BBC’s The Watch, or, how to piss on the grave of one of the most beloved fantasy authors of all time

Originally written by u/EquivalentInflation on Reddit and reprinted here with permission.

Adaptations of beloved works are often approached very, very cautiously. From Peter Johnson to Ong, there have been a whole host of bad adaptations, leaving fans of any book terrified when news of an adaptation is announced. But one man had a brilliant idea. What if, the issue with all those previous adaptations was that they ruined too little? What if, the answer was to take all the most beloved plots and characters of 41 separate books, mash them up into a disgusting homunculus, shove some steampunk up its ass, and ruin all of them together? Oh, and also disrespect the beloved dead author whose expressed wishes you’re ignoring, and kick out his daughter.

Welcome to The Watch.

Disclaimer: At certain points during this write-up, you may think, “Gee, this whole thing just seems like a massive ad to get people to read Terry Pratchett’s work”. It is. You should read it. (Come on. Read it. You’ll like it.) However, it’s also a dive into some truly excellent drama and a massive amount of untold history that I’ve done my best to dredge up and collect in one place. Hopefully, even if you’re already aware of this, there’ll be some new parts of it in here for you.

A lot of this information has been kept as secret as the BBC could, or was scattered around. I tried to go a bit further than most of the news sources I found, and create a whole picture of why this became such a travesty. This is a topic I’m very passionate about, and the write-up can get a tad long, so I’ve included a TL;DR in bold at the end of each section in case you don’t really care that much about the details, or get lost.

Our story begins… and a man’s story ends

Who is Terry Pratchett?

(If you’re asking this question, refer to the disclaimer above.)

Terry Pratchett is one of the most successful and beloved fantasy(ish) authors in the business. His website here has a dive into his life. The part that’s most important to this write-up is his career as a writer, specifically, the Discworld series. Starting in 1983 with The Color of Magic, Pratchett would go on to write a staggering 41 books in the Discworld series. Think of it almost like the MCU: there are many stories, some of which cross over, all existing in the same shared universe. These varied wildly; with one being about a turtle god, and the next being an in-depth look at sexism in the military, while a third focused on the perils of having dwarves in your condom factory. Despite the varying topics, Sir Terry’s trademark wry humor and satire were always present.

One of the most popular sub-series is the eight City Watch books. It focuses on the Ankh Morpork Night’s Watch, headed up by Sam Vimes, with a wide supporting cast. They were the underdog cops in a city where some crime was legal. Vimes was one of Pratchett’s most popular characters, an everyman who rose from being an impoverished drunk to the most respected and feared hand of justice in the world. It’s a series full of discussion and satire on politics, monarchy, racism, sexism, and justice, which also has genuinely loveable characters in hilarious situations.

Pratchett was also just a remarkably good person. He remained down to earth, living a modest lifestyle with his family even as he gained fame and money. His daughter Rhianna remembers him missing deadlines and work just so that he could take her out to explore the countryside or tell her stories. He was ecstatic at receiving a knighthood, so much so that he forged his own sword out of a meteorite, and hid it afterward, leaving it missing to this day. A lot of his ideas came from D&D campaigns he’d run for kids while volunteering at the local library. And that’s all setting aside the major donations he made to different charities. All of that combined meant that in addition to people being fans of his work, they were fans of him as a person. He’s been called a “British National Treasure”, and his fame has spread far past his homeland.

TL;DR: Pratchett was an overall good dude, as well as a great writer. His books revolved around a shared universe, satirizing basically everything. The relevant group of books are a satire of police in a city where some crime is legal. It was also notably critical towards police, calling out bigotry, corruption, and excessive use of force.

The Watch gets adapted

Pratchett was always very protective of his work (going so far as to insist that, on his death, his computer and notes be pulverized by a steamroller so that no one could ever use them without his permission). He was heavily against any kind of adaptation, and stated that, unlike his friend Neil Gaiman, he didn’t think any adaptation of his work would ever happen. Aside from all the issues making an adaption in the first place, Pratchett has a very specific brand of humor that can be hard to turn into TV or movies. There were a few made-for-TV movies of variable quality back in the 90s and early 2000s, but never anything big. Pratchett even had this to say about an adaption of Mort:

“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 problem 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.

“Whereupon, I’m happy to say, they were told to keep on with the medication and come back in a hundred years.”

For those wondering, the personification of Death is the main character and is the focus of the entire plot. Removing Death from the movie would be like removing the One Ring from Lord of the Rings.

