The second season of The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power is here. This is a big deal for Amazon Prime Video, as it seeks to justify the reported $1bn it spent on a five-season commitment in 2017. For the rest of us, though, there’s a chance that the show itself will once again take a back seat to the discourse swirling round it. Because, while the first season of The Rings of Power could be a little slow at times, it was nothing compared to the absolute firestorm of backlashes it received.
Some of these were more justified than others. The show’s very existence felt unnecessary – its entire point seemingly being the bulking out of peripheral details from JRR Tolkien’s stories. At times, the acting was extremely dodgy. Plus, it featured the most questionable array of accents ever committed to screen, with the Irish ones so bad that it prompted the Irish Times to call it “famine cosplay”.
