BBC America has revealed first-look images from new series The Watch. Comprised of eight episodes, The Watch began filming in Cape Town, South Africa in September and is part of BBC America’s 2020 slate that includes the Emmy®-nominated Killing Eve, Jodie Whittaker’s second season of Doctor Who and Seven Worlds, One Planet, presented by Sir David Attenborough.
Set in a fictional city where crime has been legalized, The Watch is a genre-busting series that follows a group of misfit cops as they rise up from decades of helplessness to save their corrupt city from catastrophe. Uniquely anarchic and thrillingly entertaining, the character-driven drama follows several of Terry Pratchett’s best-loved creations from his “Discworld” novels on a riotous and emotional odyssey. The cast includes Game of Thrones’ Richard Dormer as Captain Sam Vimes, Adam Hugill as Constable Carrot, Jo Eaton-Kent as Constable Cheery, Marama Corlett as Corporal Angua, Lara Rossi as Lady Sybil Ramkin and Sam Adewunmi as Carcer Dun.
Dormer stars as Sam Vimes, Captain of The Watch, disempowered by a broken society that’s reduced his department’s jurisdiction to almost nothing. Jo Eaton-Kent is Constable Cheery, the ingenious non-binary forensics expert, ostracized by their kin and finding a new home and identity. Adam Hugill plays Constable Carrot, the idealistic new recruit, raised by dwarfs, but really a human abandoned at birth. Marama Corlett is the mysterious Corporal Angua who is tasked with Carrot’s training and keeping the rookie alive. Lara Rossi plays the formidable Lady Sybil Ramkin, last scion of Ankh-Morpork’s nobility, who’s trying to fix the city’s wrongs with her chaotic vigilantism.
BBC America previously announced that Brian Kelly (Outlander) and Emma Sullivan (Doctor Who) have joined Craig Viveiros (Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None) as directors for the series. The show’s lead writer is Simon Allen (The Musketeers). The Watch is set to premiere in 2020.
Automatically Appended Next Post: I'm getting more of a steampunk / post-apocalypse / "Into the Badlands" vibe from it than Discworld, but time will tell...
have you sold twenty squillion books full of awesome and cleverness ?
No ?
then why do you think meddling with stuff you clearly don't care to understand was a good idea, you been hanging about with those War of the Worlds dinks...
Well that's a very, original, take on Discworld. I'm getting 80s American urban TV style gangs and films vibe from it rather than Discworld or Steampunk.
Whilst you can argue that Discworld is indeed on the industrial march so much just looks wrong. Spraycan graffitie - the little beads holding onto his badge (exceptionally American style); heck there's an electric fan in the background.
edit - yeah far as I can tell Discworld didn't have electricity yet - even by the end of the last books as it was pushing further forward in industry it was still a pre-electrical world. They had magic, of course; and things like Icongraphs (cameras with an imp that paints the picture of what it sees through the lens). Even in Moving Pictures it was Imp powered photography. IT was very much at least just getting to hit the Steam Punk era after a heavy fantasy outset.
I think even the massive computer in the Unseen University was powered by mice and other oddities rather than any kind of proper electricity
I just, well, I yeah I'm kinda lost for words on this interpretation.
Edit - I mean this might be cool to watch, but its looking increasingly like its NOT Discworld.
Edit 2 - Carrot is wearing a chainmail shirt that hasn't even freaking got buttons to do it up. It's an open front chain mail shirt! I mean chain mail in movies and media has a spotty history with the likes of the chain mail bikini and such; but freaking heck how beyond pointless is a chain mail shirt with the front exposed of ANY use?!
I recognize basically nothing in those photographs.
I presume the tall redhead is Carrot. Somehow the short blonde is... Angua, and not Cheery. Ok then.
Jo Eaton-Kent is a weird choice for Cheery, since the primary arc of the character is wanting to have an open and defined gender identity, unlike most dwarfs (and gets ostracized for that). Doing it backwards confuses the message immensely.
Lady Ramkin is a vigilante? (And normal sized. Which.. ugh. So much of her character is bound to the contrast between her size and noble breeding and her compassion and affability with average people)
What are the armored creatures with crossbow guy supposed to be? They're far too small for trolls, orcs don't really exist outside a football player at UU, and goblins are tiny and flowing with mucus.
I am not sure what the person engulfed in flames in the picture with Lady Ramkin is about either.. (getting hurt, yes, but .. how?)
It might be dragon flame with a CGI dragon to come?
Pretty sure its a shot of her in the dragon pens when the burglar gets cooked. The "hole" in the floor is likely what theyve translated an individual "stall" to.
Ok, the bad first. That looks absolutely nothing like the Discworld. I didn't expect it to look exactly like Kidby's drawings, but thought at least it would go in that direction.
The good: I still think it looks interesting and will definitely give it a watch. But seeing how everything looks like, they should have just said that this is a very loose adaption.
Just re-reading all of Discworld atm. Hard pass on this. I was unlikely to watch this anyway, but definite nope with these visuals.
Adaptation does not have to slavishly follow the original, but most of these changes seem to be for reasons of budget and marketing rather than quality, and that makes me think the end product will be poor quality.
Viterbi wrote: But seeing how everything looks like, they should have just said that this is a very loose adaption.
Well, people do keep saying it's 'Inspired by' not 'Based on'.
Thanks, interesting article, I didn't know that Rhianna and Rob weren't involved anymore. But I have to say, even under "Inspired by" one would expect a little more resemblance to the source material.
It looks like another where they've taken some names from a well-known setting and slapped them onto a generic story.
The Dwarven 'ambiguity' of Cheery has been lost.
Angua does not look to be the imposing woman she is usually described as.
There's been no mention here yet of Vetinari. Too many big changes, and we don't yet know why.
I’m broadly open to this show in itself not being cack. But, going on the character descriptions I’ve concern they’ve rather missed the point of Vimes and the Night Watch.
See, when we first meet Sam Vimes, he’s the burnt out, alcoholic Copper, aided solely by Sgt Colon and Nobby Nobbs. The Night Watch is a joke, and going nowhere.
But over the life of the novels, we see Vimes improve everything. He gets on the wagon, reforges The Watch, marries Lady Sybil, and deals with Ankh-Morpork becoming ever more modern, and all the trouble it brings.
Much of his journey is confronting his own (self confessed) bigotry toward other species.
Angua and Cheery Littlebottom are both key players here, as Igor, Detritus et al.
And for Ankh-Morpork to truly live, I don’t think you can vary too far from the books. Now that doesn’t mean slavishly follow them. Just that you need to keep the central theme. Especially with The Watch.
And here I see mention of John Keel. Let’s just say he’s kind of central to a young Vimes...
In short. The show might be good. Certainly I’ve no reason to currently believe otherwise. But Discworld it is not. Too much variation from the source material.
I have no emotional attachment to Discworld, and have never read the novels, and all I can say is that everything I've heard, read, and seen about this series makes me have zero interest in it whatsoever. The description of the series and characters here actually makes the whole thing sound like a lazy reinvent of Gotham, and I can't help but feel like Discworld is supposed to be something very much not that from what I know about it.
But, much as you can read Discworld in any order, I feel jumping in with Night Watch is a mistake.
Agreed. In fact reading the books out of order you miss out on ever so much.
Whilst he made each book a stand alone novel, they all interlink with each other. Elements and themes established in one book carry over into the ones that follow. This is both relevant for seeing the world and characters evolve and change, but also for running jokes and themes that spread through the series. Thats before you get to the subtle in-jokes that Terry wove into each story that fit to its central theme for the book. "watch" "witch" and a few other long running mini-series focus on specific characters that you see evolve and develop as well. Like casual unofficial series within the whole.
As for someone having not read them the only advice I can say its to go out and get The Colour of Magic and make a start reading them
Also for all the "inspired by" comments I don't think you can claim that your series is "inspired by" when you slap the series title right onto your own creation. If you call your creation the same name and such then its based on not inspired by - even if you then start to shout about it being inspired by later in the marketing. If they'd called this "The Police Watch" and then renamed all the characters chances are it would be stronger in itself and as a product because it wouldn't slave itself to themes and ideas and preconceptions that its clearly not intending to actually follow through on.
As for those about Cheery’s gender? It’s kinda close to book Cheery. And indeed all Dwarfs.
See, all Dwarfs are male. Even the mothers. Clearly some must be female, but traditionally it’s not discussed. So Cheery being openly female was a bit of a cultural revolution.
Cheery is obviously a character that a non-binary or trans person might identify with, as she was a fictional character going against her societies ideas about gender (ie. that all dwarves are male).
I think she is a great character, and I can see that they are following the "spirit" of the character, but it seems to me they are trying to make it more ... I dunno, topical, real world related and that seems like a poor reason to change the character.
If the show has lots of that, I am just not gonna enjoy it because Pratchett is dear to my heart and I will not be able to prevent myself from comparing the writing and characterisation in the show to that of the novels.
Da Boss wrote: Cheery is obviously a character that a non-binary or trans person might identify with, as she was a fictional character going against her societies ideas about gender (ie. that all dwarves are male).
I think she is a great character, and I can see that they are following the "spirit" of the character, but it seems to me they are trying to make it more ... I dunno, topical, real world related and that seems like a poor reason to change the character.
Pratchett's books always had parallels to real-world issues. It was pretty much a central theme of the stories. Making her not actually a dwarf kind of deflates the message, though.
I'm ok with an adaption not sticking closely to the original material, so long as the end result is good... but this particular change just seems like a really odd choice.
I second all of the "hmmm" comments; on the one hand not looking like a stock swords and sorcery world could be a good thing, so that it doesn't look like a Game of Thrones rip-off. But it's going to be hard to give up on the classic look from the original artwork.
Likewise, Discworld has always been a "mirror of worlds", to explore alternate takes on concepts and events from the real world. It's been a looong time since the original guard books, so updating it to incorporate modern concepts and issues would be fine, but some of the descriptions coming out don't really bear any resemblance to the original ideas. I'm still curious and would dearly love for this to be a success, to bring a whole new generation to the books, but at the moment I have significant reservations.