That’s why fans were so enthusiastic when in 2012, Pratchett announced there’d be a TV show based on the Watch, with him working closely on the show. It was billed as “Pratchett-style CSI”, a comedic look at crimefighting in a city that had legalized crime. It was going to be on the BBC, it was going to be big budget, he and his daughter were writing for it, it was going to be great. Emphasis on the was.

TL;DR: Pratchett usually was opposed to making adaptations, so when he announced he’d be working on one, it was a big deal, and people were excited.

GNU Terry Pratchett

In 2015, after years of struggle and pain, Sir Terry Pratchett passed away due to Alzheimer’s at age 66. His Twitter account sent out a final goodbye, having him meet his oldest running character, Death.

AT LAST, SIR TERRY, WE MUST WALK TOGETHER

Terry took Death’s arm and followed him through the doors and on to the black desert under the endless night.

The End.

Fans worldwide reacted with grief, sending tributes of their own. A number of famous figures, such as David Cameron paid their respects, along with notable writers like Neil Gaiman, Ursula Le Guinn, and George RR Martin. An elaborate graffiti mural went up to honor his work; Valve and Frontier Elements added elements to their games named after him. Reddit even added an HTTP header of “X-Clacks-Overhead: GNU Terry Pratchett”. It references one of Pratchett’s most famous quotes, that “a man is not dead so long as his name is spoken”, by making sure that his name will constantly be repeated.

Surely, after all those emotional responses to his death, the BBC would respect what he had created, and follow a dying man’s last requests. Surely, they couldn’t be so abysmally stupid as to insult a beloved public figure in death, right?

Behind the Scenes

Production

A lot of what happened has been kept very very secret and behind closed doors. However, we can piece together some knowledge from what was made public, and from BBC employees like u/PJHart86 who made this great post.

Way back in 2011, BBC In House Production Drama signed a deal with Terry Pratchett to make the show he’d promised fans: a CSI version of Ankh Morpork, not an adaptation of his books. By the next year, they had a budget of around $3,300,000 per episode, which couldn’t have happened unless production was already well underway, and they had a solid plan. We know that they were working on scripts, and presumably had basic prep work like getting casting set, choosing where to film, etc.

In short, Pratchett’s 2015 death came at the worst possible time, since it also coincided with the head of the BBC’s drama programming leaving the job. So, a new corporate head came in, and saw an expensive show (in a time of budget cuts) whose big name and driving force was gone. Add on that there’s generally a policy of clearing out whatever shows your predecessor was prepping in order to make your own content, and the show’s fate was unfortunately clear.

Additionally, during all this, in 2015, BBC In House Production Drama got folded into BBC Studios, and BBC Studios then spun off of the larger BBC. It’s a whole mess of legalese, but the key part of the story is that they became a for-profit entity, which also had an in with the BBC for almost guaranteed airtime. This pissed off a lot of Indie creators, but that’s a drama for another time. In 2017, that entity absorbed BBC Worldwide. All of that ends up meaning that they could sell properties to bigger entities (like they did with Pratchett’s other work, Good Omens, which went to Amazon Prime).

So, by this point, in 2018, the alarm bells start going off in BBC Studios’s heads. They paid a pretty good chunk of money for the rights to the Watch, and then paid even more to start basic production (which had gone on for at least four years). u/PJHart86 theorizes that BBC Studios had signed a 10 year deal with Pratchett, which would seem to fit with most deals in the industry. If they didn’t do anything with it, then they take a massive loss, and lose the rights in three years. However, if they managed to make it, not only would they recoup some losses, but they’d get to keep the rights for longer. But unlike Good Omens, nobody else wanted to buy and produce it for them. They had to do that themselves… which meant they needed a much lower budget. That’s the reason why they filmed in South Africa, and thus felt the need to completely change the geography of the city. It’s also why they stripped down so many of the fantasy elements (CGI is expensive), and killed off a major character in the first episode because the effects cost too much.

And if you look at the BBC Drama Commissioning page, you’ll see phrases that spelled doom for the adaptation. Phrases like

We have found that it is the risky and original pieces that have become our most iconic shows.

‘Talkability’ is an important quality of BBC One drama. This could be achieved by an imaginative reinterpretation such as Gentleman Jack.

Classic titles adapted with a modern eye, like A Christmas Carol, A Suitable Boy or Dracula, can make a splash.

That’s not a great sign.

