Lord of the rings

Amazon’s much-heralded Tolkien prequel The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power began by answering a question that has puzzled humankind – and possibly elves – these many millennia. Why is it that a ship floats and a stone doesn’t? The reason apparently is because ‘a stone sees only downward’, whereas a ship has ‘her gaze fixed upon the light that guides her’. And this, I’m afraid, set the tone for much of the dialogue that followed in the two episodes released so far – as, to their credit, the characters managed to exchange an endless series of ponderous aphorisms without giggling. So it was that we learned how

I don’t think it’s my imagination: it really is getting harder and harder to find anything worth watching on TV. But then, why should it be otherwise? Entropy has afflicted every aspect of our culture from holiday flights to the supply chain to the efficacy and integrity of our political and legal system to the quality of pop singles, so we should hardly be surprised if the quality of material on the gogglebox has taken a dive too. One metric of this is the decline in quality of long-running TV series. Game of Thrones was not the exception but the rule. Even the series I sometimes consider to be the

It has taken me a while to watch Yellowjackets because I found the premise so offputting: in 1996 a plane carrying a New Jersey girls’ school soccer team crashes in the mountain wilderness, stranding the survivors for nearly two years. Through flashbacks, we learn that the girls went through some kind of Lord of the Flies horror scenario, perhaps including cannibalism and ritualistic tribal sacrifice. All of which might explain why the forty-something women we meet today are so raddled, bitter, secretive, paranoid and messed up. Perhaps the biggest red flag is the dread memories it invokes of Lost, the plane crash TV series that ran in the Noughties for