The Rings of Power has a surprising connection to both Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul. Writer Gennifer Hutchinson, who was recently interviewed by GameRant, has worked on all three shows. In her interview, Hutchinson discussed how writing for The Rings of Power compared to Better Call Saul and Breaking Bad.
Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power is helmed by J.D. Payne and Patrick McKay. The two, who are co-showrunners of Rings of Power, won the rights to the show over channels such as HBO when they pitched a show that would pay homage to and remain loyal to author JRR Tolkien’s source material. Joining them in the writers’ room is Gennifer Hutchinson, Helen Shang, Jason Cahill, Justin Doble, Bryan Cogman, and Stephany Folsom, with Glenise Mullins acting as a consulting writer.
Hutchinson discussed her time on Better Call Saul and Breaking Bad and compared it to her time on The Rings of Power in her interview with GameRant. “You know, it’s interesting. It does, but there’s a lot of stuff that’s foundationally the same. One of the things that’s nice about doing a TV show in this world is that you can spend a lot more time with your characters and do a deep dive on them and their psychology and where they’re coming from, which is really kind of the wheelhouse of the Vince Gilligan camp. So much about deep character study,” Hutchinson said when asked if the writers’ rooms differ. “But, also, this is a giant sweeping big fantasy show, so there was also this attention being paid to the scope and telling this huge story and balancing five different worlds and so many different characters. So there was that need to kind of really be mindful of so many different moving parts at the same time, as opposed to an intimate character study that you get on something like Breaking Bad or Better Call Saul. Here it was like you were doing smaller intimate character studies but having to make sure that you’re juggling all of them and honoring all of them throughout.”
It seems that writing a large-scale fantasy show like Rings of Power was a bit different in terms of worldbuilding. Both of Vince Gilligan’s hit shows take place in what is essentially the real world, and the focus is solely on the characters and their interactions with one another. A fantasy series like The Rings of Power has to spend time establishing the rules of its world, and introducing audiences to new concepts and even new species. It’s full of new, fantastical locations such as Khazad-Dum, which is ruled by Dwarven peoples. Hutchinson essentially comments that, while character building and relationships are just as important in The Rings of Power as they’d be in Breaking Bad, they are only one consideration out of many.
The beauty of a fantasy series like Rings of Power lies in a mixture of its world-building and characters. Even in new worlds, the human condition continues to prevail and characters like Galadriel must face moral struggles of their own. All the while, they must face new and interesting situations that a human in the real world can never truly face. This allows writers to ask how a person might realistically respond in a completely alien situation.
At the same time, there’s also the fascinating lore that the audience gets to learn about. The Rings of Power features rich histories of fantasy peoples, with Dwarven cities dotting the land, or ancient, magical kingdoms of Men that are corrupted by ancient evils. There’s an extra layer of discovery when an audience is given a new world to learn about.
The Rings of Power is available for streaming on Amazon Prime.
