Amazon's streaming service can be best described as "hit or miss" with the misses being miles off from good. You can count the number of decent shows on one hand while failing to remember every gawdawful show it's released.
Of all the piles of excrement, Jeff Bezos's company has created, "Rings of Power" stinks the most. Having cost around $1 billion to create and bombing harder than a MOAB, the show represented Amazon's potential to spend big and lose bigger. Despite pretending everything was going great, it was pretty clear that Amazon felt the blast and that its streaming service had a gaping crater to deal with.
But perhaps Amazon is seizing upon a bit of luck that, ironically, comes in the form of the ongoing Hollywood strikes. It would appear that it's utilizing the strike to cancel underperforming shows...or at least that's what it's being accused of.
According to ScreenRant, Amazon canceled the woke-infected "A League of Their Own" series despite it being renewed for a second season. Didn't watch it? Didn't even know they had created it? You're not alone. It's not exactly a popular show thanks to it being a delivery system for social justice messaging and woke nonsense. The show was originally going to get a shortened second season to wrap up some storylines, but now that's been tossed in the garbage.
Interestingly, this seems to come as a surprise to Abbi Jacobson, the show's co-creator. While Amazon is saying that the reason behind the cancelation is the strikes, she seems to believe it's for other reasons and the strikes are just an excuse, calling the decision "cowardly" and "bull**it" in an Instagram post.
Amazon is also canceling their sci-fi show "The Peripheral" which also underperformed. According to Forbes, this and "A League of Their Own" is just the start of a big cancellation sweep, and not just at Amazon.
"This feels like the start of something, so I would definitely expect a lot more of this, a combination of cutting costs and the effects of the strike," wrote Forbes senior contributor Paul Tassi.
This brings us back to "Rings of Power." Speculation now abounds as to whether or not Amazon's biggest and most expensive failure will face the guillotine as well. The show has been locked in for five seasons, but with the writer's strike seemingly allowing them to rearrange the board, it's not impossible for it to go completely untouched.
"Rings of Power" is Amazon's most expensive show that, despite all of its impressive sets and CGI, was a mess of a storyline that reimagined Tolkien's beloved characters into cringe-worthy shadows of themselves and slapped too much "for modern audience" flavor into it as well. Over time, audiences found themselves bored with the show and watched less and less as the season went on.
(Disaster: Amazon's 'Rings of Power' Ratings Reveals Its Billion-Dollar Show Bored Viewers)
Outside of bad writing, horrific acting, and terrible costumes, the bastardization of Tolkien's work drained any good faith Amazon and "Rings of Power" had with its audience. It's pretty clear that Amazon cannot continue down this path without taking tremendous losses.
Despite nothing having been announced yet, it's a safe bet to assume the show's been brought up in meetings. It probably won't get canceled seeing as how so much money has already been sunk into it, but it's unlikely that some changes won't occur.
The question is, what kind of changes will they make, and will these course corrections win back Tolkien fans? If that's what they want to try, the changes will have to be severe, possibly including an all-new writing team and possibly an entirely new storyline that will somehow ignore the first.
A lot is possible at this point, but nothing is set in stone, not even approved season renewals. What Amazon chooses to burn could either put it back on the right track or cement itself in failure.