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Old Kentucky Shark posted:At another point Lord Vetinari, who is played by a woman, is depicted in campaign posters as a man, and retains the "One Man, One Vote" motto from the books: is that a joke? How do you tell? she transitioned, her vampire GF had some tips on how to look menacing. all other points stand, it really feels like a first draft of a script. they also managed to make Cheery weird with her "we come in all shapes down there comment." is she just really tall? do they think her gender is connected to her not looking like a dwarf? wtf in short: don't even watch it unless you like feeling confused, then angry, then sad. an emotional tour de force, even if unintentionally.
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Jan 3, 2021 07:39
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Eh, Ritva Valkama played a bishop in that Isabella Skorupko film set in medieval Sweden so 
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Jan 3, 2021 08:47
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Seems like this is a show which uses multiple exclamation points!!!
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Jan 3, 2021 09:09
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Dirty Frank posted:Seems like this is a show which uses multiple exclamation points!!! !!!!! !
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Jan 3, 2021 09:32
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It is bizarre. It feels like a game of telephone - in which someone was asked to read some of the books and condense them into interesting bullet-points, then someone else picked out the 'interesting' ones of those to present to their boss who merged them or tried to hammer them into standard roles in their fantasy-police-procedural plot skeleton. In doing so it looks like they've given equal import to different points and misunderstood them - the existence of the thieves and assassins guilds becomes 'Crime is legal!' and something for the protagonists to fight against and Carrot's role as a subversion of the fantasy trope of the lost scion of kingship returning to the city looks like it's being jammed into the usual 'reluctant hero' mould. He's not the protagonist in Guards! Guards! Vimes is, but Carrot lets us see how lazy and apathetic the Watch has become and stimulates Vimes into becoming better. Again a subversion of Carrot being a 'loose cannon who plays by his own rules' - given his fixation on the book of law. It's weird then to cut Nobby and Colon out as they represent the old 'don't run too fast' Watch whereas Detritus, Cheery and Angua are proactive figures, so it's strange for them to be the ones just seat warming, pigeon shooting and throwing paper-balls. Other stuff seems like it's been misunderstood and regurgitated - making CMOT Dibbler a Huggy Bear style informant would be strange enough - Dibbler normally acts as a kind of Greek Chorus, or insight into the mindset of the common man in the city 'I reckon a king would be good' or 'Hark at this newspaper fad!' - not criminal, but not being on paying taxes or sausage quality control. Making them into a crime boss just seems bizarre, as though someone heard the 'Cut' and 'Throat' part and decided to use them instead of one of the established crime bosses - Chrysoprase (too expensive for CGI?) Harry King (too much explanation?) or even inventing a new one. Maybe a Dwarf, so they could establish what a Dwarf is, and highlight how Carrot and Cheery are (supposedly) the exception to that. A review in the non-scifi/fantasy press seemed to think that 'dwarf' meant a person with dwarfism, rather than a Dwarf and concluded that Warwick Davies and Peter Dinklage must have been busy - so defining what a Dwarf is still important. Ankh-Morpork looked more like a sci-fi spaceport than a fantasy city - all the neon graffiti, fluorescent lamps and poured concrete. Stuff like the imp in the CCTV must have been very confusing to non-book readers - it's painting onto a tablet? They also manage to squander lots of strong jokes - the drunk/knurd one with the monky-cheese 'An elf called Trevor. He is not to be trusted...' - we've not been told enough about this world to know if that's a joke, or if pixies, elves, ghosts, talking dogs etc are commonplace. Is Carcer being back impossible in a world of magic, werewolves, tall dwarfs, zombies and trolls? I kept thinking - It's alright, I guess, except for that they got X wrong, and Y wrong and then I couldn't think of anything they got right. What's that? This is the drive-thru for Gimlet's All-Night Rat delicatessens? Rat and Soss please.
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Jan 3, 2021 13:47
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Old Kentucky Shark posted:At another point Lord Vetinari, who is played by a woman, is depicted in campaign posters as a man, and retains the "One Man, One Vote" motto from the books: is that a joke? How do you tell? uh campaign posters? IIRC Ankh-Morpork doesn't really do the "elections" thing
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Jan 3, 2021 14:28
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T-man posted:she transitioned, her vampire GF had some tips on how to look menacing. Also according to imdb that was the only appearance by Vetinari in the entire series, so what even was the point of that? Old Kentucky Shark fucked around with this message at 15:12 on Jan 3, 2021 |
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Jan 3, 2021 15:06
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Old Kentucky Shark posted:Also according to imdb that was the only appearance by Vetinari in the entire series, so what even was the point of that? IMDb is notoriously unreliable due to basically being Wikipedia (ie, anyone can edit it). Don’t take any faith in it.
