Why TV Is Wrong for Tolkien
Amazon’s series The Rings of Power hasn’t gotten great reviews and Evan Puschak hypothesizes that, unlike movies, TV is not the right medium to tell Tolkien’s stories.
I’m skeptical that the Lord of the Rings, or any other story from Tolkien’s mythology, can really work as a TV series. It’s a square peg round hole situation. TV as a form just doesn’t play to the strengths of Tolkien’s vision.
Discussion 5 comments
Aaahhhh very good! I have been wondering why I cannot come to love the series, whereas I really love the films. The video provides a very good explanation.
Yeah, that tracks. I'm not much of a Tolkien fan but I really liked Morfydd Clark's Galadriel in season 1, it seems because she was written and played as a flawed, driven novelistic character. I'm watching season 2 and wondering where that character went as she's subsumed into torpid exposition hell.
This is a weird take and the title is misleading. The medium is not the same as the message. He's essentially criticizing psychological character development for epic novels adapted to screen. Portraying as three 2-1/2 hour movies (i.e. the Lord of the Rings, the Hobbit) as opposed of eight 1 hour episodes (i.e Rings of Power season 1, season 2, etc) doesn't make the story itself better or worse.
I *think* his point is TV series's tend to be open ended and traditionally don't embrace a terminal conclusion, whereas movies tend to have solid endings. But that's traditional rather than inherent to the medium. But maybe the dominant tradition is the thing.
Cannot see the weird take nor the misleading title. His argument is not that the story is made better or worse, but that for this particular type of story the adaption to one medium works much better than to the other.
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