Finally, for anyone in the thread who hasn't read the books and is thinking of starting; do not start with the Colour of Magic!! I dearly love it, but it's rather a mess; more of a spoof of DnD and pop-culture fantasy tropes than a true novel. I generally recommend starting with Mort, Guards, Guards or even The Wee Free Men and following their respective series, using this handy chart (spoilered for size):
I rather enjoyed the Colour of Magic. I get that its not as good as his latter books and that the series grows in power (quite quickly) but I don't discount it so quickly as some.
I think its a good starting point because whilst it is a bit of satire on fantasy its also the real last age of fantasy for Discworld - you can see the fantasy world within it that the Disc once was and you can see the very beginning of the world making big changes and starting to take those all important steps.
So...I feel the previous Discworld TV stuff has been pretty hit-and-miss, mainly due to some pretty serious pacing issues, IMO. Having something "inspired by" initially seemed like a good idea, especially for an ongoing TV series. But this just looks really weird and not in a good way. The world seems a little too up-to-date, which is concerning when one of the really interesting things from the DW books was the parallels and unique divergences from our own world, often with that signature dose of DW ingenuity/pragmatism. I'm not seeing much of that here, though admittedly it's hard to tell from a bunch of stills.
Then there are the characters themselves. I'm not one to demand everyone looks exactly the same as they're described in the novels and I think character/attitude is more important than looks in the long run. But this seems really jarring, especially Sybil, Angua and Cheery. Their looks are actually a key part of their character in a lot of cases, mainly through how Sybil and Angua subvert expectations based on their appearances and being a Dwarf is a key part of Cheery's character but I can see how in Cheery's case you can transpose some of those details while still keeping the core of the character intact. My worry right now in Cheery's case is that the producers seem to be parading the non-binary part of the character very heavily and I have little confidence they're going to be playing that off in any more than token fashion. I'll be pleasantly surprised if they do.
Lots of warning signs and alarm bells so far with this. Definitely a case of wait and see but it's not looking good so far.
I think the thing that clashes most for me is the electric fan in the Watch office (but then, is it actually electric). I'm still keen to see the show. I'm happy to accept the more steampunky look to a 'late era' Discworld and to avoid a 'comedy Game of Thrones' look.
MarkNorfolk wrote: I think the thing that clashes most for me is the electric fan in the Watch office (but then, is it actually electric). I'm still keen to see the show. I'm happy to accept the more steampunky look to a 'late era' Discworld and to avoid a 'comedy Game of Thrones' look.
I sort of get the worry about a comedy GoT look but I think Ankh-Morpork is such a richly detailed city that's a character in its own right it seems a little odd to change it so much. And if the production designers can't make Ankh-Morpork look unique and interesting without it coming off as a parody of something else that would be a big red flag for me if I was financing the production.
MarkNorfolk wrote: I think the thing that clashes most for me is the electric fan in the Watch office (but then, is it actually electric). I'm still keen to see the show. I'm happy to accept the more steampunky look to a 'late era' Discworld and to avoid a 'comedy Game of Thrones' look.
I sort of get the worry about a comedy GoT look but I think Ankh-Morpork is such a richly detailed city that's a character in its own right it seems a little odd to change it so much. And if the production designers can't make Ankh-Morpork look unique and interesting without it coming off as a parody of something else that would be a big red flag for me if I was financing the production.
Understood. But we've all got different 'head canon' images of what it looks like. Me, (due to my age I expect) found it easy to imagine as a Terry Gilliam-esque crap-hole of a fantasy city. But it's developed since the early days, and so far I've seen nothing too incongruous, apart from the fan - but hey, maybe it's powered by a pixie.
MarkNorfolk wrote: I think the thing that clashes most for me is the electric fan in the Watch office (but then, is it actually electric). I'm still keen to see the show. I'm happy to accept the more steampunky look to a 'late era' Discworld and to avoid a 'comedy Game of Thrones' look.
I sort of get the worry about a comedy GoT look but I think Ankh-Morpork is such a richly detailed city that's a character in its own right it seems a little odd to change it so much. And if the production designers can't make Ankh-Morpork look unique and interesting without it coming off as a parody of something else that would be a big red flag for me if I was financing the production.
Understood. But we've all got different 'head canon' images of what it looks like. Me, (due to my age I expect) found it easy to imagine as a Terry Gilliam-esque crap-hole of a fantasy city. But it's developed since the early days, and so far I've seen nothing too incongruous, apart from the fan - but hey, maybe it's powered by a pixie.
Honestly that's a level of subtle detail that I'm not coming to even hope to expect from this series.
I mean it might be and that would be awesome because its very Discworld, but they don't really seem to have a grasp on the heart and soul of Discworld as it is.
Slipspace wrote: My worry right now in Cheery's case is that the producers seem to be parading the non-binary part of the character very heavily and I have little confidence they're going to be playing that off in any more than token fashion. I'll be pleasantly surprised if they do.
If anything, they appear to be getting it backwards - dwarfs are all non-binary in the Discworld. You don't have male-looking and female-looking (binary) dwarfs, you just have dwarfs that all look short and beardy under all the chainmail. Cheery / Cheri is different because she wants to be binary and demonstrate that she is female.
Slipspace wrote: My worry right now in Cheery's case is that the producers seem to be parading the non-binary part of the character very heavily and I have little confidence they're going to be playing that off in any more than token fashion. I'll be pleasantly surprised if they do.
If anything, they appear to be getting it backwards - dwarfs are all non-binary in the Discworld. You don't have male-looking and female-looking (binary) dwarfs, you just have dwarfs that all look short and beardy under all the chainmail. Cheery / Cheri is different because she wants to be binary and demonstrate that she is female.
Yep. And the footnotes in the book end up explaining that they often end up with gay marriage as well. Nobody involved knows what they're getting until after the marriage ceremony, and its taboo (or at least incredibly impolite) to ask.
I think it would have been more representative (and less tokenism) to have left the situation in the books intact, as you have an entire culture that's functionally non-binary and nondiscriminatory by default and not an 'exception to the norm.'
With the setup they're using for the show, they're just going with the standard 'ostracized for not being 'normal.''
Honestly I suspect that they didn't even read the source material when designing much of the set and characters and actors. I mean if they can't even get her as a dwarf right what hope is there for the rest?!
Overread wrote: Honestly I suspect that they didn't even read the source material when designing much of the set and characters and actors. I mean if they can't even get her as a dwarf right what hope is there for the rest?!
Pretty much sums up the thinks I've been having, hopefully the fanbase will just politely ignore it rather than get all frothy on the twit-gakkers and me-toobs
and whilst I have cheerled for it before if you can find the Neil Gaiman story “The Goldfish Pond and Other Stories” its a cracking (and I suspect a smidge autobiographical) short story on how the Hollywood and tellyland causes one thing to become another, which appears to be the case here
I'll be honest, from what I've read and seen so far this seems to be less "inspired by" rather it seems to be a wholly different world that has had the Discworld slapped on top of it to try and borrow some credibility.
Yeah that explanation of how Dwarves in Pratchett were already non binary was exactly my problem with it. The change is actually lazier, and dumbs down the idea. Changes just for the sake of laziness are bad changes. Same with modernising the costumes and stuff - that is just a way to be lazier with sets and so on. Fine in a low cost theatre production, not interested in it in a TV adaptation. I can just read the books again, my imagination works fine.
Is anyone surprised this is going to be gak? I mean BBC America has an amazing track record of turning great tv programmes into a steaming pile of gak pretty much ever single time and that's with there own shows.
Well, we don't know what it's going to be like. We've just seen some pics and we've gone "oh, Cheery doesn't look like a traditional dwarf" and "where's Nobbs" and "Ramkin's a bit thin".
I'm reminded of the preview pics of Dredd. Opinion was very scathing of the low tech images and what looked like an unimpressive Lawmaster. But the story and the actors turned into a darn good movie.
Me - I'm going to watch it. At least at the start. It's a TV show so that's how it should be judged.
I’m totally open to the show being great. But I still can’t get over that if they can’t get the look and atmosphere right, what else have they got wrong?
Regardless of how good it is, it’s unlikely to register as Discworld for me, I’m afraid.
I take your point, but so far there's not a lot that looks right (I will grant that Vimes looks OK so far) and a *lot* that seems to just fundamentally misunderstand the original setting, characters and stories.
I'll watch it and give it a chance, but I won't be going in excited and enthusiastic.
Not read the books but watched the TV shows over the years, including the Cosgrove animations from the 90s. Even at their lowest point, Terry Prachett's stories and characters always shines through where they start with seemingly unrelated threads and weave into an epic conclusion that most modern blockbusters can only hope to achieve.
As shoe-string as it was, I liked the finale of Soul Music...
...not sure about The Watch save for Marama Corlett who played Rina in the Sinbad series a while back. She was quite good in that one, and apparently been in a few big films since. I suppose like Hog Father and Colour of Magic I'll watch an episode before judging - which is the case for most shows.
Honestly the old cartoons might have had pretty flat voice actors, but they were beautifully faithful to the original material. The "film" adaptations are a bit hit and miss with me. I think they generally hit it with a decent script and faithfulness toward the original material, though they can sometimes get that "made on a shoestring budget" feel which I think doesn't do justice to Discworld where most of my imaginings are of a bustling lively world full of life and characters from dwarves to trolls and all inbetween.
It doesn’t look like what I think Ankh-Morpork looks like,but that doesn’t matter. I quite like the look they’ve gone for here, and if it means they can portray something that looks good on a TV budget, so much the better. The dodgy rubber golems in Sky’s Going Postal were a rather huge flaw in that series, for me. Better do leave them out or change them to something you can do convincingly.
