Fantasy television in the fall of 2022 looks like an A/B test. Two options have been set before us, both appearing weekly through September and October: HBO’s Game of Thrones spinoff House of the Dragon, option A, offers a brawny, bloody extension of a familiar fantasy universe, one where brutal interpersonal violence and petty power struggles are occasionally interrupted by shrieking dragons and the threat of large-scale catastrophe. The Rings of Power, option B, is positively heartwarming by comparison. There’s still violence and evil, but its magical landscape is peopled with do-gooders. Characters in Middle-earth can be friends; any friendship in King’s Landing, conversely, is just a betrayal that hasn’t happened yet. Middle-earth believes in redemption. Westeros believes in a Sisyphean embrace of struggle until death. Grim or grandiose. Cynical or corny. You can watch both, of course, but it’s hard to shake the flick-of-a-light-switch sensation in moving from one to the other.
But underneath all that Luigi-Waluigi folderol, it’s striking how alike the two projects are. Both are born of the same franchising drive: Extend, expand, capitalize on, and continue. Both land on similar solutions to find their central premises: Faced with the question of how to keep going after a blockbuster story reaches a definitive end, they cast backward. If you can’t keep explaining what happens next, your best option is to rewind and explain what happened before — never mind that you’re inevitably boxed in by the existence of the original thing, and never mind that “how Galadriel became Galadriel†is perhaps fascinating ground for Galadriel to explore in therapy but far more difficult to make into a surprising story. (Difficult but not impossible. We live in the age of Cruella but also Better Call Saul.)
It’s not just that they’re both prequels, though. Like the dubious Fantastic Beasts movies before them, they are essentially encyclopedia entries turned into television series. House of the Dragon stems from a particular chunk of George R.R. Martin’s Fire & Blood, a history textbook written from within the Song of Ice and Fire universe told from the point of view of a Westerosi academic trying to organize various primary documents. The Rings of Power comes from an appendix to J.R.R. Tolkien’s Return of the King, which also exists via an in-text explanation that was collected as part of a fictional archive. It’s even more sparse than Martin’s textbook — much of the Tolkien appendix is a bulleted timeline of events covering several millennia. “C. 500 Sauron begins to stir again in Middle-earth,†reads one. “750 Eregion founded by the Noldor,†notes another.
For House of the Dragon, that history textbook — and the pressure of the original series only a few generations away — forms a short leash, generating a cramped story full of incestuous familial dramas and battle lines that crisscross the same territory over and over. At the same time, the show is perpetually hurrying to get to some future good part, hop-skipping across several years of story at once. There is no time to dawdle on character development or the immediate consequences of major events. Everything important has to be crammed into one funeral scene or one argument between enemies. The show feels constrained but also stretched too thin.
The Rings of Power operates almost in the opposite direction: It’s bounded by a nutshell and yet feels like the king of infinite space. At its best, Tolkien’s terse timeline entries serve as keyholes, and Rings of Power creates the sensation of glimpsing through them to discover entire little worlds on the other side of the door. But the series is so enamored with Tolkien trivia and centuries of myth, it’s missing a fundamental sense of urgency. It feels like an open-world video game, perpetually inviting the player to hare off after side quests rather than buckle down on the main story line. Except an open-world game would be better at providing closure for the side quests; there’s no closure for all the bits and bobs in Rings of Power — just more evil, still looming on the horizon.
Together, the two series give the impression that TV fantasy is a gold rush, a boomtown — two huge adaptations appearing at the same time, each of them attracting millions of eyeballs and muscular, unignorable marketing campaigns. They join a growing pile of titles with similar scope and magical inclinations (although none quite as big): Wheel of Time, The Witcher, His Dark Materials, Shadow & Bone, Outlander, The Sandman, See. I’m tempted to throw in Westworld, but I can hear Roman from Party Down chiding me about hard sci-fi. Nevertheless, on TV, this is where a lot of the big bets and big money are happening!
And yet even in the moments when a show like The Rings of Power does feel fun, the genre as a whole is starting to feel like magic, magic everywhere but nary an intoxicating drop to drink. House of the Dragon is such a rote extension of Game of Thrones that it almost seems silly to call it by a different title. (Whoever made the decision about its opening credits theme apparently came to the same conclusion.) Its Targaryens have nominally better blonde wigs. Technically there may be fewer instances of sexual violence, but now there are multiple graphic, torturous birth scenes. House of the Dragon is, at its core, more Game of Thrones — just as Rings of Power, in its visual style, tonal palette, and (beautiful, tender) score, is deliberately operating from the Peter Jackson playbook. Both series are presented as shining new jewels in the streaming pantheon, and they are! Nearing the end of their first seasons, though, it’s painfully clear that they are conservative plays, efforts to make and remake things that were already successful and serve them to audiences again, like last night’s roast chicken turned into today’s chicken salad.
Don’t get me wrong — I am fond of chicken salad. There is always a place for it, and TV, with its seasonal structures and yearslong productions, is a particularly apt medium for the familiar thing that returns in slightly new iterations. Still, House of the Dragon and The Rings of Power resemble smooth replicas rather than exciting new reworkings. That A/B test sensation comes out of their cultural proximity but also because the shows shine with the unmistakable shellac of extensive market testing.
My adolescent self, her thick plastic glasses buried deep in the pages of stout paperbacks with dragons on the front, would look up and shake her head sadly, dismayed to find she’d ever turn down her nose at such generous offerings from her very favorite genre. (And she’d be confused to discover one of the shows was made by the very same bookstore-slash-website where she’d purchased all of those dragon-covered paperbacks.) Does it matter so much that these two series have been so thoroughly tested to provide what audiences want that they then deliver what audiences want?
Like the yearning Harfoot teen in The Rings of Power (whose very existence suggests that somewhere along the line, a marketing professional pointed out that any Lord of the Rings title requires someone Hobbit-y), I suspect it would be much better to take a broader view of what’s possible within the genre. The current slate of fantasy TV feels empty because its visual and thematic vocabulary is stale, even in its most overwrought, mind-blowing, billion-dollar iterations. Fantasy and genre fiction with more exciting perspectives does exist. It’s taken decades, but the first TV adaptation of Octavia Butler’s work is coming later this fall. There’ve been plans for years to adapt N.K. Jemisin’s blockbuster Fifth Season trilogy as well as Nnedi Okorafor’s work, and watching buckets of money flow into boring, safe, pre-built worlds makes one wish that same urgency went into non-dragon-based visions of fantasy TV. (Or at least some different dragons: Anne McCaffrey’s dragons have dragon sex in the sky, and then their riders do too and it creates enormous issues of consent and interpersonal drama, and yes, that part would be iffy, but — where’s that TV show?)
Until any of those projects exist, though, what we’re left with is The Rings of Power and House of the Dragon, and they both have a problem exactly antithetical to their budgets and ambitions. Their prequel-ness is a storytelling limitation, but worse, it’s an upper boundary on their imagination. Fantasies should be forward-looking dreams of different worlds. TV’s current options only know how to look backward.