cloetehenri

I love nature documentaries, with a special preference for the BBC documentaries narrated by David Attenborough. As much as I love those, I really appreciated Penguin Town for how different it was from the documentaries I normally watch. Instead of featuring many species at different locations, Penguin Town only focuses on the African penguin colony at Simon's Town in South Africa. That allows the series to focus on telling the story of a couple of individuals in the colony in detail. The witty narration by Patton Oswalt and stunning videography of the beautiful Simon's Town area really brings these quirky characters to life, and by the end of the series you will be shouting just as hard for these penguins as for the human characters in your favorite fictional series. Highly recommended!

With the last couple of Star Wars series, I was complaining about Disney relying too much on nostalgia, and not enough on good writing. Andor was the perfect response. Starting with (mostly) unknown characters and planets, the writers created an immersive world with an intriguing story, deep characters and interesting cultures that I can't wait to explore more. A series that someone who has never watched Star Wars could enjoy. The only small complaint that I have is related to a couple of episodes where the pace was incredibly slow and not much happened. However, the setup in these episodes led to such good payoffs that in the end I don't mind much. I really hope that future Star Wars series will build on this standard that was set by Andor.

No, season 1 of the Rings of Power was not bad, hence the rating of 7/10 from me. But if you have one of the richest fantasy worlds to set your series in, and the highest budget of a first season ever, such an average rating should be a very big disappointment.

The biggest downfall of the series is the poor quality of the writing, which would have been sub-par even for a series with a tenth of the budget. There are so many examples of lazy writing, clumsy dialogue, poorly justified character choices and strange time jumps, that it really detracts from the things the show do well. Also, the character development is poorly written and, after 8 hour-long episodes, I hardly feel any attachment to the main characters. The one thing that the show did do well was the visuals, which are generally stunning. I just wish they could have put the same effort into the writing.

Overall, the Rings of Power suffers from many of the same flaws as the recent Wheel of Time adaptation. Considering the exceptional source material that these two shows had to work with, the resulting products are highly disappointing, which makes me very concerned about Amazon's adaptations going forward. Let's hope the studio learns from these two shows, and comes back with much improved products in the second seasons.