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Jan 3, 2021 15:09
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As I read the summaries brought to us by the folks who suffered through that first episode, I'm just.....absolutely baffled by the decisions that apparently have been made. That's what's getting to me, that all these weird and terrible things were added in with purpose after some sort of deliberation. It's not like they ar making small changes that only superfans would notice, they've done apparently numerous that would make anyone who read the series even once go, "Wait, what the gently caress? NO."
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Jan 3, 2021 15:39
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I think at this point the only logical explanation possible is that this is a situation like the infamous Street Fighter movie; they had an existing script for some unrelated thing and for whatever reason of marketing decided to lazily and badly reskin it as an adaptation of another IP in an attempt to make money, despite having almost nothing except the most superficial connections to the IP it is purporting to adapt.
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Jan 3, 2021 15:44
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They should've just made another series of Defiance, it probably would've fit better than Discworld judging by the reactions.
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Jan 3, 2021 16:01
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RoboChrist 9000 posted:the only logical explanation 2020
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Jan 3, 2021 16:31
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Oh yeah, I mean, logic is optional when it comes to understanding how/why large media corporations do things even in the best of times. But this was in development before 2020, no?
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Jan 3, 2021 17:37
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Doubtful Guest posted:poured concrete *
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Jan 3, 2021 18:24
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Phenotype posted:This made me laugh harder than anything in that awful show.
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Jan 3, 2021 19:24
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It's been in development for years, Rhianna Pratchett was heavily involved for a lot of that time before coming out this year and basically saying "this is a garbage fire now, stay away." I have to guess it started out much closer to the source material before a team of executives (who needed to get back on their dried frog pills) kept stacking dumb poo poo on top of it due to misunderstood focus testing or just their own terrible instincts until this is how it ended up. I don't think I'll bother watching it... life's too short for that kind of self-harm. It's a pity it didn't end up even being good enough to lure new readers into the books. But on the other hand, there are lots of franchises, properties, and series that got big by getting watered down and having the sharp edges filed down bit by bit to appeal to the masses. A weird mess like this is maybe preferable to a mild, respectable success that leads to increased corporate attention, eventually resulting in a bowdlerized, Disney+ friendly Discworld, right? Just imagine a total misinterpretation of Granny Weatherwax's relationship with her cat You, where she's grumpy and the cat is cutesy and they go on adventures that reveal Granny really has a heart of gold and has to learn to smile again. Or like imagine a Death that is always intervening to make sure cute kids and kindly old folks aren't meeting their untimely ends from a runaway cart or whatever because that would make the audience feel bad. At least we aren't facing a bunch of that, right? I'm definitely just trying to make myself feel better, a cool Watch show would have been fun 
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Jan 3, 2021 19:25
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*being waterboarded from the juice of a thousand sour grapes* i still like cheerys actor if not her character
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Jan 3, 2021 20:32
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RoboChrist 9000 posted:I think at this point the only logical explanation possible is that this is a situation like the infamous Street Fighter movie; they had an existing script for some unrelated thing and for whatever reason of marketing decided to lazily and badly reskin it as an adaptation of another IP in an attempt to make money, despite having almost nothing except the most superficial connections to the IP it is purporting to adapt. But no, this was definitely a Discworld script. There are so many cool little things pulled straight from the books -- the traffic cameras that are just imps painting pictures, arresting the head of the Thieves Guild, the Knurd scene, Sybil's wig and dragon flamethrowers -- and the main plot looks like it's going to be an amalgamation of the dragon plot in Guards Guards mixed with Night Watch, which could actually be an interesting twist on Vimes's history and redemption if they did it right. It's like a Discworld fan (Rihanna) went through and carefully picked out interesting parts from the books (and possibly even came up with an original narrative mixing elements from a fan favorite book with the origin story of the modern Watch), and then they handed control over to a bunch of hack producers who'd never heard of Discworld, and they said "wow what is this weird nerd poo poo? let's just make it cool, right?" and smeared it all together in the dumbest way possible. It's all the more disappointing because I can definitely see the shell of a TV show in there that I've been wanting to watch for decades.
