Here's a pitch for a lotr TV show that I would consider watching. Takes place after the events of LOTR, and its a smaller story. No world ending nonsense, maybe not even a big bad antagonist (in the sense of being a world ender or a dragon even would be too much) and just have it be straight up adventure. It could just follow a handful of characters on a little adventure throughout middle earth, we'd get to see the aftermath of sauron's defeat, maybe hear about how some old characters are doing. Something more focused on the journey than anything. It would check a lot of boxes for me, and would have the bonus of not really ruining canon as bad since it takes place in the future.
Frankly the best attempt at a LOTR sequel (and game mod in general) I've ever seen is the
Fourth Age: Total War mod for the first Rome: Total War (a game that's almost 20 years old), set a couple centuries after the events of the trilogy with a civil war between Aragorn's descendants and the lingering malign influence of the Mouth of Sauron forming its centerpiece. The devteam worked on that mod for almost 15 years (their demo came out in 2005, the final patch for the full mod in 2019) and, similar to how Amazon could only go on a few pages of the appendices for Rings of Power, they only had
a few pages of Tolkien's concept for a sequel to work with. (Because Tolkien ended up deciding a story about the Reunited Kingdom degenerating and future Gondorian boys smashing up monuments like they're Antifa would be too depressing to write about) The creators ended up having to rely on both extensive lore research and conjecture, ie. making things up, to produce a viable game, and haven't moved on from Rome I as it became outdated even by the standards of the pre-Warscape engine Total War games.
And yet the end product is still one of the best fan-mods for any game I've ever played, to the point where it feels like an entirely new game in its own right. On top of that, the team is so wonderfully, autistically devoted to Tolkien that almost immediately after concluding work on FATW, they went right on to work on
another LOTR mod (this time set in an actually canonical timeframe, the Wainrider invasion of the mid-Third Age where Gondor's getting beat down by a new wave of hostile Easterlings while Arnor is on its last legs). In addition to playthroughs of FATW and other old Total War mods,
this guy on Youtube has made videos showcasing the new mod's icons and faction units, including some factions that haven't been properly previewed in the devs' main thread.
If Amazon had even one-hundredth of the talent, passion and attention to both Tolkien's lore and the themes he was trying to convey (such as the 'Long Defeat', or the idea that the world will inevitably gradually decline as time goes on in spite of occasional temporary reversals like the victory of the Free Peoples of Middle-earth over Sauron, until the apocalypse happens) of the people behind Fourth Age & Wainriders Total War, I don't think they'd have gotten even one-hundredth of the hate they're rightfully getting now.
However, this is Amazon. They'll hide as much as they can, and burble about meeting expectations ratingswise where they can't. The shill media will dance along, praising the series for tangential stuff like the sexual proclivities of the cast and crew, how inclusive it all is, and on and on.