So, BBC got Simon Allen (remember that name, we’ll talk more about him later) to completely scrap everything that had already been done, and to create something brand-spankin’-new. It would later come to light that in the process of this, Rhianna Pratchett and everyone else Sir Terry had picked were forced out, and given absolutely no voice in the show.

TL;DR: Due to jumbling around and major changes in the BBC, Pratchett made a deal with BBC Studios, but they never ended up making it. When they realized they were close to losing the rights, they rushed out a show with a slashed budget, which planned to deliberately change the source material.

Everything’s got a story in it. Change the story, change the world.
Everyone has seen a bad adaptation or two in their time. This… this takes the cake. The weird thing about it is… it’s a fairly decent show on its own. If they had just made their own show, and changed the names of the characters, it probably would have been pretty OK. As it is though, the show is hot garbage. The best review to sum it up is

I found it amazing that they somehow simultaneously got nothing about the books right, while also being so close that I couldn’t even attempt to pretend it was something completely different.

One of the things that kept fans hoping, and which made the pain so much worse is that Pratchett’s narrative style is in many ways perfect for an adaptation. He famously hated continuity, so much so that he wrote an entire book just so that he could use it as an excuse for fans. He often would change minor elements of characters or how the world worked because it would make a better story. So an adaptation could manage to change a lot, and still be very very good if it just held onto the same spirit and energy as the books.

Spoiler alert: it didn’t.

Casting

Let me be very clear, right now, since some people have tried to hijack criticism of the show as an excuse for bigotry: Pratchett was an outspoken proponent of equality, who included all kinds of different people in his work. If you think he’d be mad about someone being black, or would somehow want to exclude trans people, you’re thicker than a troll in a desert. Go ahead and fuck right off.

Now, there’s already plenty of debate online about race/gender-swapping older characters, but this case was a bit different. When it was announced that the casting would be more diverse, changing several roles to women or people of color, fans were… confused. Terry Pratchett was well known for having remarkable diversity throughout his work, with a number of protagonists being queer, POC, women, etc. It’s like if someone said “I’m adapting Oscar Wilde’s work, but I’m going to add homoeroticism” or “I’m adapting Tolkien, but I’m going to add some twelve page Elven songs about fucking forests or whatever”. Rather than using all the incredible characters that existed, Simon Allen wanted to rewrite completely different ones.

You can see most of them here. To put it politely: the casting seemed designed to make headlines rather than make meaningful, respectful characters, especially since many of those characters were then given reduced roles, or became stereotypes.

Perhaps nothing exemplifies this better than Rosie Palm and the seamstresses guild. In the books, they’re sex workers, who are treated with genuine respect and are shown to be intelligent women who take part in the political workings of the city. They have full autonomy over their own bodies and are confident in their own sexuality. In the show… they’re not there. Shocker. But trust me guys, they super duper respect women. Or, the fact that they were filming in Africa, but somehow the extras and background characters tend to mostly be white. That takes effort.

Characters

Let’s run through a few of the major changes to characters in the show (and part of what got fans so pissed about them). I could write a full essay on any of these, but I’ve tried to keep it short (after writing and deleting multiple full essays). If you don’t want to bother reading, you can skip to the TL;DR at the end.

Carcer: Carcer was changed from being a vicious serial killer into Vimes’ betrayed adoptive brother. The whole point of Carcer was that he was supposed to be a truly, utterly, irredeemable monster. He’s a psychopath, who stabbed an unarmed man to death for fun. Carcer had no reason to be taken alive, and Vimes is tempted to kill him at several points… but resists, and takes him in for trial, proving what a good man he is. Pratchett’s point was that it’s far easier to spare a misguided best friend than to spare someone truly awful and irredeemable. The show decided to fully ignore that point, and make Carcer far more sympathetic, and Vimes’s adoptive brother.

Sybil: Duchess of Ankh Morpork, wealthiest woman in the city, wife of Sam Vimes, skilled negotiator and diplomat, protector of goblins and dragons. At least, in the books. Pratchett wanted to make Sybil a rebuke of every sexist trope for a detective’s love interest. He hammers home the idea that she’s not conventionally attractive (she’s heavyset and older than Vimes), that she chooses to romance him, that she’s socially and financially far above him, and that she has her own passions and skills outside of him. And then the show made her young, hot, and basically Vimes 2.0 (only less skilled, because you can’t have her overshadowing the male protagonist). Perhaps the best example of this is her “weapon”, a tiny dragon she squeezes to use as a flamethrower. Hilarious, right? Except, in the book Sybil made it clear that this is an inhumane and dangerous practice, and threatens to kill anyone who does it.