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Jan 3, 2021 23:48
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feetnotes posted:Just imagine a total misinterpretation of Granny Weatherwax's relationship with her cat You, where she's grumpy and the cat is cutesy and they go on adventures that reveal Granny really has a heart of gold and has to learn to smile again. Or like imagine a Death that is always intervening to make sure cute kids and kindly old folks aren't meeting their untimely ends from a runaway cart or whatever because that would make the audience feel bad. At least we aren't facing a bunch of that, right? The show's Death talks like he's Quoth. How badly do you have to misread the books to confuse those two?
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Jan 4, 2021 00:17
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T-man posted:*being waterboarded from the juice of a thousand sour grapes* i still like cheerys actor if not her character Yeah, they did a good job with the material. Their IMDB page is very bare, so like, I'm legit impressed that they could pour as much energy as they did into such a nothing script and construct a character out of it. I hope they get some better roles in the future because they have a ton of charisma.
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Jan 4, 2021 07:53
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feetnotes posted:It's been in development for years, Rhianna Pratchett was heavily involved for a lot of that time before coming out this year and basically saying "this is a garbage fire now, stay away." I have to guess it started out much closer to the source material before a team of executives (who needed to get back on their dried frog pills) kept stacking dumb poo poo on top of it due to misunderstood focus testing or just their own terrible instincts until this is how it ended up. oh god, a witches show with granny weatherwax as an absentminded sweet old lady who goes on adventures with her best friends and sometime keepers - the prim and uptight nanny ogg and girlboss witch in pantsuits magrit who saves the day by flawlessly wielding ancient magics
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Jan 4, 2021 10:17
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T-man posted:*being waterboarded from the juice of a thousand sour grapes* i still like cheerys actor if not her character Yeah, the actors seem fine - but they're not being given great material to work with. I could see Dormer doing a good Vimes, but he seems to have had the direction to play it like Jack Sparrow with a head injury.
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Jan 4, 2021 10:31
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I do question them making CMOT Dibbler a gangster, he's just supposed to be a shady merchant that is always jumping on trends and not being particularly picky about the meat in his sausages. I'm not even bothered by them genderflipping him, it's just annoying that the character is so different.
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Jan 4, 2021 11:10
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Phenotype posted:But no, this was definitely a Discworld script. There are so many cool little things pulled straight from the books -- the traffic cameras that are just imps painting pictures, arresting the head of the Thieves Guild, the Knurd scene, Sybil's wig and dragon flamethrowers -- and the main plot looks like it's going to be an amalgamation of the dragon plot in Guards Guards mixed with Night Watch, which could actually be an interesting twist on Vimes's history and redemption if they did it right. Yeah, I was baffled by the dissonance between bits where they seemingly lovingly preserved very subtle or specific details from the books and elsewhere where they seem to have thrown out everything but the very broadest of strokes and made massive, inexplicable changes to characters, concepts, locales, etc. The actors seem to be giving it their best, but I think it's just going to be painful to watch because I can't stop myself from trying to fit whatever it is they've made together with what I remember from the books. I expect it might work better for someone who's never read the discworld night watch books?
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Jan 4, 2021 14:46
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Quinton posted:Yeah, I was baffled by the dissonance between bits where they seemingly lovingly preserved very subtle or specific details from the books and elsewhere where they seem to have thrown out everything but the very broadest of strokes and made massive, inexplicable changes to characters, concepts, locales, etc. It just makes me wonder even more who the potential audience for this show is.
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Jan 4, 2021 19:18
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You know, I'm kind of enjoying it. Was expecting worse, have seen worse on TV, too. It's definitely at its worst when it directly references known Discworld concepts though, you can tell after some point they just wanted to make their own thing (and, arguably, did).Old Kentucky Shark posted:It just makes me wonder even more who the potential audience for this show is.
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Jan 4, 2021 23:29
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My Lovely Horse posted:You know, I'm kind of enjoying it. Was expecting worse, have seen worse on TV, too. It's definitely at its worst when it directly references known Discworld concepts though, you can tell after some point they just wanted to make their own thing (and, arguably, did). Yeah it’s just that if they wanted to make their own thing they could’ve just done that and not bastardized a series that people love
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Jan 4, 2021 23:31
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My Lovely Horse posted:You know, I'm kind of enjoying it. Was expecting worse, have seen worse on TV, too. It's definitely at its worst when it directly references known Discworld concepts though, you can tell after some point they just wanted to make their own thing (and, arguably, did). [Mitchell_and_Webb_avocado_bathroom_sketch.mp4]
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Jan 4, 2021 23:33
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Old Kentucky Shark posted:It just makes me wonder even more who the potential audience for this show is. I feel like the intended audience for this thing actually is Pratchett fans. It's just that it was intended to torment us.
