I've read some of the Pratchett books and enjoyed them, but I really couldn't care less whether the series bears any particular resemblance to the books. I'm fine letting the show be its own thing. My issues with the series have nothing to do with any departure from the books.
I like the world we've been set in here. I like the characters and for the most part I like the actors chosen to portray these characters--in some cases the actors are among the series' biggest assets. They have admirable chemistry. The production design is quite good. The absurdist tone is right up my alley, and often enough The Watch can be laugh out loud funny. At its best it can come across like a steam-punky, neo-noirish Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
The problem, unfortunately is the story and the scripts. There's a stream-of-consciousness, random, attention deficit disorder feel to the story, where it feels like not only every episode, but more or less every scene is making things up as it goes, a la pulling brainstormed ideas out of a hat, only to get rather bored with it shortly thereafter, in a way that robs the show of narrative drive, suspense, or any clear long-term goals. It's not that tasks rooted in conflicts are not completed--each episode moves forward and advances the plot in a number of ways. It's rather that there are just so many ideas here, far too many, where a few scenes later, none of them particularly seem to matter. Tons of ideas are simply dropped from episode to episode, and insofar as anything is remembered, there never seems to be any weight or import to it. It's on to the next set of ideas, most of which seem arbitrarily rooted to anything that came before, and all of which remain underdeveloped and disengaging because of this.
It's too bad. The assets are strong enough that I still enjoyed each episode to some extent. I never stopped rooting for it to succeed. This could have been a great series with a strong cult following--it's weird enough to good effect that a cult following was there for the taking. But the disconnect of the overarching plot due to the tens if not hundreds of stream of consciousness mini-plots, where an overarching plot was never very clear in the first place, tended to instead put me in a stupor where I'd forget set-ups and objectives from just a couple scenes ago. That's no way to become absorbed in a show.
I like the world we've been set in here. I like the characters and for the most part I like the actors chosen to portray these characters--in some cases the actors are among the series' biggest assets. They have admirable chemistry. The production design is quite good. The absurdist tone is right up my alley, and often enough The Watch can be laugh out loud funny. At its best it can come across like a steam-punky, neo-noirish Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
The problem, unfortunately is the story and the scripts. There's a stream-of-consciousness, random, attention deficit disorder feel to the story, where it feels like not only every episode, but more or less every scene is making things up as it goes, a la pulling brainstormed ideas out of a hat, only to get rather bored with it shortly thereafter, in a way that robs the show of narrative drive, suspense, or any clear long-term goals. It's not that tasks rooted in conflicts are not completed--each episode moves forward and advances the plot in a number of ways. It's rather that there are just so many ideas here, far too many, where a few scenes later, none of them particularly seem to matter. Tons of ideas are simply dropped from episode to episode, and insofar as anything is remembered, there never seems to be any weight or import to it. It's on to the next set of ideas, most of which seem arbitrarily rooted to anything that came before, and all of which remain underdeveloped and disengaging because of this.
It's too bad. The assets are strong enough that I still enjoyed each episode to some extent. I never stopped rooting for it to succeed. This could have been a great series with a strong cult following--it's weird enough to good effect that a cult following was there for the taking. But the disconnect of the overarching plot due to the tens if not hundreds of stream of consciousness mini-plots, where an overarching plot was never very clear in the first place, tended to instead put me in a stupor where I'd forget set-ups and objectives from just a couple scenes ago. That's no way to become absorbed in a show.