‘Lord of the Rings’ is back: Everything you need to know about ‘The Rings of Power’ TV show

Amazon Studios has been teasing a Lord of the Rings spinoff since 2017, and after a long five-year wait, the project billed as the most expensive TV show in history is finally happening.

The series is set to debut on Sept. 2 amid competition with another juggernaut fantasy spin-off, The House of the Dragon, a prequel to Game of Thrones. In a media climate rife with franchising, remakes, prequels and sequels, will Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power be able to stand out?

Global News watched the first two episodes of the sprawling new series and it is a feast for the eyes. Fans of J.R.R. Tolkien’s books and the original movie trilogy will not be disappointed when it comes to the scope and spectacle of the show — unsurprising, considering how much Amazon Studios spent to develop it.

In order to secure the rights to make a LOTR TV show, Amazon shelled out an unprecedented US$250 million to the Tolkien Estate. (In comparison, the original three Lord of the Rings movies had a budget of $281 million.)

To produce the first season alone, Amazon is estimated to have spent around $465 million, bringing the grand tally to a whopping $715 million.

For that hefty price tag, The Lord of the Rings: TROP certainly delivers — boasting high stakes, charming new characters and a rich, expansive world that evokes the feeling of the original trilogy. This is a small-screen project with a vitality you’d expect of the silver screen.

It’s not just the sets, character design and score that harken back to the Middle-earth we’re familiar with; the themes that pervade TROP are clearly an homage to Tolkien. Messages of hope and adventure are intercut with great loss and sacrifice. The equation of ecological desolation with villainy also continues that naturalist through-line that Tolkien developed in his novels.

But even among the high-minded politicking and make-or-break struggle of good against evil, TROP still leaves space for whimsy, mystery and levity.

We break down everything you need to know about the series, from the backstory of the plot to how the story stands apart from LOTR, and how the showrunners and cast set about building a world that they hope would have done Tolkien proud.

The backstory

The Rings of Power is a prequel series that explores the Second Age of Middle-earth and is based on six appendices that Tolkien added to the end of the third LOTR novel, The Return of the King. Yes, that’s correct — $715 million was spent adapting footnotes.

But like everything else Tolkien wrote in the world of the Rings, those footnotes are rich and lengthy, and recount the major events of the First and Second Ages, including a summary of the Third Age in which LOTR is set. It also includes a history of the romance between Aragorn, a human, and Arwen, an elf who gives up immortality to be with her love.

When Amazon acquired the rights to make the show, many wondered if they were planning on making a young Aragorn adaptation. Instead, the studio went with a story set thousands of years before Frodo destroyed the One Ring in the fires of Mount Doom.

The Second Age is a relatively more peaceful time than the world we saw in LOTR. Morgoth, the predecessor and mentor of Sauron, has been defeated and the various races of Middle-earth mostly believe that evil has been eradicated from their world.