A Discovery of Witches

A long time since I've been this excited waiting for the next episode. This show is great. It has great production, good actors, believable fantasy society, the characters are adults (finally) and it grabs attention and holds it. I love it.

I liked the beginning of Season one. The location and build up. I felt the darkness of Matthew Goodes character could have been explored and developed more.

Midway I felt like it veered off into smaltchzy "Hallmark " movie territory. The "witchey" house along halloween pumpkins. Lost the intrigue for me as the Vampire side of his nature became weaker.

Still on the fence if Season 2 is worth paying for to watch.

Overall had the potential to be great but missed the mark with some of the plot and character development.

I made my account because I feel like this really desereves a positive review.

As someone who has seen lots, and lots of films & series, but also having my own fair share of knowledge of video editing. I can really appreciate the cinematography of this series. Beautiful scenes and film work with overall great acting and a story that shows a lot of opportunities for this becoming an amazing series.

Three episodes in so far, and after every episode I keep on wanting more. I'm mostly writing this review because honestly, I want more! I truly hope they can keep up this quality for the rest of the season, and be renewed for a second season. As it's something that I'm already looking forward to.

TLDR: Great, and beautifully produced.

What a pity that we are unable to leave separate review scores for each season. My score for season 2 would have been a 7, with the first three episodes only scoring a 5/6 each, as they were slow, boring and generally incomprehensible. Thankfully the pace and storytelling picked up from episode 4 onwards, however this second season is sadly lacking when compared to season one. I was initially pleased to see Tom Hughes appearing, but alas his character is woefully underwritten and ultimately quite silly and implausible. Loved him in Victoria and here he plays in identical character with an identical voice and even haircut. Am hoping he's better than than this, so will put this down to script issues. James Purefoy's performance is impressive and lifts the whole thing out of the doldrums at mid-point so let's give a cheer for him. I would love to know what went so wrong with this production, particularly in the early episodes, as it was hugely promising at the end of the first season. Suddenly we got cartoon caricatures of villains, implausible and ridiculous storylines and poor quality CGI of Elizabethan England. The pacing went totally to pot as well - new writers? Script editors? Anyway, by the end of series two it had picked up and is more or less back on course albeit with far less credibility than before. The whole s2 is available to download on Sky in the Uk. Interesting that it seemed to attract only review scores of 9/10 before it became available to view. Cast and crew perhaps?

The premise was interesting. The story showed potential. The actors are mostly competent and fitting to their roles.

After all that potential and a decent first couple of episodes, it slowed down to a crawl, became a second-rate romantic soap with no thrills or entertainment value whatsoever. I enjoy a character drama as much as the next viewer but I found myself ceasing to care about any protagonist.

In short, unless written by Quentin Tarantino or some other legend, two people chatting in a room will not give me sufficient motive to wait for the outcome of the dialog. Even if the interlocutors are supernatural creatures.