As for dwarven gender politics, it’s a little different to what’s been said here, IMO. When Guards! Guards! First looked at dwarf society, there was apparently gender-equality (but not “non-binary”, as I understand it - they were all definitely men or women), but as Feet of Clay went on to look at, only one gender was socially acceptable. Everyone had to be, or pretend to be, a man. Cherry’s development in Feet of Clay and the subsequent change in dwarf society was that she said she wanted the option to be a man or not.
While Pterry used Abrahamic fundamentalism (obviously Islam, but I wouldn’t want to rule out Christian fundamentalists either), the treatment of native children in Australia and Canada (and suppression of the Irish, Welsh and Gaelic languages in the UK) seems like a better target for the analogy. But I should probably not take that any further, at risk of red text.
Automatically Appended Next Post: Oh, and as l’espirit de l’escalier, I don’t see the problem with spray paint graffiti. Simply take an imp, make it hold a mouthful of paint, point it at the wall and squeeze.
AndrewGPaul wrote: It doesn’t look like what I think Ankh-Morpork looks like,but that doesn’t matter. I quite like the look they’ve gone for here, and if it means they can portray something that looks good on a TV budget, so much the better. The dodgy rubber golems in Sky’s Going Postal were a rather huge flaw in that series, for me. Better do leave them out or change them to something you can do convincingly.
As for dwarven gender politics, it’s a little different to what’s been said here, IMO. When Guards! Guards! First looked at dwarf society, there was apparently gender-equality (but not “non-binary”, as I understand it - they were all definitely men or women), but as Feet of Clay went on to look at, only one gender was socially acceptable. Everyone had to be, or pretend to be, a man. Cherry’s development in Feet of Clay and the subsequent change in dwarf society was that she said she wanted the option to be a man or not.
You're honestly misremembering. She wanted to be publicly recognizable as a woman, specifically. Which included makeup and more feminine chain mail. (She was still a dwarf, after all).
It wasn't non-binary simply because that term wasn't in Pratchett's lexicon, but the passage on 'awkward courtships' make it clear that no dwarf ever knew what any other dwarf was (in terms of gender)
So Detritus is the only one that actually looks anything like a character from the books. He's also far superior to the BBC/Sky attempts at a Diskworld troll.
The rest - I honestly cannot tell who is who! I also think it looks even more 1950-70s. I'm ready for saxophone music
Looking at it more, the way they're going to treat crossbows as guns is very, very annoying.
If they're like that a lot, the string is going to stretch and the bolts are going to slip.
Though that over-the-shoulder posturing does explain the short hair on what is presumably Angua. When it was longer, it kept getting caught in the crossbow mechanisms.
If the girl with the short pink hair is Angua, well, I suppose she could be worse. Vimes is alright, suitably grizzled I guess. Assume the chap on the far right is Carrot. He looks nicely clean-cut, but Carrot was supposed to be massively toned and muscular - his nickname Carrot referred to the shape of his body.
Detritus is mediocre, it's like they heard 'made out of rock' but never saw any of Josh Kirby's illustrations.
Cheery and Sybil are just plain wrong. And it still just doesn't look like Discworld. I think I'm going to find it very hard to not feel like it's just ripping Discworld off.
Voss wrote: Oh. Is the axe murderess supposed to be Sybil?
And here I was thinking she was Angua. At least she'd have a reason to be armed like that!
But yeah this is clearly a total and utter rip-off/inspired by. As I've said before someone wanted to do "fantasy 1950-70s cops in America" and didn't get the budget so they slapped Discworld on it and tried again and got it.
I'm sure it could be pretty darn good and fun, but it just will never be true proper Discworld. In fact the more you look at it the more you realise its not even trying.
In case anyone hasn't been following this closely:
The Pratchett estate have distanced themselves from this - "Inspired by characters created by Terry Pratchett" rather than an adaptation", and are doing their own thing under the Narrativia banner.
The Showrunner/Creator of BBC America's The Watch has said it's a "queer-ing up" of Discworld, whatever that means...
While I'm interested in the idea of a steampunk CSI series, I'm really not sure about this.
Is queering up the new woke ? Of course in my day that was politeness and basic humanity...
I think this might be yet another case of them 'merika folks not quite getting it or just trying to CW up everything as if something doesnt fit the checklist hammer it till it does
Also wondering if this sort of fumble would happen if Sir Terry was still with us
Also wondering if this sort of fumble would happen if Sir Terry was still with us
Depends, we still got the first Golden Compass movie and Scyfi-Channel managed to do Earthsea with only one character who wasn't white.
I think the thing is if you've not been "in TV/Movies/Hollywood" before then there are a LOT of pitfalls and traps whereby the creator can end up out of control and where executives, studies, bean counters, personal projects and such can all get in the way and hack up an original work into something that doesn't even resemble it. Sometimes it also happens because a project starts with person A working for studio 1 and eventually ends up with person E working for Studio 10. So a lot of the changes, whilst they add up to a big shift in the end, are all small adjustments one by one that cut away. I think its a case of "baptism of fire" until you come out the other end a bit wiser, a bit more understanding of what the media machine both wants and also how it works. Even so it might take several runs to get anywhere.
Detritus is mediocre, it's like they heard 'made out of rock' but never saw any of Josh Kirby's illustrations.
I honestly assumed they were trying to do the rock-guy from Thor 3 without obviously doing the rock-guy from Thor 3.
Which is obviously going to depend on the voice and hopefully won't look so much like a painfully generic D&D-style earth elemental in motion.
Of the cast, only Vimes even looks vaguely like what's described. And they went too far from weathered and world-beaten into 'grizzled and crazy old coot from Spaghetti McWestern, Inc.'
Carrot, Sybil and Cheery all had very distinctive visual descriptions, and those are just gone for 'generic hollywood' body-types. Angua looks like she should be running around in a cyberpunk mashup with Dickens, begging for more nano-porridge. Though that's partially posture and her relative size perched on the desk.
What the hell am I looking at? Sybil is skinny and conventionally attractive, Cheery is no longer a dwarf nor has a beard, there's electricity, and plastic, and spray paint and the like everywhere...I could go on, but I think everyone else has done it already.
Why not just make your own goddam dieselpunk series and have an original IP? Because right now, I feel like I'm looking at Narnia reinvented as a cyberpunk dystopian detective thriller. If you're going to change it that much, why bother slapping 'Discworld' on it?
My greatest fear is that with the amount of effort being spent on 'edginess' in virtually every shot there, they're going to sacrifice the silliness and humour. The whole point of Pratchett's work is the gently sarcastic humour running throughout; it's why Crowley stayed up all night turning the M25 into a satanic symbol, or why Death spends his time fussing cats.
If you remove that? It's nothing to do with his work anymore. You can change aesthetics all around, but lose that particular spark which made Pratchett's work unique, and you might as well not have bothered.
Also wondering if this sort of fumble would happen if Sir Terry was still with us
Depends, we still got the first Golden Compass movie and Scyfi-Channel managed to do Earthsea with only one character who wasn't white.
And, lately, Artemis Fowl.
I read that first book ages ago and, whilst it wasn't aimed at my generation/age, I was impressed and enjoyed the creative ideas and story. When I saw the trailer I was left going "wait was it really all like that - have I forgotten that much". I was relieved to find that my brain is fine, its Hollywood just showing that it still cannot read
I'm really not sure what to make of this one. I have no problem at all with a TV adaption taking liberties with the source material, or (as seems to be the case here) taking nothing more than basic themes and building a different story from them... And visually at least, this looks interesting. But I feel like, given how much people love the source material, it's going to have to be really outstandingly written in order to get past people's inevitable 'But that's just not right!' reactions.
Also wondering if this sort of fumble would happen if Sir Terry was still with us
Depends, we still got the first Golden Compass movie and Scyfi-Channel managed to do Earthsea with only one character who wasn't white.
And, lately, Artemis Fowl.
It says something about this year that I thought that was an upcoming Disney+ (show?special?thing?) and not a theatrical release that already happened.
Whilst you can argue that Discworld is indeed on the industrial march so much just looks wrong. Spraycan graffitie - the little beads holding onto his badge (exceptionally American style); heck there's an electric fan in the background.
Not just that: there's a toaster and plastic kettle, and one of the crossbows has a RIS mount for telescopic sights!
Whilst you can argue that Discworld is indeed on the industrial march so much just looks wrong. Spraycan graffitie - the little beads holding onto his badge (exceptionally American style); heck there's an electric fan in the background.
Not just that: there's a toaster and plastic kettle, and one of the crossbows has a RIS mount for telescopic sights!
Feels like The Watch is now a Firefly reboot ;-)
Ooo, a comedy/drama about a bunch of marshals or bounty hunters set inthe Firefly ‘verse?? Now that’s a show I would watch! Does anyone have Joss Whedon’s email address?!
Still open to the show actually being good, but they keep worrying me it’s just going to be utterly generic.
I mean, the characters are what makes Discworld.
Replace Granny Weatherwax with Generic Witch type, and the dynamic of the three falls flat.
Without Lady Sybil being, well, Lady Sybil, Vimes cannot be Vimes, as his outright love for her and Young Sam are completely central to his character.
Without Carrot being the yokel with an unshakeable belief that, when asked, people Will Do The Right Thing (and being proven right), there’s no redemption of The Night Watch.
I don’t want any fantasy drama show to fail. That’s unfair on the cast and crew (reality shows, which I find inherently exploitative and of zero value can however get in the sea), but the more I see of this, the more I suspect it’s coming out of the gate with several large foot oriented bullet wounds.
Do we even know if there's a werewolf in this? Or is she going to turn out to be a were-human or a were-cat?!
I agree this won't be Discworld, they've sliced out so much that they can't even re-use the original material all that well. Plus there's no Nobby and Colin - the backbone of the Night Watch is missing! Then again I don't think any adaptation has got Nobby right, they keep taking a human and putting warts and such on him - he's pretty much a goblin who looks a bit human rather than a human who has the odd boil.
