Hey my name's Matt. This is the 10 minute Bible hour podcast. I have a cold today.

I apologize for that. It's a bad day to have a cold because when you have a cold it kind of flattens out your voice.

You lose some inflection and humanity and on a day when you're going to open by criticizing something

that just might not be a good idea. I could abort now, but

I'm committed. We're doing this. I want to criticize that new Lord of the Rings show on Amazon.

I'm not one of these who was all mad that it was going to exist. I wanted it to work out.

I watched it and it didn't work out. Nothing personal if you happen to really love it and

think it was great, it's cool, it's fine. That doesn't mean I'm smart and you're dumb, maybe you're reading it right and I'm just too simple and I'm missing the beauty and the nuance of the thing, but I don't think I am. I think they really missed on their character construction, their character

arcs, their characters are woefully unlikable and unrelatable. I think they are

trying to please some passing modern cultural orthodoxy more than they're trying to

tap into the story that was great but at the same time look I got empathy for him

JRR token is dead and with him went his amazing ability to write stories about this world

and I'm not sure that the people of the 21st century are built to write in that tone.

So maybe it was just doomed from the start, maybe there's something more insidious underneath

that made it break, maybe it's just the kind of thing where you're looking at,

and you go half a billion dollars.

That's the kind of money that you send for foreign aid in a war,

and you used that to resurrect Middle Earth and it's just not compelling at all.

Feels like that should have worked out better.

But all of that said, the thing that I think I like

the least about the show is its attempt to call back to the source material.

It does all of these weird little nods to the Lord of the Rings trilogy.

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