Quote Originally Posted by warty goblin View Post
I vaguely enjoyed the first season while watching it. Then it ended and the whole thing was revealed to be six episodes of nothing happening, followed by one moderately ok episode and a finale where everything happened at such a rush it meant nothing and somehow felt underdeveloped in spite of seven hours of TV before that.
This seems to be the standard Amazon fantasy show format, sadly, as they did the exact same thing with Wheel of Time. Out of 8 episodes, 5 are essentially filler. On a per-episode basis this filler is actually really entertaining, but when you're trying to cram ~800 pages of novel into ~8 hours of television it really doesn't help you to try to instead cram those 800 pages into 3 hours fo television disconnected across 5 hours of filler.

After how bad episodes 8 and to a lesser extent 7 were for WoT I went from being a huge defender of the series' charm to apathetic at best, and never watched season 2.

Quote Originally Posted by warty goblin View Post
If it had been achingly bad in a cheesy fun way I'd have enjoyed it. I like Xena, a show that is frequently awful, has plots that defy human reason, and a production budget of nearly $45 per episode, and it's a blast because it's fun and energetic and knows precisely how to execute what it is. RoP is dour and self-serious, not in that absolutely zero self awareness of how cheesy this actually is way that makes for a blissfully unaware and therefore fascinatingly entertaining bad movie, just in normal ways about normal things to a very boring effect.

That said, to be fair the production values on the first season were excellent. There's some definite misfires here and there, but overall the show looks great, the props and effects folks should be proud. I only wish the actual story was worth the effort.
I got dogged on pretty hard here a couple of years ago for saying I was tired of "prestige television" as the dominant format so I'm glad other people are starting to come around to the idea that a 5/10 fun show is a lot better than a 6/10 snoozefest.