Overread wrote: Do we even know if there's a werewolf in this? Or is she going to turn out to be a were-human or a were-cat?!
No, but I can almost guarantee that she'll have some moment of sexual assault/vulnerability that makes Carrot step in. Which will in turn spark her mad love for him and eight episodes of her pining from a distance.
I know this because if they've reduced Sybil to 'skinny redhead', they're clearly going for the cheap sexist hooks in writing.
This twitter post feels less like distancing themselves and more, 'go frak yourselves and the horse you rode in on' to me.
To be honest, I'm kinda here for it, too...
And I'm a bit concerned about the whole 'queering up' comment from the showrunners... That just looks like prepositioning an excuse if the show fails.
When you consider how much love there is out there for Pratchett and Gaiman's Good Omens, which, as I understand it, the TV show is very much in spirit with how it was written, talking about 'queering up' a Pratchett story seems, well, quite frankly, like you've probably missed something.
There's some interesting info in the comments to that tweet. It seems that complete creative control was given to the BBC and that it was a deal done years ago under her father. So that gives some idea how long this has been in the pipe line; passed around and likely chopped and changed.
There's also a comment further down where someone was interviewed for a job working on the game of the Watch (likely based on this series) and that the staff were specifically told they could not work with Rhi in the games development. Ergo reinforcing that she is fully cut out of this process.
Sadly it seems that The Watch is held by the BBC until this contract ends. Which means other adaptations won't be allowed/able/suitable to use The Watch stories, but hopefully can do others (witches and the like).
Jadenim wrote: From Discworld Monthly on Facebook, first image of Detritus (who actually looks like a troll!):
I think I see the problem, this is actually a remake of Carry On Camping, they've just mislabelled it. Left to right Williams, Windsor, Sims, James, Jacques, Bresslaw. Looks good.
Overread wrote: Do we even know if there's a werewolf in this? Or is she going to turn out to be a were-human or a were-cat?!
I agree this won't be Discworld, they've sliced out so much that they can't even re-use the original material all that well. Plus there's no Nobby and Colin - the backbone of the Night Watch is missing! Then again I don't think any adaptation has got Nobby right, they keep taking a human and putting warts and such on him - he's pretty much a goblin who looks a bit human rather than a human who has the odd boil.
I quite liked the Noby/Washpot pairing they had in Hogfather - I thought the actor did a decent job of Mr Nobbs there.
Overread wrote: There's some interesting info in the comments to that tweet. It seems that complete creative control was given to the BBC and that it was a deal done years ago under her father. So that gives some idea how long this has been in the pipe line; passed around and likely chopped and changed.
Yeah. This one in particular sounds like the BBC pulled a 'I'm altering the deal, pray I don't alter it any further'
Rhi Pratchett wrote:This deal was initially done when my father was alive. Creative control was given over. But it wasn’t the same team and was a very different beast back then.
I wonder how binding the contract is for the BBC? Sometimes studios will slap the "name" on anything either because they have it under contract that they must produce it (and don't really want too so they slap it on anything to get rid of it); or that the contract expires after X period of time if its not "used" so to retain access they, again, throw it on anything they can. There's more than a few films that have been produced just to keep the IP even if the film was a mess.
It might also be that two or three projects got amalgamated which results in a hybrid of the combined ideas that doesn't really resemble any of the original projects, but which "completes them" as such. Perhaps whoever wound up with The Watch IP in their pocket didn't have the money for a set or actors whilst whoever wound up with a steam punk set didn't have an IP/writer or anything to market it with etc...
Well he's not around to thank, though one would think thanks to the Foundation and his daughter would be present, though considering it seems they've both severed ties there's likely enough bitter blood there that if he had thanked them there'd also be a storm about it too
Meet Ankh-Morpork’s unlikeliest heroes. Don’t miss an exclusive first look at #TheWatch with the cast and executive producers at #NYCCMetaverse, moderated by @ynb
I could see it being a powder keg of hostilities/issues EVER so fast. Especially Terry's daughter has already denounced the whole enterprise already. I'd have wanted to hold off on things like that until it was out; at least then it can try and stand on its own two feet before it gets torn into.
Tbf, I've given up on the idea that this will be a faithful reproduction but the trailer does look like something I may enjoy anyway, I'll give it a go.
r_squared wrote: Tbf, I've given up on the idea that this will be a faithful reproduction but the trailer does look like something I may enjoy anyway, I'll give it a go.
See that is the worst thing for me. I might actually enjoy this - steam punk style fantasy adventuring stuff - just the kind of thing I like. But its just not Discworld in the least little bit.
Heck I spent a few moments and I think there's perhaps one or two compliments/hopeful posts in the whole Twitter thread linked. Their major marketing and its, well, a failure. Even if many are, like myself, saying that they could enjoy it, its just not Discworld in any shape or form.
Perhaps it should be viewed as an adaptation of Pterry's work in the same way that the Cumberbatch & Freeman Sherlock series is an adaptation of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's work?
People seem generally to accept that series on its own merits and not get too hung up on it, for example, not being set in the 19th century.
Duskweaver wrote: Perhaps it should be viewed as an adaptation of Pterry's work in the same way that the Cumberbatch & Freeman Sherlock series is an adaptation of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's work?
People seem generally to accept that series on its own merits and not get too hung up on it, for example, not being set in the 19th century.
Yes - the general line is that it's 'Inspired by' not 'Based on'...
I suspect its partly because Sherlock has been adapted a lot. There are some very faithful creations like the ITV series through to totally insane ones. There's a wealth of choice.
I think this one gets fire because so little of Terry's work is adapted into TV and what we do have has often been rather at the budget end of the spectrum. Sometimes good budgets, but the kind where you can somewhat see the BBC style props.
Duskweaver wrote: Perhaps it should be viewed as an adaptation of Pterry's work in the same way that the Cumberbatch & Freeman Sherlock series is an adaptation of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's work?
People seem generally to accept that series on its own merits and not get too hung up on it, for example, not being set in the 19th century.
I agree, this is a good way to look at it and tbh not one I'd considered.
I'd love to see more faithful adaptations of the books I love but I'm content that, for now, the Discworld primarily exists as is in my imagination.
Perhaps if this adaptation is successful then a greater variety of future productions maybe forthcoming.
THE AMAZING MAURICE, A SKY ORIGINAL Coming in 2022 to Sky Cinema Based on Terry Pratchett’s best-selling novel Starring Hugh Laurie, Emilia Clarke, David Thewlis, Himesh Patel, Gemma Arterton and Hugh Bonneville
Sky today announced a new co-production with Ulysses Filmproduktion and Cantilever Media, The Amazing Maurice, a Sky original. This animated family film is based on one of Sir Terry Pratchett’s wildly popular Discworld novels and will star Hugh Laurie (Avenue 5) as Maurice, Emilia Clarke (Game of Thrones) as Malicia, David Thewlis (Wonder Woman) as Boss Man, Himesh Patel (Yesterday) as Keith, Gemma Arterton (The King’s Man) as Peaches and Hugh Bonneville (Downton Abbey) as The Mayor. More cast announcements to follow.
Coming to Sky Cinema in 2022, The Amazing Maurice, a Sky original, follows Maurice, a streetwise ginger cat who has the perfect money-making scam. He finds a kid who plays a pipe, and he also befriends his very own horde of strangely educated, talking rats – so Maurice can no longer think of them as ‘lunch’. When Maurice and the rodents reach the stricken town of Bad Blintz, they meet a bookworm, Malicia. Their little con soon goes down the drain as something very bad is waiting for them in the cellars.
Sarah Wright, Director of Sky Cinema and Acquisitions at Sky UK & Ireland comments: “The Amazing Maurice is a fantastic story from a legendary author, and I couldn’t think of a better tale to bring to life as an animated film for all the family. I’m excited to work with Ulysses Filmproduktion and Cantilever Media to bring this exclusive new movie to Sky Cinema audiences in 2022.”
Emely Christians, Producer and CEO of Ulysses Filmproduktion comments: “When I read The Amazing Maurice, I knew we had to turn this amazing novel into a film. The art and animation departments are working hard to recreate Terry Pratchett’s unique vision and I can’t wait to see this on screen!”
Andrew Baker, Producer and CEO of Cantilever Media, said: “I’m huge fan of Sir Terry Pratchett so I would not be embarking on this project unless I felt we were bringing the film to life in a way that honours the book and will please its numerous fans around the world. We have a great cast and great teams at the studios in Sheffield and Hamburg working to make this film special.”
Robert Chandler, Producer at Cantilever Media said: “The trick with The Amazing Maurice is getting the balance right. Terry Pratchett is a brilliant author, who was not afraid to explore dark places and have fun getting there. That’s the tone of our film.”
Rob Wilkins, Producer and Managing Director of Narrativia, said: “Bringing Maurice’s story to life was such a joy for Terry and I’m delighted that the teams at Sky, Ulysses Filmproduktion and Cantilever Media are honouring his vision with such reverence and respect.”.
The Amazing Maurice, a Sky original is co-produced by Sky, Ulysses Filmproduktion and Cantilever Media, with animation studios Studio Rakete (Hamburg) and Red Star Animation (Sheffield). The film has the full support of the Terry Pratchett estate and is produced in association with Narrativia. Producers are Julia Stuart (Sky), Emely Christians (Ulysses), Andrew Baker and Robert Chandler (Cantilever Media) and Rob Wilkins (Narrativia). The Film is directed by Toby Genkel, co-director is Florian Westermann.
The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents is a children’s fantasy by Sir Terry Pratchett, published by Doubleday in 2001 and has sold nearly 90 million books worldwide. It was the 28th novel in the Discworld series, but the first written for children. The Amazing Maurice is a lively and entertaining adventure inspired by the German fairy tale about the Pied Piper of Hamelin and a parody of the folk tale genre. Pratchett won the annual Carnegie Medal for the book – children’s literature’s highest award. Despite many other awards, honorary degrees and the knighthood that followed, Sir Terry Pratchett always emphasised that this was the award of which he was most proud.
