We Have Temporarily Taken Control of Your Television

The Watchmen series, probably.

 

About five years ago, the Onion AV Club reported some Good News for Geekdom. The immense commercial success of Game of Thrones had whetted television producers’ appetite for scifi and fantasy shows, particularly adaptations of existing stories, and nearly fifty such adaptations were by 2018 in various stages of development. In today’s post I wanted to check how many of these fannish dreams have become reality, and whether any of them exceeded my low expectations.

Obviously, events in the real world affected those in TV-land. The pandemic delayed or buried plans for several of the new series projected before the outbreak. Moreover, the last-season implosion of Game of Thrones damaged the franchise severely; as a result, we now have only one GOT spinoff instead of four or five. I also suspect the disaster made HBO more leery of investing money in SF genre series, the already-filmed Watchmen excepted. No matter; every large media corporation now has its own streaming service and programming, and most were happy to pick up the slack.

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Foundation, which newcomer Apple TV developed as part of its eclectic programming, bored the hell out of at least one reviewer, who found it forced and soulless. I fell asleep twenty minutes into the first episode, so I can’t comment, but I seem to recall mentioning five years ago that the writers REALLY should have started off with The Mule and filled in the backstory later.

Good Omens has gotten better notices. I made it through the first episode, despite having read the book too many times to find the story interesting any longer, and concluded that good acting (more specifically, David Tennant) would save the series if anything would.

Watchmen was the surprise jewel in the midden. The creators’ willingness to ask uncomfortable questions about race, policing, and vigilantism made it one of the best satires of the last decade - and unexpectedly prescient, given the nationwide police riots seven months later.        

Wheel of Time, to my surprise, got its adaptation (from Amazon) and has been greenlit for at least one more season. I suspect the writers’ willingness to pare down the list of dramatis personae by 98 percent or so will keep it going, if anything does. Certainly the scenery is attractive.

Y: The Last Man had the misfortune of being a series about a deadly pandemic released during a deadly pandemic, and the additional misfortune of being adapted from source material of uneven quality. (Brian Vaughan’s later work is much better.) I made it through the first episode but concluded there was no light at the end of that particular tunnel.

Two series that had not been under consideration in 2018, Andor and The Peacemaker, proved better than nearly all of the titles above, and indeed better than most of Game of Thrones. Andor, graced with thoughtful writing and appealingly lowlife characters, revived the ancient Star Wars franchise by adding moral depth to both the Imperials and the rebels. Peacemaker fulfilled what I suspect was a long-held ambition of DC Studios, which was to make something as original and successful as Marvel’s Deadpool. Doing so meant realizing that their “marquee” properties, like Batman and Wonder Woman, had been played out, and that their best characters now were recovering villains like Harley Quinn. The studio partially realized this goal with Birds of Prey and The Suicide Squad, and reached it with the latter film’s spinoff series. Peacemaker pushes the same emotional buttons as Deadpool, but I suspect it will last longer - when your main characters are lummoxes, there’s more enduring potential for comedy.