Cinematic Complexity in Peak TV? Amazon’s Rings of Power and the Musical Extension of an Existing Franchise

As an extension of one of the most popular fantasy franchises to date, and also as the most expensive television show made up to the present time, The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power (2022–) already sits at the summit of several “peaks” of peak TV, but what do the show’s musical elements—a score by Bear McCreary and title music by Howard Shore—have to tell us about peak scoring practices? This chapter presents an analysis of the music of the series, including its harmonic and timbral (but not motivic) relations to Shore’s music for the Peter Jackson trilogies. Borrowing from Jason Mittell (Complex TV: The Poetics of Contemporary Television Storytelling. New York: New York University Press, 2015), concepts of centrifugal complexity help to unpack and further theorize how music works in this episodic context. Furthermore, the chapter explores fan engagement with the series’ music, and in turn McCreary’s engagement with fans, using further theories of drilling and spreading to argue that it is precisely the complexity found in the compositional approach, paired with narrative complexity and complex worldbuilding that makes the series’ music prime material for forensic fandom. The series thus exhibits “peakness” in its scoring practices not through ostentatiousness or rule-breaking but by developing its own internal rules and sticking to them rigorously. As part of this discussion, the essay engages with the question of what makes a screen music score “cinematic” and thus what distinguishes music for the Lord of the Rings movies and television series.