Telepool has acquired The Amazing Maurice for German speaking territories and Telepool’s sales arm Globalscreen handles worldwide rights.
I'm not sure if that deserves its own thread at this point...
No more or less convinced myself. Which means I remain entirely open to this actually being a decent programme in its own right, even though it’s clearly waaaaay off the page.
I’ll definitely watch it when the opportunity arises. And I remain hopeful it’ll be an example of an adaptation which worked, without being slaved to the original media.
I’ll definitely watch it when the opportunity arises. And I remain hopeful it’ll be an example of an adaptation which worked, without being slaved to the original media.
I'm more in the camp that if its any good it will be an example of an idea that didn't need to be slaved to an existing franchise to work. Which is something I really wish would get through to more executives. Instead of wrapping a different idea in a different existing title just be bold and call your own thing your own thing. It's like that sony Peter Rabbit film - its most certainly got nothing to do with Peter Rabbit the original stories; however I'm led to understand that kids like the film and that they enjoy it. They could have called it Dave the Rabbit; dropped all the name links and it would still be in just the same position.
BBCAmerica has a bunch of 'Meet the Character' shorts up (couldn't find them on youtube, at least not on the main BBC channel), along with a bunch of other videos
https://www.bbcamerica.com/shows/the-watch--51041
Its all very loud music and WooWooing noises (and the idea of the watch as Misfits, which in combination with the music and some of the costumes makes me think of the Young Ones, but not in a happy way), but in between that, the character bits are... odd.
Strange poses, jerky movements (particularly Vimes and Angua), Carrot is apparently still raised by dwarves, but somehow manages to be the straight man reacting to the weirdness AND the incompetent/semi competent comic relief. Discworld Death is involved, but put into a blender, so he's a chatty, fun personification (to the point of asking Carrot out for drinks).
May check out the premiere, but.. honestly all that was loud enough (and intentionally wonky enough) that I already feel like my ears are bleeding.
I had read a review of the series a week ago. Can't remember where, sorry. It was basically a resounding "meh". Some parts worked, some parts didn't, that kind of review.
porkuslime wrote: Why is the music so much louder than the dialogue?
Because directors are making their work for magically perfect audio set ups. See also Christopher Nolan's mumbling mumblers mumbling through his latest mumble fest and the last season of GoT where the mumbling was only slightly more bearable than the black on black night scenes designed to only be watched on magically perfect visual set ups.
Computer games do the same thing, I've noticed a good few often set all the audio values to 100 or any other fixed value so that the music is just as loud as everything else. Of course with games you can often adjust the different sources separately as part of the settings so you can turn the music up or down compared to the unit sounds and voiceovers; for films yeah you can't often do that in the audio settings.
to be honest, of all the characters, Detritus seems closest to my mental image of Trolls.. and I think I am OK with Ventinari being female..
Having said that, the other main characters really are a different interpretation to my head cannon.. still trying to be open minded, but.. Lady Sybil as a vigilante, Angua being short with spiky punk hair, and Cheery being human height are all character images that I am having trouble with
porkuslime wrote: Why is the music so much louder than the dialogue?
Because directors are making their work for magically perfect audio set ups. See also Christopher Nolan's mumbling mumblers mumbling through his latest mumble fest and the last season of GoT where the mumbling was only slightly more bearable than the black on black night scenes designed to only be watched on magically perfect visual set ups.
Yeah. I've seen a couple director's rants about how people are 'watching things wrong' (ie, not in an idealized miniature theatre with perfect lighting and acoustics arranged by a Feng Shui master) and the extreme audio levels and 'too dark' films are entirely the viewers' fault.
Meanwhile I'm constantly fiddling with volume controls, turning up dialogue segments and turning down action segments because they're impractical morons. And music heavily dialogue scenes are just a complete clusterfeth.
I suspect I keep watching less and less live action TV and film at least partly because modern audio mixing standards are utter rubbish.
porkuslime wrote: to be honest, of all the characters, Detritus seems closest to my mental image of Trolls.. and I think I am OK with Ventinari being female..
Having said that, the other main characters really are a different interpretation to my head cannon.. still trying to be open minded, but.. Lady Sybil as a vigilante, Angua being short with spiky punk hair, and Cheery being human height are all character images that I am having trouble with
Cherry really gets me because the Carrot video shows there are in fact dwarves in this take on Pratchett, and taking that away guts their interactions. There are times that they get each other due to a shared culture that leaves the rest of the Watch baffled, and we get to see Carrot come out of his fairly blinkered 'Conservative Dwarfish' viewpoint.
Angua I just can't reconcile at all. 'Feral grace' and 'hair' (lots and lots of brunette, in fact, though I'm aware she's canonically blonde) are what I mostly picture, not... stiff and mini punk.
Ramkin and Carrot both lose a lot for being Hollywood-standard body types.
porkuslime wrote: Why is the music so much louder than the dialogue?
Because directors are making their work for magically perfect audio set ups. See also Christopher Nolan's mumbling mumblers mumbling through his latest mumble fest and the last season of GoT where the mumbling was only slightly more bearable than the black on black night scenes designed to only be watched on magically perfect visual set ups.
Yeah. I've seen a couple director's rants about how people are 'watching things wrong' (ie, not in an idealized miniature theatre with perfect lighting and acoustics arranged by a Feng Shui master) and the extreme audio levels and 'too dark' films are entirely the viewers' fault.
Meanwhile I'm constantly fiddling with volume controls, turning up dialogue segments and turning down action segments because they're impractical morons. And music heavily dialogue scenes are just a complete clusterfeth.
I suspect I keep watching less and less live action TV and film at least partly because modern audio mixing standards are utter rubbish.
It's not just action stuff. I was trying to watch a video on YT about the 30th anniversary of Fresh Prince the other day and had to turn it off because the music over the interview with Will Smith was mixed louder than his voice.
porkuslime wrote: to be honest, of all the characters, Detritus seems closest to my mental image of Trolls.. and I think I am OK with Ventinari being female..
Having said that, the other main characters really are a different interpretation to my head cannon.. still trying to be open minded, but.. Lady Sybil as a vigilante, Angua being short with spiky punk hair, and Cheery being human height are all character images that I am having trouble with
Cherry really gets me because the Carrot video shows there are in fact dwarves in this take on Pratchett, and taking that away guts their interactions. There are times that they get each other due to a shared culture that leaves the rest of the Watch baffled, and we get to see Carrot come out of his fairly blinkered 'Conservative Dwarfish' viewpoint.
Angua I just can't reconcile at all. 'Feral grace' and 'hair' (lots and lots of brunette, in fact, though I'm aware she's canonically blonde) are what I mostly picture, not... stiff and mini punk.
Ramkin and Carrot both lose a lot for being Hollywood-standard body types.
What's really weird is that of all the characters in the books Angua is the one you could easily cast as a stereotypically beautiful Hollywood body type and get away with it but instead they went for a weird punk look. That's fine, I guess, but it's kind of jarring to me. I think I mentioned before ITT they massively missed a trick with making Cheery human in so many ways and now we know Dwarves are a thing in this take on DW it makes even less sense. If anything says this series lacks the intelligence and sbutlety required to be a good representation of Pratchett's work that's it right there.
The strength of Cheery's writing was that it played off a running joke from the start of the series. I'm reading through the series now (just finished Jingo) and it's apparent that Pratchett's view, or at least what he wanted to present to readers, changed.
The Dwarf all looking the same starts as a harmless joke - oh, hah hah, isn't that funny, they all look alike, the courting rituals must be hilarious. Then we get Cheery and we see how something seemingly innocuous can be hurtful or repressive.
There might be nothing wrong with this Cheery but it's not the Cheery, nor her message, from the books.
Part of Terry's skill is also layers. Many of his stories can be enjoyed at multiple levels of interpretation from the purely slapstick surface level through to in-jokes within specific themes (eg Soul Music has loads of references to the rock-n-roll era) and then major social commentary on humanity and such.
Cheery is one such example; on the surface it is indeed a pun and then you dig a bit deeper, past the surface and Terry shows you something else. The nice thing is that he's not preaching or forcing, he's just showing you the greater ramifications.
The other thing to realise is that Discworld was always in a vast state of change. From the very first book one constant is change. From the old fantasy tropes to a more, perhaps, modern fantasy. In some ways he perhaps saw the dominance of the Lord of the Rings style fantasy and rebelled against it to show us new ideas and developments and perhaps to suggest where it might go after that era.
Overread wrote: ...The other thing to realise is that Discworld was always in a vast state of change. From the very first book one constant is change. From the old fantasy tropes to a more, perhaps, modern fantasy. In some ways he perhaps saw the dominance of the Lord of the Rings style fantasy and rebelled against it to show us new ideas and developments and perhaps to suggest where it might go after that era.
It is for this reason that it is one of the great sorrows that he was taken from us too early, there was so much more to come.
Overread wrote: Part of Terry's skill is also layers. Many of his stories can be enjoyed at multiple levels of interpretation from the purely slapstick surface level through to in-jokes within specific themes (eg Soul Music has loads of references to the rock-n-roll era) and then major social commentary on humanity and such.
Cheery is one such example; on the surface it is indeed a pun and then you dig a bit deeper, past the surface and Terry shows you something else. The nice thing is that he's not preaching or forcing, he's just showing you the greater ramifications.
The other thing to realise is that Discworld was always in a vast state of change. From the very first book one constant is change. From the old fantasy tropes to a more, perhaps, modern fantasy. In some ways he perhaps saw the dominance of the Lord of the Rings style fantasy and rebelled against it to show us new ideas and developments and perhaps to suggest where it might go after that era.
Well, the first ones didn't touch much on Tolkien- they were very naked parodies of Lieber, Howard, McCaffery and others. Light and Colour weren't very funny either, IMO. It took him a while to hit his stride and find a decent voice, rather than just riffing on the genre staples and having a very vengeful and angry Death chasing Rincewind around.
