The Spiderwick Chronicles

I think this is at least 3rd series in a row for me, that has nothing but aesthetics. The other recent ones were Fallout and Ripley. As with them, I can't say anything bad about the aesthetics and general style: it does look like what I would expect from a fairy tale. But the essence of the fairy tale does include the "tale" part.

It's just boring. Completely unremarkable, with quite a few moments ruined by telling things, rather then showing them. For example, pretty early in the show there is this moment, where Ogre (or whatever he really is) is trying to manage his temptation to eat a human. Most of the scene it's the girl (whoever she is) literally saying "Are you not hungry?". A good narrative would show a trembling hand trying to reach out to doorknob, but stopping (o being stopped by the other hand), or showing some more emotions, including hunger, on the face of the character (licking lips, salivating, clenching the jaw).

But alas, we have another case where book is transferred to screen in a literal manner, forgetting the whole point of such an adaptation. In a book you have to spell everything out, because you can't show things, since you can only rely on text and reader's imagination, which is dependent on how much details you provide. But on screen, you can not only tell things (which uses hearing), but also show things (which uses eyes - the main consumer of TV shows). Why modern shows has forgotten the art of visual story-telling is beyond me.

Everyone who played a teenager were super annoying, especially the ones that played the twins and the sister. Show reminds me a bit of Grimm, but Grimm was better. I can see why Disney passed up on this show. If theres a Season 2, i'd be surprised. Christian Slater was good as a baddie, but needed more witches of eastwick jack nicholson type acting.

The acting was all over the place. The plot holes also all over the place. I also felt these kids kept repeating themselves in every episode. I watched the show only cause i was already invested. We'll see. I gave it a 6 out of 10 cause there were moments that caught my attention.

For the most part it's an enjoyable romp through the mythology that the spiderwick Chronicles created. But then it decides to take a turn toward an agenda that is pushing the story of mental health and post to do with people that have emotional problems. Which is a great topic and absolutely one that should be addressed, but not one that this particular series was focused on.

The music was well picked, the actors were chosen very well. And for the most part you're going to like even the smallest of characters. But the idea that this story has anything to do with this source material is completely lacking.

The Bad: It's pretty bad, the writing is bad, most of the story is predictable, special effects are questionable and a ton of unnecessary forced dialogue.

The main (Spiderwick) characters are VERY unlikeable and don't stick out. They gave the teenagers no likeable traits!

Timbletack is also very ugly I don't know why his design is this bad.

The ending was bad!

The Good: The dialogue is laughably cringe which makes the show kind of funny.

The cast they chose to play the characters are quite good even though the writers butchered the characters with AWFUL dialogue.

Conclussion: Don't watch the show it isn't worth the 5 hours+ of watching just to see some bad CGI, cringe writing and way too many long forced dialogue for this to be 'enjoyable'. It's overall just a mediocre show.

The ONE & ONLY redeeming aspect of this entire fiasco is Christian Slater's devastating performance, worthy of a real cast, crew, writers, producers and directors. If the last episode would have shown us that there was science fiction involved, and Slater had been transported into a D-list production from an A-list one, THAT would have felt far more believable. OK, actually, the actress who played Lucinda was pretty charming, as well, so who's to say how she might have done with adult-written dialog? The remaining cast could have been good; it's hard to say - the material they had to work with was so atrocious, repetitive and grating, it is almost impossible to watch. I did watch the whole thing - and, unfortunately, there is zero character development. So a character who says an annoying thing in the first episode will continue to spout the same time of thing throughout all of the whole 8 episodes - bar none. There's no relief from a gorgeous CGI fairy world, bc the producers largely felt it wasn't needed in this production. So you have Slater, the actress who played Lucinda, portaled into the worst television fantasy series to have been produced in decades. Watch the 2008 film or Willow or House of the Dragon or pretty much ANYTHING else, bc this is a dumpster fire.