By Jonathan Klotz
| Published
Star Trek fans may feel like they’re being tortured with new franchise entries that barely resemble the utopian future created by Gene Roddenberry, and Star Wars fans can’t agree on what the franchise should be, but there’s another long-suffering fandom that is still waiting for an adaptation to do the series justice. Discworld, the long-running fantasy satire from the mind of author Terry Pratchett, has had a few decent television movies, including Going Postal and Hogfather, but the biggest attempt at bringing the bizarre world carried by elephants on the back of a giant turtle to life was so misguided, fans pretend it doesn’t even exist. The Watch, a BBC series about the guardsmen of Discworld’s largest city, Ankh-Morpork, finally escaped developmental hell in 2021, but it missed the point entirely of what many consider to be Pratchett’s best series of books.
The Watch Offends Discworld Fans
The Watch attempted to adapt Guards! Guards!, the eighth Discworld and the first about Samuel Vimes, the drunken head of the Ankh-Morpork City Watch, by default really, and his motley crew that attempts to keep the peace. Richard Dormer, who played Ser Beric Dondarrion of the Brotherhood Without Banners in Game of Thrones, was an inspired casting choice as Vimes, but that’s one of only two good decisions made in bringing the series to life. The second was turning the magical city into more of a steampunk setting, which not only helped keep it within the BBC’s budget but should have helped ground the more fantastical and whimsical parts of Discworld’s largest city into something digestible for those who had never read the novels.
For those who did read the Discworld novels, The Watch was as immediately offensive as Section 31 was to Star Trek fans. Beloved fan favorite characters were completely altered, from the little things, like the werewolf Angua remaining in control of her “affliction,” to those that fundamentally changed the very point of the original novel. Lady Sybil, the eventual Mrs. Vimes, is supposed to be a wealthy noblewoman with a sense of class and dignity, but in the series, she’s a vigilante, and the only thing the two characters share is a name.
Perhaps the only change that’s remotely defensible is the change from fantasy to steampunk, which brings with it coats, microphones, and a higher level of technology alongside outright punk rock fashion, but oddly, that part works. The Watch could have been a straight fantasy series, but the twist to the Discworld setting does seem like something Pratchett, who loved to zig when readers expected a zag, would pull off himself. It’s a shame that the series would also miss the entire point of the original satire.
A Series That Gets Everything Wrong
Terry Pratchett was a brilliant satirist who used his novels to poke fun at everything in modern life, from cell phones and insurance, but also used Vimes in Guards! Guards!, to give the most succinct and accurate treatise on economics. The Watch turns a fan favorite part of the entire Discworld series, the “Vimes Economic Theory of Boots,” in which Vimes explains that the rich can pay for boots that last longer, while the poor constantly pay to replace their shoddy boots and spend more over the long run, into a putdown. It’s the exact opposite of how Pratchett intended and is the single, most egregious example of what the series fundamentally misunderstands about Discworld.
It’s no wonder that The Watch, despite being the most ambitious Discworld project to date, was a complete failure when it aired. Instead of being the creative, CSI-inspired adaptation that Terry Pratchett originally envisioned, it’s a soulless mess that can only claim to be “inspired by the characters of Terry Pratchett” instead of selling itself as a straight adaptation. The only thing worse than no great adaptation is one that’s so bad that millions of fans around the world decide to pretend it was never made in the first place.
If you want to see how not to adapt a beloved series of novels, The Watch is available on Amazon Prime Video for $19.99, but you’re better off taking that money and buying Guards! Guards!, Men at Arms, and Thud!, all three of which are still among the best Discworld novels ever printed.