Cheery: This is one that truly pisses off fans. In short, one of Pratchett’s most well-known and well-written social critiques comes from Cheery’s struggle to be recognized as a woman. Dwarven society is hypothetically equal: women can do anything men do. The issue is, they can only do what men do, meaning that all dwarves must dress and act as men. Cheery was a woman, who faced a great deal of hate and backlash for living openly as such. Part of this was a parody of Tolkien’s dwarves, but it was also a statement on the new nature of sexism, how women could only be viewed as successful if they took on traditionally “male” qualities. Additionally, a number of trans fans found inspiration in Cheery, for obvious reasons. Crucially, Cheery’s birth sex was never actually revealed. The Watch treat her as a woman because that’s how she asks to be treated, so that’s good enough for them, and they make it clear they’ll sic a werewolf on anyone who bothers her. The show tries to tackle this, but makes massive changes to it, and cuts out most of what actually made it special and meaningful. Also, Cheery is a dwarf, which in the TV show are specifically referenced being short, but also they are physically identical to a human? It’s weird.

Death: Death is Pratchett’s longest-running and most iconic character, present from the first few pages of his very first novel, to his last message. Death is kind. Death is patient. Death is wry and sardonic. Death is meaningful. Death is not a motherfucking idiot who bumbles around and randomly starts to rap, because why the fuck would you do that! WHY!?!? This is the mark of an insane mind!!!!!

Vetinari: This is a more minor gripe. Essentially, Vetinari is the most stereotypically evil-looking guy possible, with the job description of “Tyrant”. He wears all black, has a pointy black goatee, he was trained as an assassin, you get the picture. The joke, of course, is that he’s actually a perfectly reasonable and efficient leader, albeit with a singular, irrational hatred of mimes. You can see what the show did, and while Anna Chancellor is an excellent actor, she doesn’t really come off as “obviously evil and menacing”. It also cut out all of Vetinari’s brilliance and manipulation, which meant that even if you wanted to see a woman in the role, it was now boring and meaningless. There was also a scene where a poster of Lord Vetinari was shown with his very male book description, which made it even more confusing.

Cut Me Own Throat Dibbler: Another minor gripe, but this one was truly infuriating for a lot of people. In short, Dibbler in the books is a shameless grifter and scammer. He rips people off, but is generally harmless and hard-working, and you almost want to see him succeed. The show then said “fuck that” and had Dibbler running a gang and selling drugs to kids.

Detritus: Remember earlier how they killed off a major character because his CGI cost too much? Yeah, this is him. Detritus was a fan favorite character, a massive piece of living stone who acted as the Watch’s muscle and confused drill sergeant. The first episode shows him dying… after being shot by crossbows. Wood and metal crossbow bolts killed a person made of living granite. Despite the fact that he can tank bullets like it’s a minor inconvenience. It’s so fucking stupid.

Angua: She’s a werewolf. A big part of her character is the fear of what she could become, and her caution, to the point where she’s a vegetarian in human form, and avoids killing at all costs. TV Angua kills small animals for fun.

TL;DR: Pratchett was very good at subverting or parodying tropes, and the show just turned his characters into the same tropes he mocked, removing what made them good. Many of the choices were criticized (often correctly) as being performative. They didn’t genuinely give a shit about making Sybil a powerful female character, they wanted the splash of “fixing” something that wasn’t broken.

The Plot (or lack thereof)

Hoo boy. Again, I could write a book on everything that went wrong, but I’m pretty sure half of you are nodding off already, so I’m gonna keep this brief.

The show took elements from several different books. As one of the executive producers said:

what was very clear from the early part of development was that none of the books individually lend themselves to an eight-part series … so we had to do a sort of pick-and-mix of the best bits across the range of books and invent our own series, invent our own world.

Excuse me while I go scream profanities into a pillow.

The issue with this is pretty obvious: each book is meant to be able to mostly stand alone. They have recurring characters, with their own progression, but the major plot points are all self-contained. So when you take the time travel book, and you take the dragon book, and you take the dwarf book, and you shove them all in a blender, what comes out is an unappetizing grey sludge.