The later ones sort of ran 'Fantasy Racism is Bad, mmkay?' into the ground hard, without offering much else (Unseen Academicals onwards, for the most part).
His best books were the middle bits.
And despite being based (roughly) on some of those middle bits, this show... doesn't look good.
In fairness his last handful of books were written with him suffering mentally and likely also trying to push them out as fast as he could to try and complete more of his life's work before his mind was totally gone.
I have to say I'm actually glad no other author has been encouraged/allowed to take up the torch and continue. Sometimes this works and sometimes it doesn't; it works with Tolkien because he honestly published very little, but his world building and notes were extensive into the extreme so he left a huge body of material and concepts to work with.
Yet other times even extensive stories don't work - the newer Pern novels by Anne's son are, reportedly, not as good. However its not just comparing a difference in style but an author from another age of writing who was very experienced by the end; with someone who is more modern and who has honestly not written as much.
I have to say I'm actually glad no other author has been encouraged/allowed to take up the torch and continue. Sometimes this works and sometimes it doesn't
I'm glad no one has. I utterly loathe this practice.
Even if they're competent (unlike, say, the younger Herbert), they're never on track with the setting and the characters the same way.
Younger authors need to do their own thing, not desecrate corpses.
I have to say I'm actually glad no other author has been encouraged/allowed to take up the torch and continue. Sometimes this works and sometimes it doesn't
I'm glad no one has. I utterly loathe this practice.
Even if they're competent (unlike, say, the younger Herbert), they're never on track with the setting and the characters the same way.
Younger authors need to do their own thing, not desecrate corpses.
Pratchett actually had it in his will that his hard drives with all the ideas and outlines he never finished were to be crushed with a steamroller so people couldn't try to do just that. I believe it was his personal assistant who carried out the requested destruction.
There was indeed video proof of Rob steamrolling the harddrives. I'm sure it's still online somewhere..
From a trailer I watched, I'm unbelievably disappointed with this Watch adaption.
I saw the cast list early on and I thought ok, interesting curve balls let's see where they go. The end result? Utter cack and most reviewers have given a similar verdict. God knows why they had to muck about with it.
To be honest as soon as Rhianna Pratchett said it was nothing to do with them then I'd about washed my hands of it. Narrativia are apparently working on a Wee Free Men adaption which should hopefully be good.
That's worse than everything else. Starting with a self-assured Cheery is introducing a completely different character!
I can get along with adapting Cheery to the events she wasn't there for- no problem, and at least get why this Cheery is 'they' instead of 'she,' and sort of why we skip on that journey completely (though skipping a character's personal journey seems to be missing the entire point to me), but to round everything up with also a tall, confident human rather than a nervous dwarf, caught up in cultural expectations and roles? What is left of this character at all?
Also this:
Largely serialized, The Watch runs into a problem that often afflicts its ilk: The need for each episode to have some kind of emotional climax in order to make everything feel complete. In this case, these moments tend to wildly clash with the show’s tone,
Oi. Seriously. Narrative structure is a metatextual element of the universe, fundamental to the source material. As these lackwits have gone back to the well of serialized tripe, with a we-learned-something-today ending every week? Just... get out.
Exactly right?? I mean how hard would it have been to do a series per book? You can easily progress the character ark over the individual series.
Guards! Guards! has a good tv villain (as all the Vimes books do that's entirely the point), it's got dragons in it, what more do people want? That's the mind boggling thing to me, they have zero reason to change Pratchett books to fit in?
Olthannon wrote: Exactly right?? I mean how hard would it have been to do a series per book? You can easily progress the character ark over the individual series.
Guards! Guards! has a good tv villain (as all the Vimes books do that's entirely the point), it's got dragons in it, what more do people want? That's the mind boggling thing to me, they have zero reason to change Pratchett books to fit in?
The problem is likely affecting it on many levels. You've got executives with data streams and polls wanting to interject "modern" elements and such so that its "in with the times" in a "its that teacher at school trying far to hard to be in with the cool kids". You've got different executives afraid of presenting some elements incase of any potential insult to a demographic that's large enough to affect marketing and uptake; you've got a writer and a director each wanting to put "their own spin" on things. Heck as its a series it might have different directors and writers for each episode. You've got actors wanting some control over how they are presented; you've got the cutting room. And fundamentally you've got the question of if those in power actually wanted to make the story in the first place; or if this is just the best chance they have to make their own story and they've slapped on another title because it was the only way the investors would sign off on the project.
Muddled in with that might be that the studio has a licence up for expiring and is just throwing whatever they can at it just to keep the licence. A good few horrible films and TV series have been made purely because the licence was nearly up and the investors either wanted to hold onto it (by producing something and extending it) or don't want to waste money that is on the table.
I liken it to the recent Peter Rabbit film by Sony. It is 100% not Peter Rabbit by Beatrix Potter. It's about a rabbit called Peter who happens to have "some" character similarities but beyond that there is no connection at all. But they've got the title and the licence and they got away with it for the free marketing. Heck the first 10 seconds of the intro to the trailer is almost a full middle finger to the idea of adapting the source material.
Well, I guess that ended, then. Seemed an abrupt way to wrap up the 'two episode special,' but I guess since the FX budget dried up in episode one, there wasn't much reason to drag things out.
It was mostly... bland. It really needed cue cards to tell me how I was supposed to react to various events, because apparently some deaths were supposed to be funny and others were supposed to be sad. Some seemed tied solely to the budget...
Interesting use of goblins as the disposable minions that no one cares about, even the heroes. But I guess they're communists, so its fine. But it seems ironic since Snuff exists and the third or so I've read (never finished that one) seemed pretty clear that exactly this sort of thing was objectionable.
Really, really not OK with the visual imagery suggesting that a freshly de-transformed werewolf looks exactly like a rape victim. Just... no.
But she eats people (even if they're 'just goblins') so its funny, right?
I have watched the various trailers, and was tentatively going to co-opt the tv in the house to watch The Watch.. but I read a couple reviews that frankly turned me off.
Someone somewhere mentioned that "Angua after turning from werewolf to human, looked like a rape victim" and that line, I think, was the clincher
I am a HUGE Discworld fan, and The Watch is my favorite Storyline therein. I was determined to view this as a Discworld down another leg of the Trousers of Time..
Anyone able to give a "discworld fan" review or something?
I have watched the various trailers, and was tentatively going to co-opt the tv in the house to watch The Watch.. but I read a couple reviews that frankly turned me off.
Someone somewhere mentioned that "Angua after turning from werewolf to human, looked like a rape victim" and that line, I think, was the clincher
I did, right above your post.
And yes, it was bad. They shot a scene of Angua coming to consciousness mostly naked in an alley, curled up on herself, shuddering and vomiting.
Actual rapes in movies/shows rarely look this much like a rape aftermath. I don't know why its in here. I don't know why its followed up by jokes about eating sapients (and also cats) and what her crap is going to look like.
I am a HUGE Discworld fan, and The Watch is my favorite Storyline therein. I was determined to view this as a Discworld down another leg of the Trousers of Time..
Anyone able to give a "discworld fan" review or something?
There are definitely discworld elements. Well, references, but it feels like a checklist.
Vimes doesn't feel at all like Vimes, more like a Johnny Depp style madman who mostly doesn't do the right thing, let alone at a cost to himself. He doesn't try to be the straightlaced cop (which means he never fails at it). He's mostly a passive observer, and that feels bizarre.
Ramkin is even worse. She's an activist terrorist reformer (of criminals) who's about 'seizing the power' and is apparently the only person in Ankh Morpokh who cares about 'cleaning up the streets.' With casual killing and/or bizarre reform school lectures at people in chains and terrified of her 'monsters'. She has exactly one rant about mistreated dragons, specifically 'Good Boy,' then pulls him out as uses him as a flame thrower. On people. And we leave the two episode intro with the idea that she has a 'dark backstory' (everyone has one of these) connected to the Watch.
Cheery apparently IS a dwarf after all. This is 'explained' by the pithy line 'We come in all sizes down there.' Which... contrasts very oddly with Carrots backstory about being too big and being sent to the A-M city watch explicitly because of that. Her personal journey apparently took no effort at all, but she of course also has a dark secret.
I could go on, but its more of the same. Discworld element gets checked off, and they move on to some 'vaguely punk' music and get handed the next clue.
Carcer's motivation isn't at all what I expected (and isn't from the Watch books), but it feels like another 'Discworld checklist' feature.
Wow. I know Rhianna said those involved were just doing a job and not to hurl abuse at them and so on, but I'm really struggling to resist. What fethers.
Crispy78 wrote: Wow. I know Rhianna said those involved were just doing a job and not to hurl abuse at them and so on, but I'm really struggling to resist. What fethers.
The truly sad thing is it isn't really enraging or controversial enough to get worked up about. The Angua scene is horrifying from the perspective of 'why did you do that' but most of the show just isn't even vaguely engaging enough to protest or hurl abuse.
Clues just get dropped off and the deus ex machina card is a painfully obvious shortcut when it comes into play. The first episode is framed as Death showing Vimes his life ('life' having the meaning of 'one incident 20 years before and the current plotline'), but they're not consistent about it and just drop it at the end. With a lot of 'how do you know about the parts you weren't there for?'
The actors don't scene terribly engaged or engaging, and the deaths are pretty horrid. The show clearly expects you to react to some as deeply tragic and others as funny, and others as the 'ooh, wow, action scenes' deaths. Except they don't bother setting up actually caring about the characters in some cases, leave you wondering _how_ they even died in others and the vast majority are just lackeys. Not even dangerous lackeys, more like the 'heroes' are killing Fedex drivers because their bosses are Bad People.
