The Watch

After seeing good Discworld TV productions like Hogfather, The Colour of Magic and Going Postal I actually thought that BBC would be able to make something at least as good ...

This is utter crap ... Discworld in some weird punk style.

Characters not even trying to be the characters we love from the books, and that's not even getting into the whole gender swap mess.

If you are a fan of the books watch the old TV movies I mentioned above and give this garbage a pass.

Get the rights for the Disc world books about the Watch , then decide that Terry Pratchett's version was rubbish and you could do it better !! Why ?? Take the names and storylines from various books , completely change the personalities & background stories and get Richard Dormer to Chanel his Alex Higgins as Vimes !! Avoid !!

In some way I have to blame the British as a whole, as they are funding this, not because they want to mind you they are forced to support it. And that is the problem, the show knows it never has to worry about money, or be able to sell the show in other countries, so they can go the low effort way instead. This seems to be made by people who was told about DW in passing, and just filled in the blanks with fan fiction from twitter. It's sad to see people defending the show, because "Hey, look they gender swap a character, how funny", when said thing because a mockery of the original story and are just done to hide the failure of all involved in understanding the source material. I now see why the estate of Terry Pratchett and his daughter have washed their hands of this project, and said it shares nothing with the stories he made, other that the theft of the names of those involved. In a time with so much pain and hopelessness I don't see why we have to add more into it, the original stories where fun, innovating and self critic in a way, this this is just sad really. In short all things you loved from the books are gone, change or dumbed down. If you want to see DW in moving picture from, look up the movies and animations, even though the budget was smaller and they are older they are still light years ahead from even the goal of this series.

They somehow took one of the funniest series of books and handed it to a writer and director who don't have a sense of humour. The tone is off. The cast try their best but the pacing and tone are nothing like Pratchett and nothing like his books. So we're left with a series which is an object of interest to fans of Pratchett and fans of comedy sci-fi, but in the end it is a misfire. It fails to even be fun, coherent storytelling.

There is a moment in one of Terry Pratchett's brilliant Discworld novels where the protagonist's "organiser", a magical device reminding the owner of his daily appointments, breaks, so it starts reciting the schedule from an alternate universe where the characters made the wrong choices with awful results.

This feels like a show made in that darker timeline.

Maybe the producers were making their own steampunk cop show and decided to slap Discworld names on it as a marketing afterthought. Imagine if someone was planning an on-the-road sci-fi/comedy and, by some dark miracle, managed to get the Lord of the Rings license from the Tolkien Estate: cue a LOTR version where a bunch of stoner hobbits and an insane cackling Gandalf ride speeder bikes towards Mordor through a cyberpunk Middle-earth; Aragorn is a woman, Galadriel a dude, Gollum a politically-minded revolutionary and everyone else is missing. That's The Watch. I'm no purist when it comes to adapting books to screen... but when setting, plot, tone and pretty much all characters are unrecognizable, you should just create your own original work instead of bastardizing someone else's.

Some of the actors could have been fine in a proper adaptation, like Dormer as Vimes - if the iconic character had not been turned into a punk Jack Sparrow. Vimes - who is, with Granny Weatherwax, one of Discworld's most complex, nuanced characters among so many memorable ones - was, pre-development, a broken, depressed drunk, not a goofball. Nearly every member of the Watch has been tinkered with in similarly deplorable ways, to say nothing of Sybil.

Also, how do you ruin the running joke of the huge Carrot being an adoptive/honorary dwarf? Why, you cast other tall actors as dwarfs! It takes some special kind of anti-genius to mess this up.

So, as its own thing? Not good. As an adaptation? Offensive, tone-deaf and nightmarishly bad. We'll always have dozens of great Discworld novels, I know, but it's sad we couldn't get a good Watch TV series as well.

1/10.