****Warning: Rant, Long****
Oh no.
Just two minutes in and I hear this -- "...we had to pick and mix the best bits across the books..."
Why on
earth would you have to do anything like that?!! Because "none of the books lend themselves to an eight-part series"?
I wish he would explain why that is. Re-creating
each book as an eight-part series sounds logical enough to me -- that's what BBC Radio 4 did with all the books (and with great success, might I add). Of course, they did them in 3 parts or 4 parts, or (in the case of the talking books) in 8 or 9 or 10 or 12 parts, depending on the size of the book and number of CDs.
The made-for-TV films did it, more or less. "Hogfather" did it pretty well. The "Colour of Magic/Light Fantastic" movie did well, too. There were some bits about the "Going Postal" movie I didn't like, but it worked. Heck, even the animated movies worked. They were all faithful to the books, more or less.
So to me, it makes more sense to use
one book as the basis of an 8-part series. That would have given them much more room to explore and display each character in depth, as well as develop the plot of each book. As it is, what they actually did sounds like a crazy mishmash of characters and scenes from the series.
I won't even go into the part where the characters themselves were changed beyond recognition. Why this was done, I have no idea. *shrug*
-- "...and invent our own series, invent our own world."
Again,
why? You have a world. It's called the Discworld. You have a series. It's called the City Watch books. And you shat all over it.
-- "You don't need to know the books to enjoy the series..." Um, exactly. Because you took the existing material and threw it all away.
-- "The books gave us license to..." No they didn't. You took license with the Discworld. That's a very different thing.
-- "... our show is set in a corner of this little multiverse..." Er, no -- it's not. It's set in Ankh-Morpork, a very well-defined
CITY on the Disc. How well-defined? It's mapped out. We know where everything is. We know who is who, what they do, why they exist, how they make a living etc. It's not "a little corner of the multiverse." We're not talking about a tiny place somewhere like Slice or Twoshirts (although even they are pretty clearly developed in the books).
If you wanted a piece of Discworld to develop your own original story ... how about starting with (maybe) Howandaland? Or Nothingfjord? We don't know much about them, except what the Roundworld equivalents are (sub-Saharan Africa and Scandinavia, respectively).
I'm sorry, but I stopped watching after three minutes. I couldn't keep watching this knob crap all over the series that I love so much.
My guess? This bastardisation of the Discworld will majorly piss off a whole bunch of Discworld fans and, maybe, interest or amuse of a huge swatch of non-Discworld fans. Maybe some of them will read the books, realise they've been misled, feel aggrieved about the show, read more of Terry's books, and even (maybe) find their way here. I hope so.
Then again, maybe not. More likely, they might watch an episode here and there, and then watch something else instead.
I carried on watching and saw "Death" (?) being rude to the interviewer. I'm not sure why. The Death I know isn't rude to anyone. :|
Sigh ... I give up.
Tell you what -- let's do a Kickstarter and film the
real City Watch series! (If we can!)
No? Well, it was just an idea ...
