Senior Entertainment Writer

Before any of the first seasons of “The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power” hit Amazon Prime Video in 2022, executive producers and showrunners J.D. Payne and Patrick McKay had already wrapped up much of their work on the story for Season 2. That’s partly due to the free time afforded by the 2020 COVID lockdown. But in reality, Payne and McKay say they’ve known for years how the show would tell the rise of Sauron (Charlie Vickers) through the Second Age of Middle-earth, the millennia-spanning era leading up to the events of J.R.R. Tolkien’s “Lord of the Rings” novels.

“It's surprisingly more mapped than you would expect,” McKay says.

Season 2, for example, opens with a sequence the writers first conceived of six years ago: laying out what McKay calls “the show-canon origin story” for Sauron, a geeky way of acknowledging that many details about the Second Age that Tolkien didn’t write had to be invented for the series. It’s a necessity that has nonetheless frustrated some Tolkien fanatics, who haven’t been shy about voicing their displeasure with the liberties taken with Middle-earth lore and the deliberate pacing of the storytelling.