The Watch

I had no idea what I was watching and I'm a huge fan of the books. From the very first second it was confusing and horrible. All the characters were botched, storyline botched, script botched, editing botched. I liked the idea that Ankh Morpork was some sort of neo-punk medieval city, but that's all I liked because from the very first second, I was confused about what was happening (and this is from someone who has actually read the books several times).

This is a hard pass for any Pratchett fans as this will only make you angry. And I'm afraid that anyone else will have absolutely no clue what the hell is happening.

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.

Watched the pilot, and left conflicted. I've read all the books over the years, so it was nice to see elements brought to life, but why modernise and change things up, when playing it true to the source would have been easier and better? Pratchett isn't a show-writer from the grave, so let his work do the storytelling. It's what he did best, after all

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.