The SciFi Channel, and how much it sucks

[tahnan]

Oh, Amber Benson. You are so pretty and so talented. And it's so not helping. (Perhaps you decided to leave your talent in reserve lest this movie corrupt it?) I think perhaps what happened to Amber Benson here is what happened to Thora Birch in the D&D movie: the director said, "You're playing royalty, so speak with formality and no emotion."

The script doesn't help. Typical of her dialogue: "Hold your tongue, Delphite!" and "What sorrows have befallen your people?"

[Edit to add: it's not her line, but perhaps the worst line of the movie was, "You are not pure. He has soiled you with his seed!"]

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It occurs to me that, as a fan of the Harry Dresden books, I should comment on the first episode of SciFi's Dresden Files. Here's what it had in common with the books:

• There's a magician/detective named Harry Dresden.


• He owns a shield bracelet. His mother died too young for him to remember her; he was raised by his stage-magician father.


• He's got a friend in the police force, Lt. Murphy, with whom he has some sort of professional relationship. He's got a semi-ancient advisor named Bob.


• There's something called the White Council.

OK, I think that about covers it.

Sure, they couldn't quite translate the plots of the books. (And how could they? The first book involves powering magic via orgies.) But here's what was missing: everything else. He has a large apartment which doubles as his office; he uses technology without a second thought; he doesn't wear a duster; he's not geeky and awkward; he drives a Jeep, for crying out loud, and not the cobbled-together Blue Beetle. No staff. Bob has a body and walks around his (incredibly large) apartment advising him. No fake Latin. He was trained in magic by his uncle, who still seems to be alive, and doesn't that just change vital parts of his history.

If you don't know the books, this may all seem like nitpicking, but it's not. These are things that make Dresden Dresden. What they've done is drained him of all the quirkiness that makes him such an interesting character, and left us with a bland, run-of-the-mill detective. Alas.

Comments

[fuldu.livejournal.com]

I don't disagree with anything you've said about the differences and I haven't read all the books yet, so this is based on imperfect knowledge, but I got the impression that the uncle thing, at least, was still the same story being told from the other end. In the books, the backstory on the uncle has come out quite thoroughly, leading up to what I would expect is a reveal that he's not quite dead and is part of the "big bad" behind the sudden uptick in horrors in Dresden's life (Before seeing the show, I had been thinking the "big bad" was Dresden's mother, but this makes sense, as well). In the show, the audience is being shown the reveal earlier on, in order to get us more involved in the backstory as it's revealed. It also starts with Dresden's good qualities and allows us to gradually learn about his bad ones, which I can imagine network officials thinking was a good idea.

Similarly, cross-reference the show's flashback to the interaction between Dresden's father and uncle, where the uncle threatens the father with an odd tap on the chest with his staff, against the books' assertion that the father didn't really die of a heart attack. Neither medium has told the whole story, but the pieces (at least that I've seen) fit together nicely into a single whole.

[lilisonna.livejournal.com]

No Blue Beetle? Whaaa.

I will continue to skip the series then. Sad; it could have been pretty nifty.

[bourbon-cowboy.livejournal.com]

I personally think it's unfair to judge The Sci Fi Channel by the scores of shitty films they show on the weekend. It's pretty clear---not only from the budgets, but from the utter carelessness they show toward niceties like scripting, as you pointed out---that Saturdays are throwaway days for the channel, and they just try to fill as much airtime as they can as econimically as possible. And so we get one-star monster movie after one-star monster movie, all filmed in some mysterious land that's equal parts Canada, New Zealand, and Romania.

Maybe I'm leaping to their defense because I actually enjoy these shitty monster movie marathons on a half-bemused, half-masochistic level. I'd be sad if they all went away.

I agree, though---it's depressing to watch Amber Benson suck.

[tahnan.livejournal.com]

Well, granted that this is also the channel that gives us BSG. (Which I've never watched, but I do hear such good things about it.) Then again, isn't it also the channel that cancelled "Farscape"?

But yes, I do appreciate that the SciFi Channel shows occasional X-Files, and that they do try with things like "Eureka" (which wasn't terrible, it just didn't quite gel with me). The channel has many redeeming features. Unfortunately, after what it just did to Amber Benson, it needs redeeming.

[thedan.livejournal.com]

And let's not forget ECW.

[greenlily.livejournal.com]

I'm prepared to give it the benefit of the doubt a while longer. It passes the Eighth Doctor Movie test: Were this not an adaptation/continuation of something I loved, I'd enjoy it on its own merits. As an adaptation/continuation, it fails.

[tahnan.livejournal.com]

Test granted; though my feeling was, taken on its own merits, I found it kind of all right, but not especially good.