Spoiler:
We get to see the goblins grumbling about living wages, workers needing to control the means of production and wanting to see their spouses and children before they're 'gunned down' by crossbow bolts. One even gets out a 'hey, that's my wife!', but of course no one seems to speak goblin- presumably the Watch can't read the subtitles. And the Bad People aspect is... muddy. Clearly they are after summoning the dragon and killing people, but Carcer's 'gang' seems more like a street orphanage back 20 years ago, and why the kids were all arrested is sort of vague.
I'm actually surprised the BBC went with a 8 episodes. I don't expect there to be more.
Oddly the Narrativa logo was on the show, presumably a legacy from the very beginning of development.
My wife and I made it through about twenty minutes before deciding we couldn't take any more. It just didn't feel like anyone involved had even read a discworld book, and I wish they'd just not bothered.
8 episodes only is very small by modern standards; sounds like whoever was in charge of the budget and such didn't have a huge amount of confidence in its production to start with. That or the clear separation from the Estate and the creation might have made higher ups cut it short knowing they were too far in to change but not far enough in to outright cancel.
I 100% know its not Discworld now, but I just want to see if its got a charm of its own buried in there or if it really is just a mess. It's important for my ranting that I know these things.
I'd actually quite like to see it, but with the idea of trying to disassociate it from PTerry in my mind to see if it can stand on it's own feet as piece of entertainment.
I imagine that will be quite tough considering that it will be stuffed to the gunnels with references which are in ingrained deeply into my psyche from the originals, but I'm going to give it a go anyway.
Then, once I've watched it and weighed it merits I'm going to give it a good roasting.
As someone who has never read Discworld, I thought it was... Ok? There were no expectations for it to ruin it try to live up to so I didn’t hate it. The setting is neat. The jokes don’t always land. I’ll probably keep watching it but the priority won’t be the highest.
AduroT wrote: As someone who has never read Discworld,
Ok now this is a serious problem we need to address - and one which we might be able to resolve too!!
Agreed, there's arguably never a better time to read some Pratchett.
Agreed - though then comes the question where to start for there is quite a bit.
A good few people will recommend favourite books or series of books within the greater whole of the work. My issue is that whilst each book is designed to be stand-alone and Terry does use a good number of footnotes and description to help people along with injokes and themes; there are still injokes and themes established right from the very first book, which carry over into the following series. Indeed when read in order of publication you get to see not just each story for itself, but the interconnected elements - the jokes and puns that run one book to the next; events (minor and major) that shape one story influencing another; the characters evolving and changing and indeed the whole setting itself changing and shifting.
Whilst many argue that the first books are not his best, I'd say that they are still worthy and quality reading.
So whenever people ask me, I say go to the start - The Colour of Magic.
AduroT wrote: As someone who has never read Discworld,
Ok now this is a serious problem we need to address - and one which we might be able to resolve too!!
Agreed, there's arguably never a better time to read some Pratchett.
Agreed - though then comes the question where to start for there is quite a bit.
A good few people will recommend favourite books or series of books within the greater whole of the work. My issue is that whilst each book is designed to be stand-alone and Terry does use a good number of footnotes and description to help people along with injokes and themes; there are still injokes and themes established right from the very first book, which carry over into the following series. Indeed when read in order of publication you get to see not just each story for itself, but the interconnected elements - the jokes and puns that run one book to the next; events (minor and major) that shape one story influencing another; the characters evolving and changing and indeed the whole setting itself changing and shifting.
Whilst many argue that the first books are not his best, I'd say that they are still worthy and quality reading.
So whenever people ask me, I say go to the start - The Colour of Magic.
You know, even PTerry disagreed with starting with his first books. I think I saw an interview about it somewhere, I'd agree TBH. I'd go for Mort or even the Watch itself as a good starter.
Yeah. Guards!Guards! or the first Witches book (Wyrd Sisters, not Equal Rites, which like Light and Colours is a bit rough).
Mort is a bit... eh. I think you need some grounding first, but it might be useful before folks get around to Susan (but considering how little the genealogy matters, I'm not actually sure that's true)
Overread wrote:8 episodes only is very small by modern standards; sounds like whoever was in charge of the budget and such didn't have a huge amount of confidence in its production to start with.
The budget looks like it ran out after episode one.
The _only_ reason a particularly significant event happens is clearly the FX budget.
Seriously, actually spoilers:
Spoiler:
They kill off Sergeant Detritus at the end of episode one. With...maybe a dozen crossbow bolts. Yes, he's completely rock. No, it makes no sense, beyond 'Let's only have the characters that don't cost a mint to have in shot'
They try to make it sad, but its just confusing. To try to make it extra sad, Vimes later explains that Detritus saved him from a suicide attempt, and he was very, very angry with him, so Vimes... offered him a job better than 'bridge troll'
The Librarian is in episode two, briefly. Evolutionarily digressed ape person who darts around thru shadows and up and down chains. Didn’t show much more than that.
I'm in two minds, personally I would always say to start chronologically and start with Colour of Magic but also I totally get people advising not wanting to start there.
I suppose it's worth saying in this thread start with Guards! Guards! and find out what you could have won with this adaption if it had been done well.
He's mostly (for his <5 minutes on camera) in poorly lit background shots, with Angua and Cheery afraid of his shadow. They communicate with him in a Deus Ex Machina room that allows everyone to communicate (its an attempt at a translation room, but allows you to 'read' other people so the plot can happen). Its also a canonically (for this show) reason why he 'devolved' into a vaguely 'planet of the apes' style person, still wearing a hooded wizard's robe.
He doesn't threaten anyone or get called a monkey. Doesn't talk (or 'Oook'). He comes off more as the Archchancellor's pet than the Librarian.
He's present but pretty out of shot for the reveal of who stole his book- if he got a reaction to that, I didn't see it.
I almost always will suggest starting with Guards Guards, OR Small Gods.
I feel that Small Gods is one of the best "stand alone" books in the series, and gives you a healthy dose of PTerry's viewpoints without tying the reader to a specific character
I actively buy all Guards Guards, Small Gods, Wee Free Men and Wyrd Sisters books I run across at used bookstores or thrifts, just so I can use them to evangelize
porkuslime wrote: I almost always will suggest starting with Guards Guards, OR Small Gods.
I feel that Small Gods is one of the best "stand alone" books in the series, and gives you a healthy dose of PTerry's viewpoints without tying the reader to a specific character
I actively buy all Guards Guards, Small Gods, Wee Free Men and Wyrd Sisters books I run across at used bookstores or thrifts, just so I can use them to evangelize
Wait a sec - does this include those minimalist black and white covers they went in for for a time? Because after the gaudy and insane full art colour covers, those minimalist ones looked like they belonged on the front of horror books not Discworld books. "Proper" discworld books have Josh Kirby and Paul Kidby art.
I'd recommend reading Guards! Guards! and Wyrd Sisters as the most Discworld books and Small Gods as the best book (which is different from it being the best Disc world book and different from being the best story).
Of the 21 that I've re-read for the first time as an adult I'd say:
Bad books (by Pratchett standards):
Sourcery
Eric
Moving pictures
Soul music (both of these have the substance of a third of a story stretched to a full length novel. At least Eric had the grace to know there wasn't enough there for a full story)
Lords and Ladies
Typical Pratchett quality books:
The Colour of Magic
The Light Fantastic
Equal Rites (although this has personal resonance for me that makes it a great book that makes me sad we didn't see more of this Discworld)
Mort
Pyramids
Reaper Man (verges on being a great book just for the closing act)
Witches Abroad
Men at Arms
Interesting times
Maskerade
Jingo
Great books:
Wyrd Sisters
Guards! Guards! (these are the two most fundamental Discworld books to me)
Small Gods
Feet of Clay
Hogfather (may be the best story in the catalogue)
You know, even PTerry disagreed with starting with his first books. I think I saw an interview about it somewhere, I'd agree TBH. I'd go for Mort or even the Watch itself as a good starter.
I would agree with not starting at the start. The Colour of Magic and the Light Fantastic are good, but they're not a patch on the more developed stories that came later.
My intro to the Discworld was Pyramids, which aside from being a hilarious read was a good way to start in the middle given that it's effectively a stand-alone story. I think I went back to the start from there.
If you wind up being a fan, I would also recommend not reading the Shephard's Crown, which was his last published book. It wasn't finished when he died, not having gone through his usual multiple rounds of 'polishing', and it really shows. As the last Pratchett book ever, while understanding the reason for it, it was a disappointing way for the series to end.
Alternatively, read it, and then read 'Nation', which is not a Discworld story but is absolutely brilliant.
I have to say I finally read the Shepherds Crown only in lockdown last year with a tear in my eye.
I struggled with Nation, I intend to go back and give it another go with fresh eyes soon.
His collaborations are also a bit of a stretch for me, I love Stephen Baxter and PTerry, but I've really had a hard time going through the Long Earth series which is weird because it basically ticks all my boxes.
I've actually got a few of his short stories to read through which I've deliberately set to one side, plus there's always the Unadulterated Cat. Even my wife likes that one, because its about cats.
I've had Sheperd's Crown since it was released and never had the stomach to read it. Partly because in the last couple of books before that you could tell that the disease was taking it's toll and partly because I just haven't been able to face the finality of it. Someday.
On the subject of reading order recommendations, I suggest Mort; it's still an early book, but it's around when he began to find his "style", it leads you into arguably the best series and, unlike Guards or Witches it explains Death, the most recurring character and the one that will seem the oddest when he pops up randomly in other books (although it's a close call with the Librarian...)
Jadenim wrote: I've had Sheperd's Crown since it was released and never had the stomach to read it. Partly because in the last couple of books before that you could tell that the disease was taking it's toll and partly because I just haven't been able to face the finality of it. Someday.
You're not alone - I stopped after Unseen Academicals and haven't gone further. The style does change and I also agree with the whole finality aspect as well. Some day I'll catch up to the very end!
That said I have been one of the few to read the very first discworld book written way before the Colour of Magic and the Discworld. Heck few have heard of Strata let alone read it. I've also read Darkside of the Sun*
*I never realised it at the time but I picked it up at school in the library, read it and didn't forget it; yet it was years later and after reading a chunk of Discworld that I learned it was by the same author.
