The Rings Of Power's Showrunners Didn’t Want To Make “A Documentary Of Middle-earth”
“Some people would like you to make a documentary of Middle-earth,” The Rings of Power showrunner JD Payne tells TheGamer. “We [Payne and fellow showrunner Patrick McKay] have been working on historical adaptations of other things throughout our careers, and it's not a new thing for dramatists to do: you have history, and there's things you do when you're translating it from one medium into the next to make it dramatic and to make it into a storyline.
“We figured that some people might raise an eyebrow at it, but we hoped that the storytelling would be engaging enough that they would come in and just enjoy being in Middle-earth.”
Related: The Rings of Power Review: Morfydd Clark Shines In A Spectacular Tolkien Adaptation
After a quarter of a century of collaboration, you’d almost expect Payne and McKay to have had the same experiences of Tolkien, but that’s not the case. The pair had different routes into Middle-earth, with McKay reading the books first and Payne finding the Jackson, Boyens, and Walsh films before diving headfirst into the deepest depths of Tolkien’s writing. Neither comes across as more or less knowledgeable about Tolkien than the other, and arguably perfectly represent the audience of The Rings of Power, although most film-lovers won’t have gone as deep into The History of Middle-earth as Payne.
“Having different sensibilities for what Middle-earth is maybe helps,” says McKay. “But I think in this particular case, with this show, we just had a really clear idea of what was Tolkien and what was important to him. The more we read and the more we thought about it, the more we felt that Peter Jackson's amazing films had captured so much of it, but there was even more in there that couldn't even fit in
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