I’m not going to bother summarizing the entire plot (partly because I physically can’t make myself watch the full show), but it was… all over the place. They jumped from drama to mystery to comedy without much to actually ground them. There’s jumping around to alternate universes, magic swords, drag queens singing at assassins, but none of it really does all that much. As you may have guessed, it also continues to change things for absolutely no reason. Major character traits, plot points, elements of the world, all of them different, none of them meaningful.

Then there’s just the writing. It’s just… it’s bad. For example, Detritus’s death was set up to be a big plot point, seeking revenge for the fallen brother who they’d known for years… and then he barely gets brought up, and they brush off his death five seconds later. But then when the plot needs it, it suddenly becomes emotional and meaningful again.

I will give them credit for pulling off the impossible, and making a role where Matt Berry plays a talking sword not funny. Given that the man can manage to make people piss their pants laughing by reading a decades-old letter, it’s a Herculean feat for them to make him boring.

The vibes are off

I’ll admit, this is a bit hard to put into words. What made Pratchett so great wasn’t just his characters or his worldbuilding, it was that his books believed in things. They had messages, they had morals, and they had lessons for life. Neil Gaiman, one of Pratchett’s closest friends described him as someone who was constantly angry. Not that he was yelling or screaming, but that he had a deep, abiding rage when he looked at the injustices and faults of the world, and that rage is clearly present in his writing. The show failed to capture even a single sliver of that.

It’s important to note that Pratchett wrote a lot of the Watch books responding to police in media, which would often blindly praise cops. His take was heavily critical towards a lot of police policies, and created a story where the cops became respected and admired, because they’d earned it through being genuinely good, dedicated people. So, as you can imagine for a show coming out in early 2021… it had the capacity to make a lot of different groups very mad, but it also had the chance to make a real statement. In the end, rather than being a show that captured the moment, or made any important social point, it just turned into the same old “renegade cop who doesn’t go by the book”, the same trope Pratchett had fought against.

On a slightly lighter note, the entire design was just all over the place. They hopped from steampunk to futuristic to medieval, all in a sandy desert-ish area. None of it even remotely resembles Pratchett’s medieval fantasy/early industrial age setting. It’s telling that they advertised it as “cyberpunk”, despite clearly not knowing what that word meant, and not actually making it cyberpunk.

Let’s take a moment to talk about Simon Allen

Allen is the show’s writer and executive producer, who was placed in charge of pretty much everything. He’s responsible for the entire show turning out how it did (which he says as a point of pride, and others use as an insult). To be frank, it feels like Allen resents Pratchett. In interviews, he was very clear that this work was only inspired by Pratchett, and spent the bulk of his time talking about what story he wanted to tell. It almost seems like was handed an adaptation, but he wanted to make his own story, and so he just chopped up the existing narrative and rearranged it how he liked. Imagine if someone got hired to make a Luke Skywalker movie, then had it be about him crashing on a medieval planet, trading out his lightsaber for a sword, and having to duel orcs and goblins to get back to space.

Adapted or stolen?

As has been mentioned, the show tried to do its own thing, labeling it as “inspired by the works of Terry Pratchett”. The issue is, they don’t actually stick to that. There’ll be a scene where character directly quote from a book, or make obscure references, then go in a completely different direction. It’s a weird paradox where it ties itself inextricably to Pratchett, but also tries to distance itself from him as much as possible. In the end, this was their fatal flaw. They made a show fans would hate, which relied too much on the original material for new fans to get half the quotes or references.

TL;DR: The adaptation changed a number of things, often for no reason, or just for the sake of changing them. It feels like Simon Allen wanted to make a completely different story, but needed to have the Pratchett names in there so that he could get the funding for it. It butchers and disrespects nearly everything Pratchett wrote and stood for.

Oh, don’t blame yourself, Mr. Allen. I’m sure others will do that for you.
To say that the show wasn’t received well is an understatement. Most fans were chased off when the first trailer or the promo photos dropped, and anyone who stuck around to actually watch the show quickly became infuriated. It managed to get a small number of fans (most of whom had never read the books), but it was stuck in a limbo: Too low of quality to build its own fanbase from scratch, nowhere near faithful enough to tap into the existing fanbase.

The most concrete example of its failure I can give is the fact that it has still never been streamed or put on TV in the UK. Ever. Given that selling American shows to the UK BBC is a core part of BBC Studios’s business model, especially with such an iconic British series, it’s hard to believe that was by choice, meaning that the BBC there just won’t air it. Most of this backlash and hate came from the US, where Pratchett fans are far smaller in numbers. Trying to air this in Pratchett’s homeland, where he has the most fans would be suicide.

