I watched an episode sober. Will not do that again.
They managed to set an episode in a highschool much faster than I expected, even knowing it airs on MTV. Quite impressive that none of the paper streamers wasted away because the building was “sealed”, but still housed an enormous bat population.
Brooks is kind of charmingly hokey these days, and his character names are terrible. But his stories do have an interesting ethos. He’s gotten more ruthless about his characters as time wears on, but not in a cynical way; instead, self-sacrifice is sometimes simply the price to doing the right thing. Power and heroism both always have costs.
Drink whenever someone says “elf” or looks pensive.
You’ll die of alcohol poisoning. Limit it to just when the lead/hot elf knits her eyebrows.
I agree, this show seems to be getting worse as it goes on, but for some very strange reason I still want to watch it. I think it has to do with the fact that the original Shannara trilogy was some of the first fantasy novels I read as a lad. Elfstones of Shannara in particular was my favorite (what this is based on.)
Anyways, I think I will stick with it to see how the “war” is portrayed. When I read about the battles between the Elfs and Demons in the book, it was my first exposure to large scale battles in literature, and I loved the desperation of the elfs trying to hold out, and badassery of Allanon.
Or maybe its seeing Allanon on screen (even though he looks much different) the actor who plays him seems to take the role seriously, and so far his story line is tolerable.
But yeah, its pretty fucking bad overall.
I do like how they are portraying Allanon. Allanon was a major badass in the books so Im glad they are playing him this way.
Elfstones was one of my favorite books as a kid as well. I loved the initial part of the quest, with the reaper and the elven rangers. The war was pretty awesome.
My youngest son is 12, and he loves this series. Maybe even more than the superhero shows we normally watch. I’m thinking I’m not the target demographic.
I agree that Allanon is a good addition to the show. I love his channeling of Sean Connery’s voice.
This show has gone from passable if fairly eye-roll inducing young adult fantasy to downright embarrassing to watch in the course of 7 episodes. As if the episode set in an actual high school wasn’t bad enough, the one I just watched had a town seemingly populated only by attractive young adults who somehow managed to have working electricity so they could throw a rave complete with DJ/turntables, colored lights and Star Trek on a film projector. Oh, and they also had at least two working firearms that looked to be in pristine condition and had ammo that somehow survived a thousand years.
I get that the world of Shannara is supposedly one that arose from the ashes of modern day Earth, but where the books are somewhat subtle about this (from what I can recall), the TV show seems to flaunt it at every opportunity and the effect is a resounding “WTF! LOL!”, which probably isn’t what the producers intended. That said, I am 7 episodes in, so I may as well stick around for the remaining episodes of the season. I wonder how this is doing ratings-wise?
It really wasn’t subtle in the books, but it was background, not normally central to the plot.
So I finished watching this last night, and was massively disappointed in how quickly the series wrapped up. I was expecting/hoping for a drawn out military confrontation which mirrored the books at least slightly, which in hindsight was pretty silly of me considering the production quality of the series.
Yeah overall was a turd, hope my wife doesn’t watch it and ask me why/how I managed to watch all the episodes. I’m usually the one ribbing her on her choice of TV, this is an unacceptable turnaround.
Yeah. After all those shots of the massing demon army, the big confrontation looked like a minor skirmish in the woods.
They had a teaser for season 2, but this series sucked enough, and sucked enough of my time that I won’t be watching.
Having watched it all, not sure I can be too critical of it in the end. If I tune into MTV, its not entirely unexpected I should see a show targeted to their audience. If it gets renewed it’ll probably fair better for not being tied to one of the books.
I had been wondering if they were going to do Wishsong next.
This is on Netflix now and I’ve made it through the first 5 episodes today (slow, lazy, stay-at-home sort of day), and man this show is a hot f’n mess. I don’t even know where to start on it, and don’t feel like wasting the time or energy. If MTV thought this was going to be their Game of Thrones, they hired the wrong production crew.
Well, it doesn’t really get any better. (sorry if that’s spoilerish)
No, I watched two more episodes last night and it really doesn’t. My wife asked me what was keeping me with it and didn’t like my reply of, “The two hot chicks.” I’m not a TV person, so if this is what fantasy on TV is generally like I better understand now why people are willing to overlook Game of Thrones’ many flaws.
No, Shannara Chronicles is bad even for TV fantasy. (Though, to be fair, full on fantasy has been even rarer than full on SF on TV, presumably because it demands an effects budget that’s a lot larger than just setting things in modern times and throwing in vampires or wizards or whatever.)
The Magicians, which came out around the same time as Shannara was much better. About the only thing good about Shannara was Manu Bennetts portrayal of Allanon.