The rumor going around Twitter is the series started off as an adaptation of BioWare’s Dragon Age, but was minimally reworked to fit Middle Earth after securing the rights…
Considering, first, that I would not trust anything the twitterati says, the scenes of Khazad'dum DID look very Dragon Age. However, Amazon secured the rights back in 2017. I find it hard to believe that a workable script has been kicking around that long and the show is STILL awful trash that sounds like it was written by a drunk DM the night before a game.
Back in 2017 they were working on two series: Rings of Power was the "family oriented" one, while Conan the Barbarian was the "Sex, blood and violence" one meant to capture the "Game of Thrones" crowd. According to the grapevine, RoP was not woke and the scripts produced for Conan were just amazing. While both were about to be greenlighted, however, the management was metooed and replaced with a certain Jennifer Salke (who was
at once glorified by the woke press).
Salke
of course ditched the "toxic masculinity" in Conan and cleaned house in RoP, demanding a rewrite with more grrrrl power (i.e.
only grrrrl power) - the sources be damned. This led to chaos, as the two showrunners had no experience in show running in the first place. The result is the mess we see, with incomplete scripts (they mention the Silmarils but they don't explain what the Silmarils are), astoundingly bad editing, inconsistent cinematography, incomprehensible plot points (Galadriel decides to swim across a whole ocean - I'm not joking), a glacial pace and collapsing ratings. And I could go on (review manipulation by Amazon, attempts to pay YouTubers, the rights to "Everything Tolkien" being bought by the Embracer Group for one third of the price they had in February...)
So, heads are bound to roll at Amazon. We are all waiting for it. It will be fun.
Edit: Oh, I almost forgot. The writer/show runner for that wonderful Conan series? Ryan Condal? Yup, he was picked up by HBO and is currently running The House of the Dragon. Shit happens.