On Table-Setting -- 'Dragon' and 'Rings'

Plus: A return to the Woods, lockdown standup and scholars who put a Ring on it [View this email online]( [Pop Culture Happy Hour]( by Glen Weldon Welcome! It was the week we were reminded what happens [after six seasons](. It was the week we were warned to tie ourselves to the mast because soon, somehow, tossed salads and scrambled eggs will [start calling again](. And it was the week The Great British Bake-Off [totally Nailed It]( Let’s get to it. Opening Argument: On Table-Setting It’s unfair to compare HBO’s tentpole high-fantasy series House of the Dragon with Amazon’s tentpole high-fantasy series The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power. It’s also inevitable, because come on. It’s not just that they’re both expensive and ambitious projects based on beloved properties involving swords, magic, maps, lore and struggles for power. It’s that, in very different ways, they’re going about precisely the same task. Both are taking documents of dry pseudo-history and turning them into serialized drama. In Rings’ case, it’s the voluminous appendices to J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings that sketch out the history of Tolkien’s world and its peoples. Dragon is based on a chunk of George R.R. Martin’s 2018 book Fire & Blood, which purports to be an account of the Targaryen dynasty written by a historian attempting to reconcile various not-entirely-reliable sources. Both documents present the events they chronicle at an academic remove. That remove is a pose, sure – but part of the fun of reading them is the distance we feel stretching between us and what we’re reading about. It’s a lot like the distance we feel when we read real history, which is the whole point, of course. We’re struck with an acute sense of time and its effects, and maybe a pang of loss – a reminder that only a sliver of What Really Happened, the joy and pain, the births and deaths – has managed to make its way to us as we happily paw through a book on our comfy couch. Matt Grace/Prime Video Neither Dragon or Rings are interested in capturing the comfortingly melancholic sense of history of their source material – they exist to dispel it. By treating Tolkien’s appendices and Martin’s pseudo-history as outlines or, more specifically, what showrunners call “story bibles,” both shows have employed teams of professionals to throw some living, breathing meat on those dusty narrative bones. Dragon’s task is arguably the more fun one, from a writer’s perspective. You take the historical events outlined in Fire & Blood, decide which source tells the version that’d make the best drama, and you unpack them. So, the civil war called the Dance of the Dragons takes place over several years? And to truly embody it, you need to start the story when many of its major players are children? Simple! Just cast several actors to play them at different ages. Problem solved. The downside of that approach, of course, is how disconnected a season can feel, as you insert time-jumps between episodes (3 years! 10 years! 6 years!) and keep swapping out actors to account for them. It starts to feel like an anthology series that just happens to take place in the same castle. Rings’ task isn’t quite the same, actually – where Dragon unpacks, Rings compresses. The events it sets out to dramatize take place over the course of thousands of years. That wouldn’t be an issue if the series revolved around elves and elves alone – they’re immortal, after all. But that wouldn’t be true to Tolkien’s vision of disparate groups working together to defeat a great evil. The answer the Rings showrunners have arrived at is to collapse the timeline outlined in the Lord of the Rings appendices so that characters we meet in Season 1 could feasibly still be alive when everything comes to an end in Season 5. (It helps that these characters are men of Numenor, who live for hundreds of years.) So no time-jumps, and no swapping out of actors; this lends the show a real sense of continuity and narrative flow. But despite these vastly different approaches, both shows suffer from precisely the same flaw – a distinct sense that they’re slow-walking the story they’ve set out to tell, that they’re content to bide their time with table-setting when they really need to start serving us the damn appetizers already. On Dragon, the battle lines between the two sides that we know will wage a bloody and ruinous civil war keep getting drawn, then hastily erased, then drawn again. On Rings, Galadriel spends three whole