The Lord of the Rings, Pam & Tommy, a GoT prequel: what to look out for in 2022

From The Lord of the Rings to Pam & Tommy, a GoT prequel and conwoman drama Inventing Anna, there’s plenty to look forward to in 2022.

The first trailer for Game of Thrones prequel House of the Dragon is out.

Last year was overwhelming in TV as production companies found ingenious ways around Covid protocols and released an onslaught of imaginative and compulsive shows. Now as the new year starts, every major international company in movies and television seems to have its own streaming network and there is a huge amount to anticipate.

As the great critic David Marc predicted back in 1996, Marshall McLuhan’s famous notion of the TV set as a kind of electronic hearth around which we would all gather has been robbed of all prescience as each of us retreats to our “own special piece of the demographic periphery”. And how exciting it is, even if at this stage we can’t be sure where all the new international shows will air locally given the intense competition for high-end product.

Here’s a few of the international high-profile scripted shows that have caught my eye so far.

Amazon Prime’s The Lord of the Rings is arguably the big one. Tolkien’s fantasy universe was acquired by Amazon for US$250m; the behemoth committed to five seasons, making it the most expensive TV show ever produced at that point. Taking place in Tolkien’s Second Age era, millennia before the events of The Hobbit, the series’ locations include Númenor, the Misty Mountains, and the elf-capital of Lindon. The first season now is estimated to be costing around $US450m.

And so far we know almost nothing about it, except that it’s being produced under great secrecy; all of the windows of the Santa Monica writer’s room are taped closed and fingerprint identification is required for entry.

There’s also a big buzz for George & Tammy, from US network Hulu, an intriguing Paramount+ series that looks at the tempestuous marriage between famous country singers George Jones and Tammy Wynette, featuring Jessica Chastain as Wynette and Michael Shannon as Jones. The Road’s John Hillcoat directs the six episodes following the singers, who were both at the height of their careers when they wed in 1969.

And Pam & Tommy looks at another passionate and scandalous relationship as I, Tonya director Craig Gillespie follows the bombshell leak of a honeymoon sex tape. Lily James stars as Pamela Anderson and a heavily tattooed Sebastian Stan is Motley Crue rock drummer Tommy Lee, alongside Nick Offerman and Seth Rogen as the electrician who nicked the tape.

There’s also anticipation for HBO’s Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty from Oscar nominee Adam McKay, which follows a team that defined its era, both on and off the court, with a fabulous ensemble cast including Sally Field, John C. Reilly, Jason Clarke and Adrien Brody.

Pamela Anderson, pictured, will be played by Lily James in Pam & Tommy

And Michael Mann’s Tokyo Vice is commanding much pre-publicity. Mann’s first time back in TV land, the series follows the unfortunate demise of the promising horse racing series Luck, which took an unflinching, and at times touchingly poetic, look at the teeming world of the California racetrack.

Tokyo Vice is based on reporter Jake Adelstein’s 2009 memoir, Tokyo Vice: An American Reporter on the Police Beat in Japan, which lays out his first-hand experiences while working on the beat for a local Japanese paper. The series, according to HBO, chronicles Adelstein’s daily descent into the sordid underbelly of Tokyo, where nothing and no one is truly what or who they seem.

HBO has also developed the highly anticipated prequel to Game of Thrones, House of the Dragon, based on George R.R. Martin’s 2018 novel Fire & Blood, set 200 years before the epic events of Game of Thrones. Described succinctly by critic Darren Franich as “a great, big, imperfect pile of story”, the series tells the story of House Targaryen and is one of five prequel and spin-off ideas developed before the final season of Game of Thrones had even finished shooting.

Disney has picked up the now much celebrated director Cary Fukunaga, straight from the world of James Bond, to create Masters Of The Air, a World War II miniseries described as similar in sensibility to both Band Of Brothers and The Pacific. The great TV director Tim Van Patten from Boardwalk Empire, among many other triumphs, is also involved.

