The new 'Lord of the Rings' TV show won't have sex scenes the way 'Game of Thrones' did

• Vanity Fair previewed a first-look at Amazon's upcoming "Lord of the Rings" TV show.
• The creators addressed the tone of show, which will be for "everyone, for kids who are 11."

Last year, fan sites like TheOneRing.Net and TV reporters were in heated discussions about the possibility of nudity and sex being present in the upcoming Amazon TV series "The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power."

But in a new feature from Vanity Fair, the show's cocreators say the show will be more family-friendly in comparison to something like HBO's hit series "Game of Thrones."

Coshowrunner Patrick McKay told Vanity Fair that the goal was "to make a show for everyone, for kids who are 11, 12, and 13, even though sometimes they might have to pull the blanket up over their eyes if it's a little too scary."

Vanity Fair reporter Anthony Breznican and contributor Joanna Robinson noted that last year's internet kerfuffle about possible sex and nudity in the show came from a report that Amazon had hired an intimacy coordinator for the series. This raised the concern that "Game of Thrones" — notable for bringing grim levels of violence, sexual assault, and nudity to the genre of fantasy — had overly influenced the approach to a new take on J.R.R. Tolkien's own fantasy universe.

"So will there be Westerosi levels of violence and sex in Amazon's Middle-earth? In short, no," Breznican and Robinson write in the feature. Why the need for an intimacy coordinator, then? According to at least one working intimacy coordinator interviewed by Refinery29, the presence of just kissing in a scene can be the time for an intimacy coordinator.

But ultimately fans will need to wait until the September 2022 premiere of "The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power" to fully understand how the series handles on-screen intimacy between characters without becoming a TV-MA (rating for mature audiences) show the way "Game of Thrones" did.