I must have had 4 copies each of Good Omens and Truckers in paperback, mostly gone to other people to read.
The Bromeliad is a good intro to Terry's work, being fairly early, and not including spoilers to anything else he's done. It's a kids book, but is still a good set of books.
I think Mort was my first, read the earlier five (Colour and Light were fairly rough going), and waited for Pyramids to be released. They're all sat in hardback now, taking up most of a bookcase, rebought for the early ones, and at-release for the rest.
That helped later on, when my to-be wife saw I'd mentioned them on my dating page
Automatically Appended Next Post: Oh, and if someone wants Discworld at its most silly, go with the Wizards.
The Watch and the Witches are closer to real world satire, in that they’re making specific points. The Wizards are more general fantasy deftness (though not without satire)
The Watch and the Witches are closer to real world satire, in that they’re making specific points. The Wizards are more general fantasy deftness (though not without satire)
You are grossly underestimating the importance of the cheese trolley!
I feel for Ponder in the Wizard series.. the prototypical "nerd" in a university of maniacs.I also think it is wonderful how he graduated and became a Wizard..
I think, however, one of my fav characters is The Bursar..
I've got a lot of time for Mustrum Ridcully once he shows up int he Wizards books - and thought he was portrayed pretty well in the TV version of Hogfather.
Dysartes wrote: I've got a lot of time for Mustrum Ridcully once he shows up int he Wizards books - and thought he was portrayed pretty well in the TV version of Hogfather.
I agree, he's been fleshed out progressively over the years. I particularly liked the sequences of him with Granny Weatherwax and the almost proto-romance down one leg of the trousers of time hinted at in Lords and Ladies.
I started with Reaper Man, which is a favourite to this day even though it's not even a first book in one of the series. Death and the Wizards. At the time I had no idea who Pterry even was.
Don't start with Colour of Magic and Light Fantastic. Just don't. Reading Sourcery as an introduction to Rincewind is fine.
Soul Music and Moving Pictures are great, but there are a LOT of hidden jokes of film names and band names in there.
Only books I actually disliked were Unseen Academicals (possibly because i dislike football) and Snuff, which is HARSH.
Yeah, some of the later books are rather dark, with the humor considerably less prominent. Snuff and Maurice & His Educated Rodents (which was supposedly aimed at young readers) are the biggest offenders that come to mind there.
porkuslime wrote: I feel for Ponder in the Wizard series.. the prototypical "nerd" in a university of maniacs.I also think it is wonderful how he graduated and became a Wizard..
I think, however, one of my fav characters is The Bursar..
Ponder more reminds me of the younger person in the office, on a lower wage than others, being given way more roles and responsibilities.
Jadenim wrote: Monstrous regiment too; I get the impression that Terry was angry about the state of the world when he wrote that one.
Yup, Monstrous Regiment is downright grim in places.
For what it's worth, I still quite enjoyed these books, they were just a different tone to his earlier books. The Shephard's Crown is probably the closest I've come to not enjoying a Pratchett book (although Dodger was a bit more of a slog as well) but even that one still had its moments.
So the third episode happened, and I finally figured out what the issue is with Vimes.
The director, writer and casting director somehow confused Nobby Nobbs with Sam Vimes, and wrote Vimes the character out of the script entirely.
Anyway, hijinks happen (the gang heads off to find A Clue), the musical number happens (its all very scooby doo), Death shows up to cut all the tension out of the climax of Ramkin's 'Dark Secret' (which isn't much of one), she beats up a little girl a couple times, and bureaucracy happens.
And a completely unrelated magic spell foretells the Vimes and Ramkin relationship, so the fact that the actors have no chemistry together (beyond the vague sense that fungus breaking down dead flesh is technically chemistry) has no bearing on future scripts.
Apparently parts of the episode were supposed to be funny, but the episode also included Dr Cruces telling jokes to the assassins and telling them 'Laugh,' and it felt way too on the nose.
Also during an ad break they decided to play a 'deleted scene' right after where the scene was supposed to go, which seemed to entirely defeat the point of cutting it.
On the other hand, the first floor of the assassins' guild had some really nice optical (camera) illusions, so it looked like they made an effort for a scene.
Unfortunately the rest of the assassins' guild was just the basement of some BBC building (or a random hospital, complete with the words 'basement' on the walls), and looked utterly terrible. Partly because they jammed the camera up towards the corner of the ceiling and walls, and tried to fit some action scenes in, including a 'fight' in a roughly 4'x8' closet. It didn't work out well.
It wraps up with one of those scenes where Vetinari skillfully winds Vimes up, and he does what the Patrician wants.
Except, due to the difference in writing skill between Pratchett and... whoever wrote this... Vetinari just tells him not to do things 'officially,' and Vimes is still confused.
^ I mean yeah Neil Gaiman says it all in that article but really, it's not like it could be anything else. Terry's books were full of rage, particularly at the British system. If he had written a book for the last 4 years the pages would drip with such venom you'd have to wear gloves to turn the pages.
I dunno, I’m still liking the show. It’s not like Great, but it’s entertaining and cute, albeit cheesy. I don’t miss the troll just because his costume was poor and he couldn’t move very well. The future vision bit was odd and I’m not sure what that was or how that came up. Out of curiosity what was the deleted scene?
They continued to try to kill the snake Cheery was feeding to the little dragon. To the point of shooting it with a crossbow.
And then they all stood in the doorway posing with the dead snake while Vimes spasmed and convulsed at Ramkin.
Jadenim wrote: I've had Sheperd's Crown since it was released and never had the stomach to read it. Partly because in the last couple of books before that you could tell that the disease was taking it's toll and partly because I just haven't been able to face the finality of it. Someday.
You're not alone - I stopped after Unseen Academicals and haven't gone further.
Unseen is where you can really start to tell he's losing his marbles (though the Moist Von Lipwig banking one had a few stylistic hints upon rereading) . The style changes and starts getting gradually less punchy and more wandering. They're not bad books by any stretch, but they're not him at his best. They started making me sad each time a new one came out the publishers, because you could tell each time that he'd deteriorated just that little bit more.
Well yeah, I thought Unseen Academicals wandered a bit - but then I'm also not into football so I'm willing to bet I was missing plenty of references and in-jokes that might have made it better.
I thought Snuff and Raising Steam were both better than Unseen Academicals.
Well. As of episode four, the animation budget has run so low that they've replaced the little dragon with a box with a flashing lightbulb. Which you can see in the box.
And the big dragon is just a soundtrack off screen.
Anyway, this seems to be 'romantic entanglements, the episode' which could be interesting, but they've decided this was the point they needed to jam in the Sam Vimes' Boots Theory of Socioeconomic Unfairness. Verbatim and apropos of nothing, and go with other bad jokes and terrible advice.
Ugh. The sheer amount of exposition and luck is absurd. The 'villains' find the person they're looking for on the second page of the second random book they pick up, know what's wrong with her just by looking, and find the macguffin by accidently thumping a wall.
And whatever they're doing with goblins in the show is just getting more offensive. And I still can't tell if they're trying for tragic or funny with them, which is part of why it lands so poorly every time. Though sometimes... they randomly just aren't dead.
And... name dropped geography. In the wrong order. And Cohen the barbarian is stuck in an old folks home. Lovely.
As someone who has never read any Discworld and thus couldn’t be let down by a poor adaptation, I thought it was quite good enough. Not great, but certainly not terrible.
I’m on episode 2, and it’s not without its charm and merits.
Automatically Appended Next Post: The Librarian looks crap though. Why not just stick with him being a (transfigured) Orangutan, who refuses all attempts to change him back?
Discworld fan here. I could see where they have blended several discworld books together, but it was fairly enjoyable. personally I think it would have been fine if they had stuck closer to the original source material, but I would rather have some adaptations to screen than none.
Discword books/plot that I could see some things from the following books (did I miss any? if you spotted more references please let me know):
. Guards!Guards!
Spoiler:
(dragon plot)
. Men at Arms
Spoiler:
characters - Angua, Cheery & most other character development.
. Night Watch
Spoiler:
Carcer being sent through time, John Keel mentions in Vimes backstory, etc.
Yeah, that’s where it’s reminding me of Judge Dredd.
Whilst that film deviated a fair amount from the source material, it managed to weld together quite a few stone cold classic comic storylines. Off the top of my head? Cursed Earth, Judda (part of the Oz story), The Dead Man, Judge Cal. Only bits and bobs of each story, but good stuff all the same.
Automatically Appended Next Post: Wizards are a bit lack lustre. Not as mad or food obsessed as they could’ve been.
Assassin’s Guild however feels spot on.
Automatically Appended Next Post: Ok. Got to admit I’m really enjoying this.
There are wince moments for Discworld fans. But I’m really quite engrossed.
Made it through to episode 2, but gave up after about 15 minutes.
To me its an unwatchable mess. There are too many plots taken from too many books. We have The Watch, Men at Arms, Equal Rites, Night Watch, Going Postal and Snuff to name the immediate ones.
Character changes are unnecessary, female Dr Cruces, patrician and CMoT is now both female and disabled. No idea why they decided to kill Detritus, and they seem to have ditched Carrots ancestry.
From what I can gather the Pratchett estate was cut out very early on in the process and these changes show why. Early adaptations of Pratchetts works while he was still alive don't have any such hatchet work carried out and I don't think he would have approved.
I can see the appeal to someone who has only a passing interest in the source material though.
Same reason the dragon stops being seen, and even Ramkin's little dragon becomes a box with a flashlight inside. The first one is forgivable, as you can argue that they're trying to keep the dramatic impact by not making the dragon an everyday thing. The other, though... it gets really bad when someone holds up the box, shakes it, and you can actually see the flashlight rolling around.
I'm afraid to say that the Last Continent is one of the funniest books that Pratchett ever did. Fantasy Aussies at their finest. No worries!
