Reddit Decides on The Cringiest Part of The Rings of Power
The Rings of Power had plenty of cringe, however you look at it.
The series managed to look both gaudy and cheap throughout, with few good visual designs (particularly if we don't count those which were obviously influenced by Jackson's movies), the grand CG scenes were garish, and conspicuous absence of grand CG scenes in some parts (like lack of a big computer-generated fleet during the invasion of the Southlands) was puzzling. Far too many plot points were questionable to say the least, and the less to be said about relations of the series to the book lore, the better.
But what many, many Reddit users found the worst part of the series was, perhaps surprisingly, the dialogue.
The specific accusations levied at this particular aspect of the series included word bloat; pretend drama where characters get emotional to cover for the lack of real substance or meaning; said lack of real substance when too many dialogues did not actually convey anything resembling plot points ("we have ten minutes of story for this hour-long episode…"); dialogue writers trying to be profound and emulate gravitas of Tolkien's most memorable scenes but failing miserably ("like a teenager trying to be deep"); actors acting like they were in an epic while actual scenes didn't in truth feel especially epic and did not contain actual events worthy of an epic tone; and simply some stupid lines that ended unintentionally hilarious.
Some Redditors even complained that all the endless talk was literally putting them to sleep as they tried to watch The Rings of Power! The massive amount of upvotes leaves no doubt that the viewers saw the weakness of dialogue as one of the greatest problems with the series.
They may be on to something. Dialogue is the bread and butter of any TV series, something likely to take most of its screentime, so it is stands to reason that if a series is poorly received, or at least controversial, it is likely to have at least some problems in this area, whether with dialogue delivery by actors or with scripts themselves. We shall see if and how the following seasons deal with said problems.