The Watch

I just watched the two episode debut of The Watch on BBC America and I have to ask why? Why did the BBC decide to go so far away from the source material, Sky did a very reasonable job with Going Postal, hell, even The Hogfather (a Christmas time favourite in our home) and The Colour of Magic where infinitely better executed. I had some hope after hearing Richard Dormer was cast as Vimes, I loved him in Fortitude, but everything here seems wrong. The setting doesn't feel like Discworld, their vision of Ankh-Morpork doesn't fit the theme or style of the books (slowly developed and fleshed out over multiple volumes). The casting is off, not just the removal for key characters (Sgt. Colon and Nobby Nobbs) but the unfortunate idea of casting Lord Vetinari as a completely unthreatening afterthought is baffling, Charle Dance and Jeremy Irons are both still alive and have played the part so much better. There are just too many things wrong with this programme, if you want the real Watch, read the books, if you want to watch Pratchett done well, watch Going Postal.

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.

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.

One of the things I keep hearing about this show is that it is not a direct interpretation of Sir Terry's phenomenal discworld, but it is inspired by it. I don't buy it. I think someone somewhere decided that they would cash in on one of Pratchett's most fleshed out segments of the novels, the city watch, in name and name alone, and totally missed the mark. I didn't expect it to be a love letter to Pratchett or fan service, but I did expect the characters to still at least have the same core that made them such treasures to read. Sam Vines is not Sam Vimes, it's true..."That's not my cow." At least not after the first episode. Same goes for each and every character from Angua to Detritus to Carrot to good old Dog botherer. I don't even care about the gender swap. Just give me the impression that there's a Machiavellian mind that's twelve steps ahead of everyone else working its magic behind the scenes, and I'll be happy. But here is where it really stings. You can tell that everyone really is trying. The performances for the most part are committed, albeit misinformed, the production value is decent, aside from Detritus's distracting appearance. And the punk vibe could have actually made for an interesting twist, but it just comes off as forced and therefore, pointless and shallow. I can only hope it gets better.

Nothing of this show is remotely true to the original work of Terry Pratchett. Well, maybe Carrot's hair colour, but even his character gets a bad treatment of getting a changed background and impact.

It is really sad to see what happened to this. Its like the creators only read the summaries, usually find at the back of the books, and mangled them into a story. Nothing fits to the true work, as characters appearing later in the watch series are not only present at the start, but with their character arcs completed.

It also is not funny, or humorous, or insightful, or sarcatic, or ironic, or satire. Its just bland, bad and poor. Every Terry Pratchett fan should save themself from exposure to this and stay as far away from it as possiple.

PS You may think about comments about race- and genderchanging of characters. Yes. That happens. It does neither add nor detract on how awful the show is. Dont even think about "wokeness" when the base concept is just disgusting. Even the acting is sub-par, but the worst is just the writing.