: I think HotD looks better than RoP even special effect wise.
Or have a white father, a black wife, an Asian daughter, and an android son:
https://youtu.be/Kwp32zLc08c
And I had such high hopes for Kogonada after “Columbus.”
I actually googled it and am genuinely surprised that no one called HoD Kangz of the Dragons.
Karl Zimmerman: “1. Treat TV casting like theater casting and stick with it. Then a black father can have an Asian wife and a white daughter, and no one gives a fuck about it.”
I think the thing is here, is that you can’t do this and have it clash with *intentions* of the work as a whole.
When a person films theatre, their intention is very rarely to try and dissolve the audience in the verisimiltude of “This time and place was really like that”. It’s something that theatre can’t do the way that film can, within the confines of the medium – it is on a stage, it is in front of you, it’s not another world, another time, another place.
So the emphasis in theatrical pieces is on communication and acting and deep human truths, and the idea of portraying a place or time falls to the wayside a bit, or at least, portraying it literally rather than in a somewhat dream-like way.
Fantasy, as filmed on TV, really clashes with this goal because the intent is to immerse the audience in a specific speculative world. So it really does undermine that intent to have essentially random things happening that feel like they undermine the reality of that world.
This is not to say you couldn’t do it, but it’s not compatible with marketing and selling something as e.g. “You are entering the world of JRR Tolkien’s legendarium”, rather than with a more theatrical marketing based on the acting and openly offering a some more abstracted and dream-like presentation. The intent of throwing all these special effects to convince the viewer of the reality of the world, and the casting, are at odds with one another and both undermine the piece.
Taking the contrast with the recent “Green Knight” movie. I don’t think casting Dev Patel as Sir Gawain really mattered much because it’s clearly some very allegorical, dream-like sort of movie. His acting was pretty good and it all worked well, and no one cares about the “world building” which is basically a take on the Arthurian Cycle. But it might matter if you were trying to make a movie that was about literally trying to portray a specific world and make it very believable. Depending on if you built that world with it in mind and explained in a way that fits with audience intuition, or, if not, specifically addresses that.
Matt,
I actually agree with you here. I don’t think “stage casting” is the best way of doing it. I do think it’s better than what Amazon seems to have done in its series however (not just Rings of Power, also in The Wheel of Time) where the casting is explicitly set up in such a way as it’s supposed to represent something “real” within the setting, yet it’s also something which is never actually remarked upon.
I’d also say that a lot of these productions are based in the United Kingdom, and there seems to in general be way, way more cross-fertilization of theatre and film in a way we really don’t see in the U.S. Theater just isn’t anywhere near as culturally important (outside of musicals) and few of the creatives aside from the actors actively bounce back and forth between the two. While I still do think that we’d get some sort of multiracial casting regardless, I think if it was done adjacent to the Hollywood studio system it would arguably be done quite differently.
A bit of an aside, but the extreme over-representation of black Britons in these productions has always been striking to me. They are after all only 3% of the British population…a smaller group than south Asian Britons, who we generally see a lot less. I guess the thought is that they’re for primarily American audiences, but for some reason a British accent sounds more “authentic?” Given we’re doing racial diversity, I don’t see why we can’t just cast Americans next to Britons anyway.
There is a movie with an Indian actor as an Arthurian Knight of the Round Table? This wasn’t a Bollywood adaptation?
Oh, my days… Very “post-colonial.”
BTW, speaking of the Arthurian legend, I wish someone would make a faithful adaptation of “The Lantern Bearers” and “Sword at Sunset” by Rosemary Sutcliff since “The Eagle of the Nineth” was already made (as “The Eagle”). I guess if that movie were made today, the main character would be a black Roman centurion (since making the British slave sidekick, Esca, black would be much too 1950-1980’s).
@Karl, as far as I can tell on that point it seems like the West Indian migrants who came first were obviously disadvantaged in education and pursued some performing type careers more music and sports in particular, and that leads to acting. Then the African migrants for some reason also seem to have more taken this and run with it doing more of prestigious stage acting, which seems like the influence of parents and London teachers. But they all like to go to America because its a bigger market.
I don’t know why they get hired on these shows. Possibly its because they have British agents and it just allows the agent to get them a screen test because of the other actors and its generally just easier to hire people from the same country. Plus Brits would work for less given the relative salaries in play in Britain (Perhaps its exaggerated but actor James Purefoy said memorably to me back in 2010 that (White) British actors were regarded as “White Mexicans”, i.e. work for cheap, in the US, and it won’t be less true now than then).
@twinkie, “post-colonial” like the literary genre definitely not, but a “post-colonial” phenomenon, yes. Actually on that casting there was perhaps a bit of what Karl called a representational element (where the casting sort of represents something in the setting), as Gawain in the film is the son of Morgan Le Fay and nephew of Arthur, and she was cast by a South Asian actress, and you could read this as some way of the filmmakers denoting her unusual half supernatural origins. But it is very loose.
re; last post, “actor James Purefoy said memorably to me back in 2010”, meant to indicate that it was memorable to me, not spoken to me (not that its particularly important; grammatical snafu).
> Hard pass. I’m frankly sick and tired of pop media producers injecting nonwhite (mostly black) characters randomly in time periods and places where they shouldn’t be.
So I was, and still am, not a fan of HBO wokeness… but in this case it kinda works and fits the story. They make clear that a) unlike the Targaryens, the Velaryans have never had dragons, so they must be distinct genetically, and b) on screen the question of Rhaenyra’s children’s illegitimacy is that much more stark. “Everybody knows. Just look at them.”
Even with peak GoT, there were episodes where I had to scroll past or multitask. This may be too fanboyish, but I’ve found the first season of HoD consistently gripping. If I’ve looked away it’s because the tension between the children/families is too uncomfortable at times.
No thank you. Hard, hard pass. I hope the film crashed and burned.
Instead of randomly injecting nonwhite actors where they don’t belong, if Hollywood/film/tv industry really cared about “representation,” it could actually write more scripts that organically include those ethnicities. “Glory,” for example, was an excellent film about the blacks who formed the 54th Mass. Infantry Regiment in the American Civil War.
Want to inject some Asians, too, in that war? Don’t try to retconn history, make something based on the true story of two of the Bunkers of Mount Airy: https://www.battlefields.org/learn/biographies/christopher-wren-bunker
https://www.battlefields.org/learn/biographies/stephen-decatur-bunker
@twinkie, it was pretty good and I think did well, by the standards of how well art films do, financially.
They’re fairytales for nerds – get over the diversity thing, kiddies.
Yes, The Book of Eli and Glory were good films, but I think we can distinguish between representations of real history and fairy tales.
Doing imagination well is big business! The unimaginative often fail to understand this… 😉 If the US doesn’t care about these things, its level of cultural influence might decline to well, a small country.
I’m glad you think “The Book of Eli” is real (future) history. 😉
Oh you meant *that* Book of Eli.