Official Trailer for The Watch (vaguely Discworld inspired)

[Tonguez]

BBC America has put out a trailer for its idea of The Watch

I dont like the design and dont think its faithful to Pratchett
but I might just take a watch

 

[MarkB]

Oh, wow. I don't think it's at all faithful to any established Discworld design aesthetic. It's more like a weird amalgam medieval cyberpunk.

And I LOVE it.

I'll definitely be watching this. I'm fascinated to see what they do with it.

 

[Morrus]

January -- that's some ways off yet.

It looks fun, though it doesn't feel super Pratchetty to me. I'll be watching though.

 

[Umbran]

Yeah, well... Pratchett's estate and family are not impressed, and have not been invovled with this for some years, it seems.

Terry Pratchett Estate distances itself even more from BBC America's THE WATCH

Following the publication of yet another publicity image from BBC America's The Watch , a TV series loosely "inspired by" Sir Terry Pratchet...

thewertzone.blogspot.com

 

[Morrus]

Yeah, well... Pratchett's estate and family are not impressed, and have not been invovled with this for some years, it seems.

Terry Pratchett Estate distances itself even more from BBC America's THE WATCH

Following the publication of yet another publicity image from BBC America's The Watch , a TV series loosely "inspired by" Sir Terry Pratchet...

thewertzone.blogspot.com

Hmmm.

“The Discworld Monthly published a run-down of the project here which seems to explain the root cause of the problem: the original contracts between the BBC and Sir Terry Pratchett stipulated that Sir Terry had some degree of influence and approval over the production, not Narrativia; Narrativia wasn't formally founded until after the initial contract was signed. As a result, when Sir Terry sadly left this Mortal Disc in 2015, there was no longer any kind of creative control being exercised from the book end of things and that allowed BBC American to effectively do whatever it wanted with no input from Narrativia.”

I don’t know how one-sided that version is, but I the face of it that sits really badly with me.

 

[MarkB]

Hmmm.

“The Discworld Monthly published a run-down of the project here which seems to explain the root cause of the problem: the original contracts between the BBC and Sir Terry Pratchett stipulated that Sir Terry had some degree of influence and approval over the production, not Narrativia; Narrativia wasn't formally founded until after the initial contract was signed. As a result, when Sir Terry sadly left this Mortal Disc in 2015, there was no longer any kind of creative control being exercised from the book end of things and that allowed BBC American to effectively do whatever it wanted with no input from Narrativia.”

I don’t know how one-sided that version is, but I the face of it that sits really badly with me.

Going from the quoted tweets from Rhianna Pratchett, it doesn't sound like they ever had actual control or approval over the production - what they had was consultation rights, and as is often the case in such productions, just because the producers consult with you, it doesn't mean they need to actually go along with anything you say.

The look of the production actually makes sense to me. It's not anything I'd have come up with myself, but it's well in keeping with the setting's lore. This is a world that's so far on the edge of being real that other realities bleed into it constantly. That includes other fictional realities, but most of all, and almost constantly, it is our own real, modern world and pop culture.

It makes perfect sense that a world so constantly inundated by our tropes, memes and concepts would start to model itself after ours aesthetically, creating an anarchic mix between medieval fantasy, modern reality and contemporary fiction.

 

[Umbran]

I don’t know how one-sided that version is, but I the face of it that sits really badly with me.

Yeah. And, just in general, when folks do adaptations and don't take advice from those whose job it is to really know and represent the work, the result comes up kinda crummy.

 

[Morrus]

Going from the quoted tweets from Rhianna Pratchett, it doesn't sound like they ever had actual control or approval over the production - what they had was consultation rights, and as is often the case in such productions, just because the producers consult with you, it doesn't mean they need to actually go along with anything you say.

The look of the production actually makes sense to me. It's not anything I'd have come up with myself, but it's well in keeping with the setting's lore. This is a world that's so far on the edge of being real that other realities bleed into it constantly. That includes other fictional realities, but most of all, and almost constantly, it is our own real, modern world and pop culture.

It makes perfect sense that a world so constantly inundated by our tropes, memes and concepts would start to model itself after ours aesthetically, creating an anarchic mix between medieval fantasy, modern reality and contemporary fiction.

It sounds to me like they took advantage of his death to go their own way. Hard to tell though. Rights don't come into it; I'm talking about normal human respect here. There's a lot of things I have a legal right to do which I choose not to do.

 

[MarkB]

It sounds to me like they took advantage of his death to go their own way. Hard to tell though. Rights don't come into it; I'm talking about normal human respect here. There's a lot of things I have a legal right to do which I choose not to do.

The thing is, aside from the aesthetics and some character gender-swaps, there's a lot in that trailer that looks pretty faithful to me. There's still Vimes the obstreperous policeman butting heads with the supercilious Patrician, the unexpected appearance of a dragon from Guards! Guards!, Gaspode the Wonderdog turning up for what is presumably going to be Men at Arms. In terms of the actual stories they're intending to tell, it looks like they're sticking pretty close to the novels.

I'm willing to cut the production some slack until I actually see the story, and not assume that they're screwing with it just because they can. Ultimately, while I'm sure Rhianna Pratchett and the Narrativium team are good folks and good custodians, the only person whose input I'd have been mad at the production team for ignoring is dead.