Edit: Looks like I was mistaken when I wrote this, it did air on the BBC in the UK at one point, and is unavailable now. Thanks to u/armcie for correcting me.

The Critics

Rotten Tomatoes has a 53% for critics, 40% for the audience, while IMDB has it at 5.5 out of 10 stars. It was panned by critics like Variety, the Hollywood Reporter, Telegraph, and many, many others.

Some of my favorite quotes from different reviews:

We truly live in the darkest timeline

Designed to give you an aneurism

Disappointment actualized into a TV Show

In some way, I have to blame the British as a whole

Some big names speak out

Rhianna Pratchett publicly stated before it came out that

Look, I think it’s fairly obvious that The Watch shares no DNA with my father’s Watch. This is neither criticism nor support. It is what it is.

When promo photos came out, she pointedly tweeted an old interview with Ursula Le Guin, where Le Guin talks about how an adaptation of her work was butchered.

In reference to the show, Neil Gaiman commented that

It’s not Batman if he’s now a news reporter in a yellow trenchcoat with a pet bat.

Less politely, noted fantasy writer Aliette de Bodard stated that

I feel someone took my teenage years and just repeatedly trampled them while setting them on fire

Rhianna Pratchett has since thrown more shade at them, making an announcement that she’d be working with Narrativa to create

truly authentic … prestige adaptations that remain absolutely faithful to [Pratchett’s] original, unique genius

A man’s not dead while his name is still spoken
Let’s set aside the controversy though. Let’s set aside the quality and reviews. The thing that truly pissed off fans was far simpler, and almost flew under the radar. It was this Instagram post. A nice message from Simon Allen, the show’s writer and executive producer, thanking everyone who was involved. So, what’s the issue? Terry and Rhianna Pratchett are never mentioned. Not once. There’s no mention of the books, even the fact that it is an adaptation. He goes so far as to specifically thank the “amazing women who were there at the very start”, and leaves Rhianna out of it, despite her being one of the only reasons the show was even made.

Keep in mind that while making that post, his Instagram bio read “Creator of the Watch”. Not “BBC’s the Watch” or “the Watch show”. “Creator of the Watch”.

How could this get any worse you ask? Well, check out the title of this section. “A man’s not dead while his name is still spoken” is one of Pratchett’s most iconic and famous lines. His books frequently pushed the idea that repeating the names of the dead honored them and kept them alive. It’s why a number of websites, including Reddit, run a program so that Terry Pratchett’s name is repeated. So Simon Allen deliberately refusing to include his name, when he remembered to shout out the casting agency is… well, it’s a choice.

Rhianna Pratchett swiftly replied, tweeting

This is the showrunner of The Watch, failing to thank MY FATHER. This should tell you everything you need to know.

Neil Gaiman backed her up, pointing out that in addition to, y’know, writing the fucking books, Terry had been involved with the show until his death.

Simon Allen had to turn off comments for the post, because it quickly became swamped with angry fans. While he never made any public statement, the fact that he didn’t take two seconds to go “whoopsie”, and edit the post to include Pratchett’s name says quite a bit.

Conclusion

In the end, the show bombed. It certainly made BBC Studios enough to recoup part of their losses, but it didn’t become the new Game of Thrones they were hoping it could be. While never officially announced, it’s been made very clear that there is absolutely no chance of a season 2. The attitude of BBC Studios seems to be trying to sweep it all under the rug, and pretending it all never happened.

Fans are still pissed, and this has mostly soured hopes for any kind of future adaptation. If you go onto r/discworld or ask any fans, you’ll see just how vehemently this was hated.

On a slightly happier note, Rhianna Pratchett has been hard at work adapting the Amazing Maurice, one of her father’s books. Turns out, actually respecting the original source material and putting in hard work actually creates a quality product, and early reviews are positive.

I’m not sure how to end this, so I figure there’s no better way to do it than with a few appropriate quotes from the man himself. Feel free to add your own favorite quotes in the comments.

The trouble with having an open mind, of course, is that people will insist on coming along and trying to put things in it.

They say a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, but it’s not one-half so bad as a lot of ignorance.

If cats looked like frogs we’d realize what nasty, cruel little bastards they are. Style. That’s what people remember.

Fantasy is an exercise bicycle for the mind. It might not take you anywhere, but it tones up the muscles that can. Of course, I could be wrong.

GNU Sir Terry Pratchett