‘The Lord of the Rings’ show’s critic and audience scores are significantly higher compared to its much-criticized debut season — and even rival ‘House of the Dragon’ season two.

Robert Aramayo as Elrond in ‘Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power.’ Ross Ferguson / Prime Video

Is Amazon’s hugely expensive The Lord of the Rings gamble starting to pay off?

The second-season critic and audience reviews for the much-debated fantasy drama The Rings of Power show an early improvement compared to the series’ 2022 debut season.

On Thursday, the company released the new season’s first three episodes onto Prime Video, giving fans the opportunity to sample a significant chunk of the eight-episode season. The initial Rotten Tomatoes critics score is 92 percent “Fresh,” and the audience score is 69 percent positive.

It’s easy to forget that the first season received pretty positive critic reviews and averaged 83 percent, but this season has jumped from that. The 69 percent audience score might seem like the less impressive number, but the first season’s audience score was a disastrous 38 percent, so that score has nearly doubled.

Obviously, this is very much early days, and the scores can and will shift as more episodes get rolled out, but the consensus among critics who have seen episodes beyond the first three seems to be that the remaining hours are at least as good as the opening salvo. (The show’s IMDb scores show a very stable reaction from season one to season two, with both seasons averaging 7.3 of 10, but the Amazon-owned service was also accused of deleting negative reviews last time).

That said, the positive Rings reviews still tend to be mixed rather than raves. The Hollywood Reporter’s own review was negative, and The Washington Post’s review headline summarized “The Rings of Power improves in its second season but not enough.”

Many are comparing Rings, once again, to HBO’s House of the Dragon. During the shows’ debut seasons, which partially aired head to head in 2022, the overwhelming consensus was that Dragon was the superior show. But the second season of Dragon was considered a disappointment by some, and Rings‘ showrunners seem to have made good on their pledge to take note of what was and wasn’t working from their first round. They improved several aspects with a season that has a quickened momentum and given clearer dramatic stakes to complement its consistently gorgeous visuals (and an excellent score by Bear McCreary). (The Dragon season two RT scores — based on the entire season, not just three episodes — were 83 percent critics score and 74 percent audience score.)

The Rings audience score is also interesting in the context of the cultural conversation about the show’s first season. Its low scores were at least somewhat attributed to review bombing inspired by so-called “woke” elements of the show (and, indeed, there was a real percentage of the show’s backlash that had language supporting this claim, and some of the actors were targeted with hateful abuse). So what are we to make, then, of the audience largely embracing the show’s second season? Did the show become less woke? Did its viewers become more accepting of the creators’ more modern take on J.R.R. Tolkien’s world? Did the first season’s haters simply not watch this time? Or did the show’s defenders err in attributing so much blame for the scores on trolls? Some mix of these factors, perhaps?

Another question: Ratings. The Rings of Power is the most expensive TV show of all time and has cost Amazon roughly $715 million. Amazon says the first season was viewed by more than 100 million people worldwide, with more than 32 billion minutes streamed (and would surely push back on this story’s question about whether the show is paying off now by insisting “it already has!”).

Yet The Hollywood Reporter reported the first season only had a completion rate of 37 percent (50 percent would be considered “solid”), reflecting a significant drop-off. So it will be interesting to see moving forward whether the more positive reaction translates into bigger ratings, or whether these audience scores basically reflect a smaller number of fans who enjoyed the first season and then stuck around. Either way, in terms of the out-of-the-gate reaction to a series many were skeptical about, The Rings of Power is a bit of a late-summer surprise that appears to be off to a strong start compared to last time.