New Fantasy reality show that started on US television Thursday night, am hoping to watch later this evening, if you want to discuss it feel free to discuss it here. There’s been some preliminary stuff in the Singer Takes It All thread.
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Sad news tonight, with the announcement of the death of Mike Smith, who hosted That’s Showbusiness, as well as appearing on The Late, Late Breakfast Show.
OK, I was happily with it for about five minutes when it was being Dungeons and Dragons The Cartoon, then the Fates started speaking and I was off, then there was twenty minutes of not much in particular, then Awesome Knight Dude Who Has Taken Accent Lessons From Aiden Gillen came along and the challenge was fun enough then it was dull then the Fates came along again then it ended.
I’m going to stick with it because Andy Dehnart says it ends up being really good and I trust his judgement, but if it wanted to pick up more of a mainstream audience it probably did need to be a bit more knowing, sadly. I think the “Pirate Master” comment someone left is justified.
Interesting behind the scenes stuff here: http://www.realityblurred.com/realitytv/2014/08/quest-producers-behind-scenes/
Episode 2… certainly no better than episode one, and probably less to my taste. Episode one had some really good (though brief) sequences where the players were shown forgetting that they’re playing a game, and actually interacting authentically with the game universe. Sadly there were none in episode two. This has very clearly been made for fans of elimination reality TV games, not fantasy games. Perhaps part of the problem is that it’s too knowing and self-conscious. The games did not have cleverness and originality to them, either, and the introduction of a scoring scheme yanked us rot out of the universe. Still, apparently it gets better, and perhaps when the paladins stop training and get doing something interesting that they’ve trained for, it might improve sharply. Fingers crossed. Hey, even The Genius has had two fairly slow starts.
I’m trying. I’m really trying, and I like fantasy as much as rhe next person (who likes Game of Thrones) but I just can’t get into it at all, it’s just so po faced.
Ep 3 definitely better than ep 2, and still some excellent contestants, but the decisions made by the production team as to what sort of show they want it to be still put a ceiling on how good it can be, alas.
I wouldn’t expect to see an EverRealm attraction made real at Universal Studios next to the physical fictional Wizarding World of Harry Potter, but it’s nice to dream…
So I’ve now watched the rest of the show. Episodes 4-8: no, no, skip them. I watched these on a coach, when it was raining, when I couldn’t get to sleep, when I had listened to all my podcasts, on 120% speed. You don’t need to bother; nothing to see there.
Episodes 9-10: actually all right, especially if you (like me) like this sort of slightly-high-concept bobbins. I reckon they would work reasonably well standing alone from the rest of the series if you have watched few, or even none, of the prior episodes, but just accept that you’re coming into a nearly-finished game. I don’t think it’s a spoiler to suggest there’s quite a nice big set-piece fantasy battle at the end, in which they more or less get away from the reality show framing device and just let the action happen as if it were a big swords-and-sorcery story with no game elements, and that the winner of the show gets to play the starring role and look very convincing doing so. The contestants are by and large very likeable and are clearly having great fun throughout (especially the contestant who gets the last word in!) and it’s admirable that there still can be shows where the prize is the evidently very considerable fun of playing the game itself, though you never quite get away from the suspicion that there is less reality to the reality parts of this show than there is in, say, Storage Hunters.
There is very little wit, subtlety or surprise to the show. The star is the castle itself, which looks fantastic, but the camerawork does a poor job at telling the story and conveying the crucial incidents of the action in a few places, which is a particularly unhelpful sort of error. (True, it’s the sort of show where action replays would feel incorrect, but it’s also the sort of show where everything is recapped and you’d like to think they would make things clearer in the recap.)
There’s a part of me that would have liked it if they had realised that they were going to be one-and-done and then recut the finale to have an unhappy ending and provide a sense of finality to the game universe, but that’s not really the way it works, is it?