So, I finally sat down and read that Vanity Fair LotR article.

I do not say that this show is going to be good. I will say that Amazon is probably going to spend a billion bucks on THE LORD OF THE RINGS: THE RINGS OF POWER, which is an insane amount of money that probably should not be in Jeff Bezos’ hands anyway. Plus, at that level of funding? If the show fails it will do so spectacularly. That can provide some entertainment, all on its own.

Moe Lane

PS: In case you are wondering: yes, the show will compress together the coming of Annatar, the betrayal of the Elves, the corruption and fall of Numenor, and presumably the Last Alliance of Elves and Men. They are justifying it by – oh, just read what they said:

In the novels, the aforementioned things take place over thousands of years, but Payne and McKay have compressed events into a single point in time. It is their biggest deviation from the text, and they know it’s a big swing. “We talked with the Tolkien estate,” says Payne. “If you are true to the exact letter of the law, you are going to be telling a story in which your human characters are dying off every season because you’re jumping 200 years in time, and then you’re not meeting really big, important canon characters until season four. Look, there might be some fans who want us to do a documentary of Middle-earth, but we’re going to tell one story that unites all these things.”

…I do not entirely like this angle, but I don’t really have a better one. “Not doing it at all” remains a viable alternative take, of course.