My single biggest problem with Shannara Chronicles (and admittedly I liked the show, the production values especially were spectacular) is there were no significant subplots of any great merit. We see there is conflict amongst King Eventine and his sons Ander and Arion, but there’s no time taken to EXPLORE that. Wil…

Did it fall flat with teens? It is MTV’s most DVR’d show. According to TvByTheNumbers.

Yeah, but that kind of De Lint/Beagle/Jonathan Carroll-style fantasy is almost magical realism, which makes it even less dependent on “worldbuilding” than Jim Butcher and the like. If anything, it places a larger emphasis on the kind of everyday mimesis that you expect from literary fiction. The fact that it doesn’t…

I agree, it missed with me, and I have read every Brooks book out there and enjoyed them all to varying degrees. Although, I think we need to take it for who it was seemingly intended - younger teenage audiences. Look at the network - MTV, first time I tuned into that channel in something like 15 years, look at…

The reason this show failed was because the product that was delivered was a skeleton of the source material and because of it, the hard core fans never caught on to it. Instead of the thrilling fantasy we hoped for, they catered to the MTV adolescent fans of Hunger Games,Twilight,and Divergent. As a huge fan of the…

I can’t imagine how anyone could think this show was ever expected to rival GoT. I can’t even see how it would ever have been targeted towards that audience.

One of the main criticisms of the Shannara book series over the years is that it is basically Tolkein-lite. And that’s particularly true for The Sword of Shannara.

It’s targeted at tweens and teens and airs on MTV. I mean, no, it’s not awesome but it’s chock full of eye candy and easy to watch. Probably too nerdy for your average kid but it is nice to see this stuff becoming more of an option for big studios to tackle. It could be developed a bit more to try to suck in the…

The writing, the world, and just about everything about the show is lacking. Perhaps if a bit more work went into the series it would have been a good TV show. It lacks on examining in depth anything that would make the show more compelling. I don’t know if this shows that you can’t translate an epic fantasy easily to…

The Real Reason Why Shannara Chronicles Failed to Copy The Success of Game of Thrones

The problem was the massive deviation from the source material that increasingly became an insult to the intelligence of fans. Go look at the fan responses on Terry Brooks’s personal site. Discontent grew with each episode as it deviated further and further from the source material. Fans accepted some necessary…

I’m eternally in the grey but I thought I would still drop a note, unseen as it will be.

I feel like we watched two very different shows. I did an end-of-season analysis as well, and honestly, they could have done a great show with the same cast and budget and locations. What was lacking was solid scriptwriting.

They really missed the whole point of what made this one story special. It was the one time when no one was at war in the four lands; everyone was recovering from the last war, and all the races were able to come together to fight this huge threat, except the asshole southern humans who always suck. Failing to show…

Half of the wot is a description of clothing, so that could translate well to a visual medium. The way magic was weaved could also translate visually. It falls to the special but ordinary folk trope but could have political intrigue built in. Think about the game of houses, Illinois, and the black/white towers. The…

Good grief, did you REALLY just list “Legend of the Seeker” as an example of a “standout epic fantasy” show? Excuse me while I throw up in my mouth a bit.

The main problem is they took a series of books, fracked with the story and turned it into a sexually driven YA show. If they adapted the actual books none of that bs would exist and you would get an acceptable fantasy series.

The problem with this show is that the time spane between when it’s set and the fall of civilisation is wildly erratic. For set dressing we see a well rusted container ship that could be a couple of thousand years old, an abandoned car that can’t be more than 50 years old, a swing set that couldn’t be more than a few…

That’s assuming that the people involved understand the genre or its history. Basically, showbiz people want to make money, and if something is popular, they’re either going to imitate it, or adapt something that seems close enough to it. Jordan’s locked up in legal shenanigans, Goodkind’s been done, and Eddings is…

Too many conventionally attractive actors in it. I know, I know, it shouldn’t matter what the actors look like, but the fact of the matter is that it does. Don’t hire “pretty” people. That is the real message of the current crop of tv hits. Most of the shows have people that, when attractive, are non-conventionally…