Great big, expensive TV shows live or die based on one thing: Ratings.

Recently, a lot of people, including some stars of the show, complained that Disney’s The Acolyte was cancelled because of “toxic fans”. This is nonsense. The Star Wars show was axed because it cost $180 million to make and had the worst ratings of any Disney Plus Star Wars show. Had the series been good enough to draw big viewership numbers, it would have survived regardless of the “toxic fans.”

The cheaper the show, the more likely it is to survive lower ratings. This is why cheap reality shows are so popular with networks and streamers: They cost very little but draw lots of eyeballs. It’s a lot harder for big-budget, premiere television to break even.

Now we have some very bad news for Amazon’s massively expensive Rings Of Power, a prequel to The Lord Of The Rings that tells a condensed and altered version of Tolkien’s Second Age of Middle-earth. Deadline reports that Samba TV, which tracks streaming numbers, has noted a massive decline in viewership from Season 1 to Season 2.

According to Samba TV data, 1.8 million U.S. households watched the first episode of Season 1 within three days of it landing on Prime Video. Season 2 is half of that, with just 902,000 U.S. households tuning in for the first episode within four days its streaming debut.

Part of this could be chocked up to the decline in Amazon’s marketing budget. Before Season 1, every package you received from the online store was taped up in Rings Of Power branding. Amazon pushed hard on the marketing for Season 1 and scaled back drastically for Season 2. But that’s only part of the explanation for this decline.

The bigger reason is simple: The first season was incredibly bad television that not only tinkered with the source material in disastrous ways, but was filled with all manner of plot-holes, cringey dialogue and bad writing that made characters we hoped to love, like Galadriel, more jarring than likeable.

Season 2 continues to have most of the same problems as Season 1, though it remains a very nice show to look at with a sweeping score by Bear McCreary. It has all the trappings of a good epic fantasy with none of the heart or soul. And it’s boring.

This is why the show has declined so enormously in viewership from one premiere to the next, and this is very, very bad news for Season 3. I don’t think Amazon will cancel the series, however. But I do think we may not get the full five seasons promised. If I were Jeff Bezos, I would be looking for new showrunners and new writers at this point. But it’s too late. The many changes to lore and the many bizarre decisions that have been made up to this point will make any kind of narrative comeback all but impossible.

If I were in charge, I would cancel the show after Season 2 and start over with more experienced showrunners, the best writers money can buy, and a team of Tolkien experts dedicated to getting the lore right within the confines of the rights. Obviously some changes have to be made with any adaptation, but skilled showrunners and writers, willing to take experts seriously and eager not to “make it their own” but do the best job possible adapting the source material, ought to be able to come up with a really compelling series about the Second Age—instead of this tepid, generic fan-fic we’ve had foisted upon us.

This is why I don’t trust Rotten Tomatoes scores. The critics are all-but-unanimous in singing this show’s praises, but audiences aren’t sticking around. This is in stark contrast to Game Of Thrones, which built up every season. This is finale numbers, but Variety reported back in 2022:

None of this comes as a surprise. I reported last year that only 37% of the people who started Rings Of Power’s first season even finished it. No wonder so few came over to watch Season 2. If a similar trend occurs by the season finale, with numbers plummeting even further into the pit, Amazon may have no choice but to pull the proverbial plug on this embarrassing experiment in vanity, extravagance and improvidence.

Variety reports that Rings Of Power was #2 in streaming over the weekend per Luminate. Luminate reports that the show saw an estimated 553.5 million minutes of watch-time, translating into roughly 2.7 million views.

Now compare this to data from Season 1, which also opened over Labor Day weekend two years ago. That brought in 1.2 billion minutes, or about 8.9 million estimated views with just two episodes available in contrast to Season 2’s three episodes.

Variety describes this as a “slightly slower start” but 2.7 is 30% of Season 1’s 8.9 million views—far less than half. Variety also points out that House of the Dragon saw a decline—7.8 million views for its second season vs 10 million for Season 1—but this isn’t even comparable by comparison. It is true that many shows see a decline from first to second season, but as I noted above that is far from guaranteed, with shows like Game Of Thrones increasing viewership each season.

It will be interesting to see data going forward. We won’t have Nielsen data for several weeks, and that should be very revealing, painting a clearer picture of the decline season over season. Either way, this does not look good for Amazon’s flagship fantasy series.