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Here, the choices in “House of the Dragon” offer a useful contrast. The main way that the show diversified its source material is by making one of the major noble houses in Martin’s version of medieval Europe, the Velaryon family, dark-complexioned, albeit with the same platinum blond hair as the light-complexioned Targaryen family with whom they share a distant point of origin, the lost realm of Old Valyria.

The show doesn’t address (not so far, at least) Valyria’s internal ethnic diversity or how exactly traits like white hair, the signifier of its ancient bloodlines, get passed down. But the general dynamics of skin color on the show are familiar to our world. The Velaryons don’t look like other families of Westeros, who are mostly light-skinned, because they aren’t from Westeros. When Velaryons marry Targaryens, their children look multiracial. And — again, mild spoiler — when a Velaryon heir marries a Targaryen heiress, but the Targaryen heiress takes her captain of the guard as a lover, the fact that her lighter-complexioned, brunet-haired oldest sons don’t resemble her Velaryon husband creates a climate of suspicion that’s then crucial to the plot.

In other words, “House of the Dragon” uses diverse casting to raise the stakes of its family drama, while “The Rings of Power” just injects diversity haphazardly. And that lack of care is a defining feature of the show.

There are still things that can be said on its behalf: that it had a harder task, a bigger canvas and less of a road map than “House of the Dragon” (whose politics were mapped out in Martin’s source material) or that it needed to be a little more naïve, sincere and, frankly, magical than the gritty HBO style of television, which entails certain artistic risks in our relatively jaded times. If you want a Tolkien fan’s summary that’s similarly critical but ultimately a little more forgiving, I recommend reading this end-of-season wrap-up by Steven Greydanus of The Catholic World Report.

But here’s what I can’t get over: The show’s first season cost $465 million, part of an outlay that will probably reach a billion dollars before Amazon is done. How is it possible, with that extraordinary budget, that there apparently wasn’t money for actors memorable enough to match the “House of the Dragon” cast and writers who could elevate the material from C territory to at least a B-plus? Jeff Bezos, you were had.