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Lord of the Rings Television Entertainment

'House of the Dragon' and 'Rings of Power' Face Off In Podcasting (bloomberg.com) 114

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: A good fall TV run comes to an end on Sunday when HBO airs its House of the Dragon season one finale, a week or so after Amazon wrapped up the first season of The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power. The shows aren't done yet providing content, though. Both Amazon and HBO offer companion podcasts to keep fans engaged, and both devised wildly different approaches for their audio. The podcasts offer behind-the-scenes chats with cast and crew and strive to become the definitive place to hear conversations around their respective programming. The shows' similarities end there, however.

HBO, for example, released three episodes of The Official Game of Thrones Podcast: House of the Dragon before the actual TV series aired, choosing to hype listeners up for the debut through an interview George R.R. Martin, as well as an "everything we know"-style show. Since then, the program has been released weekly alongside new episodes of the series on Sunday evenings. Michael Gluckstadt, director of podcasts for HBO and HBO Max, says the podcast will continue even after the series breaks between seasons. "There's no end date for this in sight," he said, which is atypical for podcasts the network has released in the past, including for Succession and The Gilded Age. [...] The podcast is available on all platforms, as well as on YouTube and the HBO Max app.

Meanwhile, Amazon didn't release any episodes of its The Official The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power Podcast until the season finale. Marshall Lewy, chief content officer at Amazon's Wondery, said the team wanted the streaming series to "speak for itself." Wondery has created companion podcasts before, namely for its own podcasts that were adapted for streaming, like Dr. Death and WeCrashed, but this marks the first time the team has worked in coordination with an Amazon series. "This is really our first opportunity to do a partnership like this connected to Prime Video," Lewy said. The podcast now receives front-and-center promotion ahead of each streaming video episode, which is the first time the coveted space has promoted something other than a Prime video series, he said. A promotion for The Official The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power Podcast that surfaces on Prime Video. The podcast is only available on Amazon Music, the Wondery app and Audible, a critical difference from HBO's strategy. Lewy said this decision made sense given that anyone watching the show is a Prime subscriber and can freely access Amazon Music.
"The effort put into these podcasts not only speaks to the need to increase fan engagement with the programming but to create an ongoing dialogue with viewers so they don't drop off from season to season," writes Bloomberg's Ashley Carman. "A person's podcast time likely differs from their streaming time, which in theory minimizes the risk of cannibalizing the hours that viewers could be spending on other Amazon or HBO series."

"The video services want more than just sixty minutes of their viewers' attention once a week -- they want to be a part of their day and part of their conversations with friends for as long as possible."
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'House of the Dragon' and 'Rings of Power' Face Off In Podcasting

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  • This vs that ... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by JasterBobaMereel ( 1102861 ) on Friday October 21, 2022 @08:32AM (#62985603)

    Like so often you can watch (or listen to) one, the other, both or neither ....

  • by Opportunist ( 166417 ) on Friday October 21, 2022 @08:52AM (#62985671)

    Else I wouldn't even have noticed.

  • Well then, the RoP podcast needs to counter an interview with Martin with an interview with Tolkien -- oh, wait.
  • House of the Dragon (Score:5, Interesting)

    by garett_spencley ( 193892 ) on Friday October 21, 2022 @11:03AM (#62986097) Journal

    Everyone is ripping apart RoP, which I didn't bother watching because of the negative reviews. My wife and I did start watching House of the Dragon, though so I'll chime in on that.

    First few episodes were actually pretty good IMO. I stopped watching it, though, when they suddenly jumped 10 years into the future and changed the cast. We weren't expecting it, it caught us off guard and we lost interest after giving that first "10 years later" episode a chance.

    We were just heavily invested in the story of two teenage girls who found themselves in the middle of a wicked power struggle that would directly involve them and that they would inherit, but that they were completely unprepared to handle. Everything that happened between those first 4 or 5 episodes and the "10 years later" was the story we were looking forward to and thought we were being sold in the first few episodes. It was a bait and switch.

    We even thought, based on how they ended the wedding episode, that King Viserys was going to die and Rhaenyra was about to become queen immediately as a teenager with enemies plotting to kill her. That would have been fascinating. But they kept him on, didn't change that actor, aged Rhaenyra and Alicent 10 years - not through makeup or cgi but with an unexpected cast change - and started telling the same story but with adults. It's a story that can work, don't get me wrong, but it's just less interesting and not what we were looking forward to.

    So we lost interest and stopped watching.

    • Everyone I know in meatspace has found RoP enjoyable; it has some issues compressing the timelines but if you ever tried to read the Silmarillion you'd consider that a boon. Online it is mostly ripped on by the sorts of people that complained Nick Fury was black in the movies, that Captain Marvel was particularly egregious in comparison to the rest of the MCU for some reason, or who have strong opinions about whatever 'woke casting' is.
      • I've said that before, I will say it again, if I have to dig into some expanded universe, read a bunch of graphic novels and comic books, do some background research for the characters and invest more time and energy into researching the world of the movie than the writer did, it's not a good movie.

