The television season has been packed with huge shows from HBO, Disney, Amazon, and pretty much every other streamer as well. The Lord of the Rings: Rings of Power and She-Hulk have completed their seasons and stand out in a very saturated landscape of fandom and intellectual property. She-Hulk delivered the most unique Disney+ Marvel show, and LOTR: Rings of Power has successfully established its place in the fantasy TV hierarchy.
She-Hulk may have been the least talked about MCU show, but it might be its best TV effort, and it’s firmly one of the best Marvel projects since Avengers: Endgame. With Marvel shifting its storytelling to include television series, the results of the projects have been hit or miss. Even when a show is unique and compelling like WandaVision, the shows seem to all diverge into a CGI big final boss nonsense that undercuts the unique storytelling and characterizations they built. She-Hulk was able to keep intact what made it great while delivering a conclusion that, in contrast to the majority of the Marvel TV shows, felt suitable for the character, vibe and the narrative they have been telling throughout its season.
She-Hulk is basically a law comedy in a superhero setting following Jennifer Walters (Tatiana Maslany) after she gets exposed to her cousin, The Hulk’s blood turning her into a Hulk herself. Jennifer gets hired by a law firm to head up their superhero law division, where she represents characters like The Abomination (Tim Roth) from the terrible Incredible Hulk and interacts with characters like Wong from the Doctor Strange franchise and (spoilers) Daredevil being reprised by Charlie Cox.
The series has low stakes, one of its biggest strengths that allowed the show’s creator Jessica Gao and its writers to color outside the lines of what you would now expect from a Marvel series. The fourth-wall-breaking and meta nature of the show gives it a great sense of self-awareness that lets the show make fun of some of the more ridiculous things that happen in superhero stories.
The maturity of the series and the characters acting like genuine human beings with human wants and needs were much appreciated. Tatiana Maslany and the rest of the cast were great. The show trying to make the audience believe Maslany isn’t attractive was kind of outrageous but understandable because of what her alter ego ultimately represents to herself and those around her. The CGI, which was jarring at first, was more tolerable as the show went on.
The guest spots all hit their mark, allowing for the type of interactions between characters you read comics for. The show explores what it’s like being a high-profile woman in this world put under the microscope by the media, and the group of toxic, online males chronically upset a woman has taken her power from their rightful male hero was handled exceptionally well. Genuinely compelling, this story line was grounded in the real world, and mirrored the real online critiques the show continues to receive from toxic fanboys.
The show has been under the radar despite it being excellent. Most fans of these MCU shows don’t really care if something is good or not, but rather what it means for what’s next. Who is She-Hulk going to introduce, is there going to be a Hulk movie, and so on and so on until the next thing comes out and the same questions are asked. She-Hulk takes aim at some of the issues and ways these properties are consumed by fans in an fun way, Acknowledging what people are used to with these movies and shows and doing its own thing anyway.
Amazon’s The Lord of the Rings: Rings of Power has completed its first season after going head to head with its HBO fantasy counterpart House of The Dragon, for weeks. The expectations for this series were as astronomical as the amount of money Amazon spent producing it, and somehow some way it managed to pretty much live up to its hype. From its world-building and performances to its incredible visuals worthy of its price tag, Rings of Power comes out as the more successful fantasy adaption.
The series adapts the second age of Tolkien’s universe, thousands of years before the Lord of The Rings trilogy when the Rings of Power the series is centered on were created. The show legally cannot be considered a continuation of Peter Jackson’s original Trilogy or The Hobbit Films, tasking the show with being a unique story that evokes the feelings of the beloved adaptions that came before while being something that can stand on its own.
The series succeeds on that front, building out a world that feels expansive with multiple storylines and POVs for its audience to get invested in. Real scholars of the books and all the supplementary writing will more than likely have their critiques and thoughts about how the show is telling its story and using elements in ways that may contradict the lore they have poured over, but even the most die-hard fan should be able to recognize it as an achievement.
The scale of the story and the expansiveness of the world of the show is what separates it from House of the Dragon. Where House of the Dragon is hyper-focused on its very condensed story of succession, Rings of Power is more like the OG Game of Thrones in its scope, where there are several locations we visit every episode and storylines that are going on at the same time. If you don’t like the Harfoot storyline, in five minutes, you’ll be back with the elves or back with the Dwarves in their city.
The show can go from whimsical buddy comedy to an Elf centered martial arts film all in one episode. The vastness of its world and the fact that every shot looks like the most expensive thing you can see on TV makes watching feel like the epic fantasy story its material calls for.
The cast is also great, led by Morfydd Clark as Galadriel, Robert Aramayo as Elrond and Ismael Cruz Córdova as Arondir. The individual arcs characters go through serve the mysteries introduced and quickly endear them to the audience as we experience their triumphs, losses, and growth. Rings of Power is a drop in the bucket for Amazon’s finances, it could have easily been a hollow attempt at cultivating intellectual property, but it exceeded expectations becoming a worthy adaption with more to come.
She-Hulk streams on Disney+ and The Lord of the Rings: Rings of Power streams on Amazon Prime Video.
This article appears in Jan 1 – Dec 31, 2022.
