"Chronicles of Shannara TV Show?" Topic

Anyone watch this so far?
***Only minor spoilers follow***
I watched the first episode and it was good and bad.

The good part was that it had good visuals and effects and the story is pretty intriguing.

The bad was the script. Some of the dialogue was so out of place that it was horrible. One girl told another that she was "Knocked up." and there were other things that were so thoroughly modern that they just didn't fit.

Still, I can remember when I first read Sword of Shannara and then Elfstones and I loved the stories. (Elfstones was the best which is what the TV show seems to focus on)

It wasn't bad overall, I just wish that they wouldn't have made it so modern…

The books are awful so I expect the TV show to be even worse. Pass.

Consider the source.

The target audience is the MTV "generation", not us.

I watched it last night I doubt I'll watch anymore the commercials on MTV were brutal no wonder we have es in this country now. Anyway I really like the first three books and so far they have used maybe 30% of the second book the Elf Stones of Shannara and only mention the Sword of Shannara which is the first book. I never understand why they have to cut about a perfectly good story line; example Wil Ohmsford is the main character and a healer but they totally took that part out, they changed a lot, it's a series they could just let it evolve on it's own and keep a lot of the original story intact.

This is part of the usual cyclical pile on effect of Hollywood.

Lord of the Rings gave us some pretty bad followup movies.
Hollywood is puzzled, since LOTR did so well.
"Why can't we just throw out more fantasy movies? They'll watch that crap!"
"Well, they didn't watch this one! so screw 'em. Make more romantic comedies."

The same thing follows a good historically "accurate" movie.
"Hey, they like that uniform stuff. Let's give them more!"
well, the copycat ones fail. So, people don't want historically "accurate" movies.

Now we have Game of Thrones, which I would argue is a quality show, setting all kinds of records and raking in the dough..
"Hey! The people will watch these episodic miniseries with all that fairy and dragon crap? Let's make some ourselves and clean up."

And so it goes.

Irish, Hollywood buys concepts. They never use the whole story, and never will.
And that is why some battles, important ones, are missing from the Alexander movie about 10 years ago.
Why have 4 battles, when we only have 2-1/2 hours to tell the story? Two will do just fine, and screw the sieges,

I saw it. It wasn't awful. My attention span isn't long enough to have watched the whole first episode, let alone any of the second.

What I saw was better than the usual ABC/CBS/NBC evening lineups.

I enjoyed it, and will keep watching – but then I never read the books so I am coming in "fresh."

Not sure what Irish is talking about – I was pleasantly surprised at the LACK of commercial breaks during this first episode. Granted, the commercials that were on were 90%, "Smoking is uncool," which got annoying after an hour…

I ended up taking a pass at The Strain after the first episode (WANT to see it and will watch it on Netflix when it gets there) because of the dragging, overwhelming, commercial breaks (4min show, 5min commercials, 7min show, 5min commercials, etc…)

I know people love "Game of Thrones", but I just can't watch it. I choose not to watch sex scenes every few minutes.

I guess I'm pretty simple, but I like the idea of good guys and bad guys. I loved LOTR. I loved that Faramir was a good guy and noble. I didn't like how the movies made him more murky.

I just don't like the way that all of the heroes today have to have a dark side to them, and I really don't enjoy movies or shows where everyone is a dark person (bad guy)

I liked it surprisingly, as light entertainment. It has more of recent YA dystopian future movie dna than LOTR or Game of Dunnies I suspect.

Elfstones iirc was a far better book than Sword, and more original, so makes sense to start here.

I was okay with it, as expressed in my spoiler-laden thread (located just above this one). Not sure if I'll watch further episodes or not. I'm not quite "sucked into the world" so far, but I'm not repulsed either. Will see…

The Older I get the more discerning I get. I'm now to the point where I only have a few movies or shows I can re-watch and enjoy….and most new shows suck. Eventually I'll just be in a nursing home with Master and Commander on an endless loop.

I felt contempt for Sword of Shannara and refused to read anything further by this author. I still refuse.

I liked it. I wish they would have started with Sword of Shannara though. I get what's going on because I've read the books so I know the back story and who everyone is. But I can see people just jumping in getting rather confused about who everyone is and what's going on. Sword would have sorted all that out. I guess it's too Lord of the Rings to be the starting point for Shannara.

However it's clear where this story is: it's Elfstones. And they mention events and characters from Sword quite a bit and so far the *basic* story is Elfstones and this show is so far pretty faithful to the general story, but with a lot of subplot/character stuff that's made-up and so on.

The thing that is jarring to me is how often artifacts from "the ancient" world show up. It's okay to have occasional ruins and an artifact here and there like an Easter egg, but having Wil wear tennis shoes? Elves in t-shirts? Nah! I wish they would go easier on that and use "ancient" artifacts a bit more sparingly. The "modern" dialogue isn't too jarring, I guess some things might still be around in the language a few thousand years from now. Who knows, maybe "knocked up" can stick around that long?

Anyway, I would say not bad. Maybe a 3 out of 5.

I have watch it and think it's worth a second season but I don't think it will go beyond that.
Mark