Netflix makes our list with Inventing Anna. It is the first series from the visionary Shonda Rhimes following the unholy success of Bridgerton, watched by an estimated 82 million member households around the world in its first 28 days. Inventing Anna is described as “a con-woman drama” and stars Julia Garner. The show is based on New York magazine story, “How Anna Delvey tricked New York’s Party People”. Of the grifter Delvey, Rhimes says: “There wasn’t much different about her than any other boy genius who takes over Manhattan – except for the fact that she was a woman.”

Julia Garner as Anna Delvey in Inventing Anna

Netflix also has another offering from the prolific and rather remarkable Ryan Murphy, Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story. A dramatic account of one of America’s most notorious serial killers, it is told, intriguingly, from the perspective of the killer’s victims. And it seems Murphy’s show will look at the ways in which the police bungled the investigation and the times Dahmer, known as the Milwaukee Cannibal, escaped capture due to their incompetence.

And Netflix is also spending a fortune turning Neil Gaiman’s beloved graphic novel, The Sandman, into a TV series, a production long in gestation. Wonder Woman screenwriter Allan Heinberg is the showrunner with Gaiman as a producer. Bringing Gaiman’s comics to life has so far failed many writers and producers but if The Sandman works, it might just be the hit of the year.

From UK production houses, there’s Inside Man, the BBC and Netflix’s major new thriller from BAFTA and Emmy award-winning writer, the seemingly indefatigable Steven Moffat (Sherlock, Doctor Who).

David Tennant stars alongside Stanley Tucci in the four-part miniseries following a prisoner on death row in the US. The “inside man”, it seems, is a vicar in a quiet English town and a maths teacher trapped in a cellar, who cross paths in the most unexpected way.

The BBC has also commissioned The Gold, a six-part heist drama based on the true story of the 1983 Brink’s-Mat robbery and the decades-long chain of events that followed, the vicious, ­violent and unexpected events leading to the birth of large-scale international money laundering. It’s written by the brilliant Neil Forsyth, who a year or so ago gave us Guilt, the witty Scottish BBC series about the intractable nature of that intense personal recrimination over wrongdoing, and the skirmish to hide culpability on the behalf of a couple of accidental killers.

And the series I’m desperately hanging out for is the Apple TV adaptation of the brilliant Mick Herron’s Slow Horses series of UK espionage novels. Herron is a kind of contemporary John Le Carre with pratfalls. Drawing upon the first two books, Slow Horses and Dead Lions, the series, which will run for two seasons across 12 episodes, follows the slovenly but extremely dangerous intelligence officer Jackson Lamb (played by Gary Oldman) who heads up MI5’s dumping ground (the titular Slough House). The creaky, dusty building in need of a lick of paint, erased from official records, contains a group of cantankerous and disgruntled agents dumped due to continuous career-wrecking mistakes which supposedly jeopardise MI5.

It’s just been announced that both Kristin Scott Thomas and Jonathan Pryce have joined Lamb’s so-called “slow horses,’ all of whom are simply hoping to survive in a dangerous world of spy craft and politics in which they are deemed surplus.

The BBC’s Life After Life looks promising too. It’s a four-part adaptation of the best-selling and critically-acclaimed novel of the same title, by Kate Atkinson, about the alternate lives of a woman called Ursula Todd who dies one night in 1910, only to be born and survive on the same night. John Crowley, two-time BAFTA-winning director, responsible for the Saoirse Ronan drama Brooklyn, directs. The four-part series comes from House productions which produced the Emmy-nominated Brexit: The Uncivil War, starring Benedict Cumberbatch.

And then there’s SAS Rogue Heroes from writer, director and producer Steven Knight, of Peaky Blinders fame, a remarkable talent too. The series looks at the formation of the Special Air Service during World War II.

Knight describes it as, “a war story like no other, told in a way that is at once inspired by the facts and true to the spirit of this legendary brigade of misfits and adventurers”.

As Marc predicted in that far away time over two decades ago when TV was beginning to cease to exist as we had always understood it and the broadcast era was beginning: the streamers are changing the way we see the world.

It also represents an unprecedented commercial incursion into the domestic space.

And as the critic said: “Each tribe beats its own drums to spread the news.” What a time to be watching.

What we know so far: The Lord of the Rings, Amazon Prime, September; Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty, Binge, March; and Inventing Anna, Netflix, February 11.