[agrimony.livejournal.com]

What technology did he casually use? And the Jeep he's driving is one with the least amount of electronics possible. The beetle thing was a logistics issue. To film with the Blue Beetle, they would have had to have several cut away cars to film in, or they would have only been able to film from straight on or 90 degrees to either side. That's just the restrictions that such a small vehicle offers. The apartment was changed because, again, it's much easier to film in the studio apartment than a basement. There's apparently a trap door in the apartment, according to Jim, but I can't recall if we saw it in use.

There's no staff... yet. The commercials hint that it is to come (though, it's form will be somewhat altered). The duster also appears to be a victim of filmability (is that a word?) in that it's very hard to film a duster like he has in the books - hard on continuity, hard on getting it to come out looking good. The coat he does wear is, apparently, based in design off the coats that firefighters wear.

I suspect the making Justin his uncle part was just to strengthen the link within the frame of the television series. Dresden is still under doom by the High Council (but I don't know that they've really exposed that yet).

The Bob thing was an imperative that came down from above. No talking skulls.

It's probably also important to realize that the first episode used to be two hours long. And got cut down drastically when they got picked up as an actual series instead of just a backdoor pilot. :)

[tahnan.livejournal.com]

Logistics, understood (and yes, having a wandering Bob makes a lot more sense, TV-wise, than a talking skull; though he also became this helpful aristocrat instead of the lowbrow hedonist who has to be cajoled into helping).

All the same, the overall impression was: TV Dresden drives a pretty nice car and has a fairly spacious and well-appointed apartment, as opposed to Book Dresden, who drives a piece of crap and has a sparsely-furnished apartment he can barely manage to afford.

Technology-wise: it struck me at the end, when he was using a record player. Low-tech technology, but technology all the same. (I suppose it was a record player rather than a CD player.) Perhaps it's not too bad; it just seemed like One More Missing Thing.

[jydog1.livejournal.com]

::spoilers::

it's like it was stated above - a lot of the changes were to make filming easier, and I think ignoring his technology 'curse' falls into that - filming an apartment lit by candlelight is a pain in the ass, for instance. In the 2nd ep he was hovering around computers at least twice and not having any problems, so it doesn't look that they're going to make that an issue. I'm a fan of the books and I understand that certain allowances have to be made for TV, but what's irking me is that for a guy who's a pretty powerful wizard, TV Harry doesn't get to do very much magic at all. First ep, charged a hex and then used a trick to win. 2nd ep, a voodoo doll and a spot where he turns into either Patricia Arquette (minus the bad teeth) or Jennifer Love Hewett (without the big boobs or lack of facial expressions) to see a ghost. And, again, he wins by a (fairly obvious) trick. So, I guess I'm more annoyed by the actual writing than the changes (although Bob is waayyyyyy too morally concerned about wha Harry's doing. Bob the Skull likes Harry and all, but Bob's first concern is, well, Bob.

[lapak.livejournal.com]

The show is definitely not the book. I'm not enjoying it as much as I enjoyed the worst of the books - yet. But I don't think that most of the changes they've made were too terrible. Most of the changes that really bother me I'm giving a pass on for the moment, because if this does fit into the book continuity at all it's as a prequel series - we seem to be seeing Harry in his pre-book days, before he has realized that he needs to be lugging around a blasting rod and before he and Murphy get settled into their regular working relationship.

- The jeep (as someone mentioned above) is a reasonable swap-out for technological reasons.

- The apartment is different for no particular reason, which I don't like. The wardings around it are far too easy to bypass, but I can still put that down to the early-days status.

- Bob being a visible ghost I'm fine with; that makes it easier to have him interact with on TV, and Harry spends a lot of time talking to him. What I don't like is changing him from "I display what little emotion I have in a sarcastic, rude manner, though I like Harry well enough" to "I'm care about Harry deeply behind a facade of pseudo-British coldness." The attitude adjustment is the worst change, in my opinion.

- Murphy's father apparently being alive and not at all involved with the supernatural (as far as we know) seems to be another change-for-no-reason.

For all of that, though, I'd disagree with you: I think they got the basic premise of the books right. Harry cares about the use and misuse of power, he's the person who only people who are desperate or naive hire, and he generally walks into bad situations, barely survives, and then comes back as a wizard who knows what he's up against and the bad guy runs into trouble.

It's good enough that I'll be watching to see if it goes uphill or down from here. (And the record wasn't horribly jarring for me. He shouldn't have electricity at all, but if he's going to a record player makes sense.)

[aumshantih.livejournal.com]

Not having read the books, I've found the Dresden Files to be mildly enjoyable. We'll see how long that lasts however.