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Jan 4, 2021 23:36
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This is the worst tv pilot I’ve ever watched
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Jan 5, 2021 05:22
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Is there any info on when/how this show can be watched in Canada? It's very hard to search for because I just get a bunch of things about how to watch BBC in Canada. The Watch isn't a very google friendly title...
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Jan 5, 2021 05:32
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Hedrigall posted:This is the worst tv pilot I’ve ever watched Yeah and I've seen The Hitlers! E: Oh it was called Heil Honey I'm Home!
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Jan 5, 2021 05:35
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Phenotype posted:I feel like the intended audience for this thing actually is Pratchett fans. It's just that it was intended to torment us. Honestly this feels like it started as a love letter to the fans type show and then went through four or five “we need to be more marketable” rewrites.
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Jan 5, 2021 08:21
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Stroth posted:Honestly this feels like it started as a love letter to the fans type show and then went through four or five “we need to be more marketable” rewrites. It's like if the Mort adaptation that never got of the ground somehow made it into production Terry Pratchett posted:"A production company was put together and there was US and Scandinavian and European involvement, and I wrote a couple of script drafts which went down well and everything was looking fine and then the US people said 'Hey, we've been doing market research in Power Cable, Nebraska, and other centres of culture, and the Death/skeleton bit doesn't work for us, it's a bit of a downer, we have a prarm with it, so lose the skeleton.' The rest of the consortium said, did you read the script? The Americans said: sure, we LOVE it, it's GREAT, it's HIGH CONCEPT. Just lose the Death angle, guys.
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Jan 5, 2021 09:07
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Stroth posted:Honestly this feels like it started as a love letter to the fans type show and then went through four or five “we need to be more marketable” rewrites. Not far off, except they didn't rewrite it so much as jettison everything except the character names.
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Jan 5, 2021 11:23
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I'll say some nice things first: Sybil owns. Yeah, it's not even close to book sybil, but weird vigilante schoolmarm kidnapping people to educate them is great. And her bit accidentally murdering Throat's bitches was probably the funniest moment in the first episode. Ridcully's swears being replaced by orchestral blasts is dumb, but fun. I feel like the actors are most of the way towards being great, but are held back by some utterly bizarre decisions - like Dormer's Vimes constantly twisting and gurning like he's posing for a political cartoon. But when he stands still he's pretty good! And the less nice things: Everyones talked about the dodgy script and weird design decisions, but the editing is just atrocious. I feel like I've accidentally hit 1.25x playback speed. Or I'm blacking out occasionally. Because things are jumping around all over the places. Lines are blurted out, punchlines are dropped and then BAM we're onto the next scene before the viewer can react. Vimes gives an inspirational speech that goes completely off the rails into incoherent metaphor, but the way the show does this is to have him start normal, jump around randomly in the middle of a fairly normal metaphor, then cut to another scene before coming back for the end. I feel drunk trying to follow this. Throat as mentioned is awful. Death is...blegh. They somehow filmed an extended Near Vimes Experience gag, in an episode called Near Vimes Experience, and never actually make the joke. It's bizarre how incompetent it is in places.
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Jan 5, 2021 20:22
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I like Vimes' manic energy, but I also liked Christopher Meloni in Happy! and that was essentially the same performance. Come to think of it as a show it owes a lot to Happy! and maybe Doom Patrol.
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Jan 6, 2021 10:59
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High Warlord Zog posted:It's like if the Mort adaptation that never got of the ground somehow made it into production I've seen that Pratchett quote a few times before, but this is the first time I've noticed "prarm." It's wonderful.
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Jan 6, 2021 14:16
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My Lovely Horse posted:I like Vimes' manic energy, but I also liked Christopher Meloni in Happy! and that was essentially the same performance. Come to think of it as a show it owes a lot to Happy! and maybe Doom Patrol. Trying to imagine how the showrunnners for this would portray Danny the Street and I'm leaning towards suicidal bridge with a slab addiction.
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Jan 6, 2021 19:26
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I’m trying to figure out which book a quote comes from. At one point Igor says something like “We have a saying in the old country: ‘If you don’t want the monster, you don’t pull the lever.’” I thought it was from Making Money, but I can’t find it in there. Anyone have any idea?
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Jan 7, 2021 00:31
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