Later Additions · Expanded

The Rings of Power (Season 1)

Series2022

The Second Age: how the rings were forged, thousands of years before Bilbo.

Availability changes by country and by week, so this searches JustWatch rather than guessing.

Can you skip The Rings of Power (Season 1)?

Yes, on a first watch. It is self-contained, and nothing in the main Middle-earth story depends on it. Come back to it later if you want more. Show only the Middle-earth essentials.

Skippable, and it connects to the films only by subject. Amazon holds rights to The Lord of the Rings and its appendices, not to The Silmarillion, so this is built from a few pages of chronology at the back of a book rather than from a narrative anyone has read. Thousands of years are compressed into one lifetime so that characters can share scenes they never shared.

That compression is the honest complaint and it is not the main one. The first season is beautiful and slow, with four or five plotlines advancing at a crawl, and a central mystery about a stranger's identity that is strung out across eight episodes and resolved with a shrug. It cost a reported four hundred and sixty-five million dollars and spends a great deal of it on helicopter shots.

Númenor is what justifies it. An island civilisation at its height, politically fractious and visibly a few decades from catastrophe, is a part of this world the films could never show, and the production design is the best argument anyone has made for doing this on television. The forging sequence at the end of the season is excellent.

The Harfoot material is where most viewers stall. If you want Second Age Middle-earth, start here and know that the second season is better paced. If you want more of the films, this is not that.