"The Rings of Power" showrunner's break silence on backlash

 The most anticipated and expensive TV show of all time is finally here, but instead of endless praise, The Rings of Power is facing endless trolling.

“This is where everything happens,” says showrunner Patrick McKay. “The War Room.”

Since its Sept. 2 release, Amazon's billion-dollar high fantasy has received both strong critical acclaim (84 percent positive on Rotten Tomatoes) and online fan bashing (its audience score is 39 percent, which includes an unknown degree of "review bombing" at the hands of internet trolls). The show's Nielsen viewership is impressive; the first two episodes were seen by approximately 12.6 million US viewers in its first four days.

However, given that this is Lord of the Rings, the bar is absurdly high. Nobody knows the stakes more than Payne and McKay. They're two first-time showrunners who embarked on an unexpected journey nearly five years ago to make their J.R.R. Tolkien passion project and have now found themselves "on the fault line of the culture war," as McKay puts it, with everyone weighing in, from armies of anonymous Tolkien fans to the world's two richest men. It's difficult to concentrate on writing scripts and managing a cast and crew of 1,300 on the most complicated TV production ever when Elon Musk is slamming you on Twitter.

“Some of what’s been hardest to hear is the cynical point of view that this is a cash grab,” McKay says. “It’s like, oh my God, the opposite. This is the most earnest production. This is not a paycheck job for anybody. This is a labor of love.”

On a Friday in 2017, Amazon received a call from the Tolkien estate's attorneys informing them that they would consider bids for a Lord of the Rings television series. Every entertainment firm, including Prime Video, was searching for "the next Game of Thrones." Jeff Bezos, the founder and CEO of Amazon, has always been a lover of Tolkien. It seemed obvious to go for The Lord of the Rings, and an internal "fellowship" was formed to determine how to outbid competitors.

According to sources, HBO pitched the estate on adapting Peter Jackson's acclaimed Lord of the Rings trilogy, which brought in $3 billion and won 17 Academy Awards, to focus on the "Third Age" of Middle-earth. Although the late Christopher Tolkien, the author's son, claimed that Jackson's adaptations "eviscerated" the works, the estate has issues with them and wasn't keen on going over the same territory again. A number of programmes, including a Gandalf series and an Aragorn drama, were proposed by Netflix. One person with knowledge of the negotiations claimed that "they adopted the Marvel approach," which utterly scared out the estate.

In order to win over the estate, Amazon's negotiating team—led by Sharon Tal Yguado, Roy Price, and Dan Scharf—promised to maintain a close relationship and offer it a creative seat at the table so it could safeguard Tolkien's legacy. The money was obviously another factor. Sources claim that the astronomical amount ($250 million) that has been widely published was actually Netflix's proposal and that Amazon's number was tens of millions less (albeit, still staggering).

“It was our collective passion and fidelity to Tolkien that really won the day,” says Amazon Studios TV co-head Vernon Sanders (who came on board in 2018 as part of an executive shakeup which included Price being ousted for a misconduct claim, Jen Salke joining as Amazon Studios chief and Albert Cheng being installed as TV Co-Head).

When Payne, 42, and McKay, 41, heard from their reps that Rings was heading to TV, "a shiver ran through us." McKay says. They first met in junior high in Northern Virginia and became friends when they joined the same high school debate team. They relocated to Los Angeles and struggled for years as screenwriters without a big break. Their last job was at Bad Robot, where they wrote scripts and worked on many projects, including an abandoned Star Trek film.

 “We had reached a point — we’d been writing movies for 10 years that should have gotten made,” McKay says. “Movies where the director was right, the cast was right, the script was right, the title was right and it was a big IP — and it still wasn’t happening. So [we thought] maybe we should try this TV thing.”