Life, Writing, Weirdness

BBC 2020 (just barely with the first episode airing on 31 December), one series with eight episodes.

Being up front with an overall opinion, I’m three episodes in and enjoying it so far. But I think I’m enjoying it in spite of being a Terry Pratchett fan rather than because of it.

This isn’t a Terry Pratchett story. It’s a remix. And it’s up front about that. Every episode is careful to start out with the warning screen “Somewhere in a distant secondhand dimension.” Which is wise because it warns the audience to not get its hopes up too high. After the opening credits, we get a title screen with “The Watch” in large print and “Inspired by characters created by Sir Terry Pratchett”. Inspired by, another important warning.

So it’s a remix, and it’s not a very good remix. Every single character in the story is a Pratchett character from one or more of the City Watch books in the Discworld series, although a lot of them aren’t necessarily what you’d expect from casting based on Pratchett’s descriptions in the prose, they all (so far, at least) work. The actors are doing very well with the material and direction they’ve been given.

But it’s not a Terry Pratchett story.

Not that it’s horrible, but it’s not Pratchett, which regularly throws me out of the story when a character’s name is used in some kind of nonsense context that doesn’t fit with a Pratchett-level story. And I’m not convinced the writing team is familiar enough with the source material to pull things off, because in spite of an obviously significant budget, the story isn’t being pulled off.

Previous Pratchett adaptations have gone very well. The trio of mini-series produced around 2010 were excellent to spectacular. The set of animated movies done for several novels in the late 1990s were great to excellent. The Watch is… not bad, but also not good. It’s fine, really.

From a purely storytelling perspective in my mind, the plot and the characters are equally important. The characters are solid (although I’m still upset about the opening sequence of episode 2, but it certainly proved we weren’t in a Pratchett story). The story, not so much. It borrows a couple of kernels from Pratchett books, but only if I’m very generous with the word kernel. Less than it borrows for the characters, really. There is a noble dragon, there is a moment where one of the characters falls through time, and Lady Sybil does breed swamp dragons, but I’m struggling to find more.

It may improve. It may not. I’m enjoying it enough that while I’m unlikely to give it a great rating when it’s over, I do expect to get to the end of the season. And while I’m hoping the basic story gets resolved, I anticipate being cliffhangered. Few things are allowed to build an audience these days if they don’t have one from the moment the first episode is released, but sometimes they build that hope in anyway.

Be well, everyone.