For Some Unfathomable Reason, BBC America Calls this "The Watch" (Terry Pratchett "Adaptation")

https://youtu.be/Px-ljMM_EeM

I think Sir Terry’s daughter sums it up well enough:

Well…it could be fun…

That… looks terrible. :-(

As someone who’s never read Pratchett and doesn’t care about the relative faithfulness to the source material, it still looks pretty terrible.

But then I’ve been wrong before.

It’s BBC, it can’t be that bad.

We have discussed this show in the other thread, but considering its title is definitely not applicable anymore, its probably not a bad idea to start fresh. Pretty shocking that after a decade in development hell, this is the show they decided to make…

I need a tiny pocket dragon to maintain proper social distancing.

This seems lacking in humor.

Woops, y’all are 100 posts deep there. Mods, pls feel free to close mine, despite my excellent titling job.

Pratchett’s work has always seemed to me to lack subtlety. That may or may not be a good thing, but its not something I like. This didn’t grab me.

Oh my sweet summer child.

Yes, that’s true. Clever, funny, often unexpectedly rich, but subtle? No.

I like the Watch books. But right out of the gate I’m wholly uninterested in anything that just gloms the names and the settings and has none of the DNA.

What? No way. That thread is about a weekly police procedural that’s approved by Pratchett. This isn’t that. Right?

This made me laugh out loud.

Will Smith made a movie/series (?) that was alternate reality, with trolls and orcs and stuff.

This makes me think of that.

Whose voice is that at the end?

Well no, his books were written to use fantasy tropes to skewer some part of modern society, filtered through a distinctly British lens on the age of industrialization.

The goal wasn’t to be subtle, but clever and fun adventures. And to that end they were successful.

Right, it’s fairly broad satire, with some serious elements mixed into the pastiche. It’s a good mix, and it works for me. Subtlety wasn’t his thing, and I don’t know if it would have improved the work.

I do know people who have been turned off by all the “silliness,” but different strokes…

That sounds like early Pratchett, where silly wordplay was very dominant. His later works were a lot more structured and while still funny, not really silly slapstick type humour.

Yeah, I’d wouldn’t often recommend starting with The Colour of Magic, except maybe for younger readers. Wyrd Sisters and Pyramids is where he starts hitting his stride, IMO, if you can get past the puns.

I’d recommend anyone coming into the series start with one of the Watch books, or Going Postal. They represent what I feel encapsulates the best parts of Pratchett.

Color of Magic is, well, not that good.