        A movie has to stand on its own legs. Yes, an expanded universe can expand on what the movie showed. It can fill in some blanks and add color to the canvas, but the movie has to be capable to explain sufficiently

        • Oh I meant that if you'd read the Silmarillion you'd potentially have complaints from a purist's standpoint, the compression makes everything make more sense narratively, in my opinion. The OG elves are all older than the sun and 'an interesting life' is punctuated by thousands of years where not much happens so it wouldn't have been easy to translate it to a show that way. I agree that the story should be able to stand alone. Knowing LOTR just means you know who has plot armor while watching RoP.
    • I had a similar reaction. I think I saw the first three and got a week behind. Then I started seeing interviews with the two actresses that were replaced. My first thought, being a GoT spinoff, was that they killed them both at some royal event. Somehow, just replacing them seems worse. I keep meaning to go back to it and then don't. I think both actresses were actually in their early 20s. Surely, they could have aged them with makeup to make them look 30.
    • by znrt ( 2424692 )

      Everyone is ripping apart RoP, which I didn't bother watching because of the negative reviews.

      well i did, just because it's free on torrent, and really enjoyed it. it has a few really embarrassingly cheesy moments but all in all i liked the narrative and the characters far better than any part of lotr except the first. go figure. (disclaimer, not a tolkien hardcore fan either).

      i'll have to check those dragons, wasn't aware of their existence ...

      My wife and I did start watching House of the Dragon, though so I'll chime in on that.

      how interesting! please send your wife my best regards! :p

    • Shame you gave up on it, because the plot is much the same, only now those teenage girls have grown into women. In many ways they're still not ready for that power struggle and have found that it's even taken on a life of its own outside of what they desire. I actually enjoy how Alicent is even disturbed or disgusted by things that are being done by other characters to help her position and how the same power struggle has affected the children of both characters.

      Sure, what you wanted might have been inte
  • "...they want to be a part of their day and part of their conversations with friends..."

    Unfortunately the conversations were about:

    - how astonishingly average and uninteresting the show was

    - the mediocrity of the acting

    - the puerile suburban 21st century dialogue

    - the hateable characters

    - the woke casting bullshit

    - the people claiming that the only reason anyone didn't like their beloved show was because of the woke casting bullshit, etc.

    As well as "How could you hand a half a BILLION dollars to some numbnu

    • Yeah when it comes to House of the Dragon, I watch it, enjoy it and get on with my week. With Rings of Power I first watch the episode and then I enjoy watching Youtuber after Youtuber shit on it during the week. Rings of Power has definitely won the mindshare battle as far as I'm concerned.
    • - the woke casting bullshit

      - the people claiming that the only reason anyone didn't like their beloved show was because of the woke casting bullshit, etc.

      What exactly was "woke" about the casting?

      • Of course /you'd/ focus on that. You're like a caricature of yourself.

        BTW your disingenuousness is showing.

        Even CNN noticed https://www.cnn.com/2022/09/03... [cnn.com]

        I don't have any issue with dark-skinned people in Tolkien's world- he *specifically* mentioned them, several times.

    • The "woke" casting is intentional. It's the safety guard against bad reviews. Because now, if you hate the hack writing, the ridiculous dialogues, the wooden acting or the predictable plot, it can only be because you hate black people.

  • Social Pressure dictates you Consume the Popular Media.
  • With streaming taking over from traditional broadcasters and few of your target audience watching ET to hype your show, you need to find another way. Getting your show in front of people is getting hard with so many other channels of inputs that are algo'd and hard to get your content into, how else are they going to advertise their presence and create demand? It is so fractured and evolving there is no one phone call and begging that can be done to get your show publicized.

  • Rings of Power first episode. It's fucking bad. Shows/Movies designed by marketing committees and not artists need to fucking die.

    I assume Tolkien's corpse is at least partially responsible for global warming, as it has doubtlessly hit new records for rotational speed.

    • I made it two episodes. I appreciated the unintentional campiness baked into the the first episode. Its not often you get such epic production values while the writing and directing quality remains below that of a typical Syfy movie of the week. I don't know who decided that elves stare straight ahead and speak in platitudes (it wasn't Tolkein), but it was amusing for an hour.

      The second hour was simply boring. We got a few glimpses into dwarf and hobbit culture that both seemed kind of childish. We
      • Well, um, explain Mordor then.

        Reminds me of a Star Wars spoof where two Stormtroopers have a conversation:

        Say, why do we wear white?
        Because we're the good guys, duh!
        And why is our leader in all black?
        Because his black market deals kinda rubbed off.

        In short, there's an explanation for everything. Ok, not really, but at least some kind of excuse.

        • I'm sure they've got an explanation for it, but their internal logic would be impossible to follow. They made a big deal about a Sauron mystery box and made his first line, "Looks deceive." Personally, I would have leaned into the dramatic irony of the audience knowing this is Sauron and had him scheming the whole time, kind of like Iago (not the bird). It would have been far more interesting than playing a guessing game that you blew from the start.

          Amazon needs to learn Hollywood fast. They probably
      • by waspleg ( 316038 )

        I think the torch thing was like 30 seconds before I turned it off. A CGI "Troll" jumped out and I was done. Galadriel as special forces commando was sickening to watch right from the start.

        • The entire job of her legion was to stand around and stick out their swords so she could leap off and kill the troll in Legalos fashion. There's ten of them and only one of them is actually fighting the troll! And don't get me started on her death march, where she very nearly leaves one of her men to freeze in the snow.
          • I should probably let it go at this point, but the other moment that stood out was Galadriel saying, "You have not seen what I have seen." At the end of Blade Runner, we get an amazing soliloquy of all the different sights Roy Batty has seen and will soon be lost due to his death. At the end of Heart of Darkness we get Kurtz describing the horrors he's seen. They could have done the same thing here: what horrors have you seen Galadriel? Instead, we get an angry repetiton of the same line, as Galadriel i

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