freaking episodes cooling her alabaster heels on Númenor, having the same conversation, over and over. The intentions are noble – the showrunners want us to get a sense of the world, and its major players, before serving us the meal they’ve prepared for us. It’s very possible that in the future, if both shows get the seasons they’ve planned on, we’ll look back on these first seasons and appreciate the work they did to get us where we’ve ended up. That’s how table-setting works – it makes the meal possible, and you’re grateful for it, once it’s over. But right now, in the moment, we’re all of us still setting the table. We can smell the meal cooking, but we’re still out here folding the napkins and finding the placemats and figuring out the deal with the salad forks. Because that’s the thing people tend to forget about table-setting: It’s a chore. --------------------------------------------------------------- Newsletter continues after sponsor message --------------------------------------------------------------- Listen to the Podcast Sponsor-Free Support your favorite pop culture junkies AND listen without sponsor interruptions with a subscription to [Pop Culture Happy Hour+]( Learn more and sign up at [plus.npr.org/happy](. [Learn More]( We Recommend Clifton Prescod/Netflix You can come to know a Broadway show so well that your brain starts to treat it as musical wallpaper. Lovely, yes. Beautiful, sure. Profound, you betcha. But familiar. There’s a comfort in that familiarity, but there’s also, well: Familiarity. I haven’t had a chance to see the latest Broadway revival of Into the Woods, a show I know in my bones, but [they’ve released the cast album]( and hoo boy. It’s like being reunited with a childhood crush who’s turned out damn fine. Yes, we all love Abbott Elementary and sure, we all love Janelle James’ Ava, the school’s hilariously unprincipled principal. But if you haven’t caught her standup, you need to get yourself to [her Netflix special]( - The Standups, Season 3, Episode 4, tout suite. A lot of comics are out here talking about how they spent lockdown, which only makes sense – who can’t relate? But James’ take is the sharpest, freshest and funniest I’ve seen. I listen to lots of podcasts about The Rings of Power and House of the Dragon, so you’d think I’d be all set on nerdy breakdowns of popular fantasy franchises. But I’ve recently discovered Rings & Realms, a weekly [YouTube series]( in which scholars Corey Olsen and Maggie Parke unpack each episode of Rings of Power with real insight and deep lore. What We Did This Week Matt Kennedy/Disney On [Monday’s episode]( Linda and Barrie Hardymon talked Hulu’s The Patient. On Tuesday, [we revisited a conversation]( Glen (that’s me!) and Stephen had with Felix Contreras and Shereen Marisol Meraji about Los Espookys, which is finally back for Season 2 on HBO, and is better and weirder and queerer and funnier than ever. On Wednesday, Aisha and Barrie [did not prefer]( Blonde. On Thursday, Glen (still me!) talked to Ayesha Rascoe and Roxana Hadadi about The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power. It’s the [definite article]( It’s three of them, in fact! And on Friday, [Stephen talked to]( Mallory Yu and Kiana Fitzgerald about Hocus Pocus 2, and What’s Making Us Happy. You can always check out [what Stephen’s up to]( over on NPR’s New Music Friday. Check out once and future PCHH panelist Andrew Limbong’s [great radio piece]( about the economics of working in theater, which is a part of NPR’s The Next Stage series. (His interview with [PCHH patron saint]( Kate Beaton is also wonderful.) And Glen (yep! Me!) is [recapping]( House of the Dragon for NPR, which is a lot of work for him and even more for his poor editor, who has to spell-check George RR Martin’s aevery maede-up high-faentaesy naeme, in which he turns every “a” into “ae,” aend of which there aere ae hell of ae lot. Recaeps drop on Sundaey night right aefter eaech episode. What's Making Us Happy Every week on the show, we talk about some other things out in the world that have been giving us joy lately. Here they are: - What's making Mallory Yu happy: [Thistlefoot]( GennaRose Nethercott]( - What's making Kiana Fitzgerald happy: [The Jackson State football team celebrating Glorilla]( - What's making Stephen Thompson happy: [Chip n’ Dale: Rescue Rangers]( on Disney+ --------------------------------------------------------------- Stream your local NPR station. Visit NPR.org to find your local station stream. 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