As a perennial devotee of all things post apocalyptic, I was very excited when I first saw a commercial for Discovery Channel’s new show, The Colony. Valerie and I had discussed only a few nights before how it would be cool if there was a Man vs Wild episode where Bear Grylls shows the viewer how to survive a Zombie uprising.

For various reasons we missed the first few episodes. I finally caught the second half of an episode the other day. To say I was disappointed would be like saying The Phantom Menace was kind of bad. What I hoped to see was a decent simulation of a post apocalypse situation. What I saw instead was more like The Real World in a dirty warehouse without the beautiful people.

To be fair, I went online and watched the first episode. I thought maybe I’d just caught the show at a weak moment. I was wrong. While the introductory episode isn’t so bad at first, it soon devolves into just another reality show. The further they come along in meeting their basic survival needs the more they find time to yell at each other.

The intro claims the participants represent a cross section of American society. Yet it seems more likely to have been cast first to include complementary skill sets and second for maximum dramatic tension. A real cross section of America would include at least one or two people with no useful skills. When the Zombies rise up, what are the chances you’ll be stranded with a doctor, a nurse, a contractor, a machinist, 3 different types of engineers and a solar-panel fabricator? What are the chances you won’t be stuck with a single burger jockey or corporate executive type?

I’m not impressed that a bunch of scientists and engineers can figure out how to build a water filtration system. Seeing a group of fast food workers and retail employees put their heads together to figure out how to survive, now that would have been interesting. That would have tested the limits of creativity and human ingenuity. Instead the “experiment” of The Colony seems to be testing how long a group of strangers can work together before they start bickering.

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Topics: Television

Reading a book and then seeing the story altered on the screen can be jarring. A negative reaction is natural. Thus a segment of devoted fans will always be around to protest any alteration of a beloved novel.

What these people don’t understand is that what works in a book doesn’t always work on screen. I remember the laundry list of complaints about Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings adaptation and thinking to myself, “If they filmed EVERYTHING that took place in the books, they would have needed 6 movies instead of 3, and the end result would have put everyone to sleep.”

Changes are going to happen, no matter how many people complain on the IMDB message boards. The important question with any adaptation is, “does it retain the spirit of the source material?”

The new Legend of the Seeker TV series has yet to answer that question. The first 2 episodes, which aired last Sunday, set up the premise for the series and laid down a dangerous layer of cliché and hokum. I cringed a bit at a “my family is dead, teach me to use the force Obi-Wan” moment, and even more so at a He-Man “by the power of Greyskull” moment.

The spirit of Terry Goodkind’s Sword of Truth novels was there, but it was like playing Where’s Waldo to see it. If the show doesn’t find its voice in the next episode, I fear it may not last more than one season.

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Topics: Fantasy, Television