The Shannara Chronicles

Some of the romantic elements are a cheesy, and the exposition is really clunky at times, but for the most part the show is continually compelling and complex.

The series is sassier than the book.... Moving pictures require something different; messianic folderol is best served there with a little sex, and a little seltzer. That has been provided.

Give this reasonably absorbing series a little credit, even though it often seems to be merely reworking various fantasy formulas. It moves quickly and does a nice job of weaving together two story lines involving an elfin world that is threatened when a giant tree.

Sure, Shannara, which harks back to the golden age of syndicated genre fare, is a standard quest journey in which there are troll, gnomes, living trees and magic books, and characters say things like, “If Allanon is here, there are dark days ahead.” But there’s conviction in the show’s execution.

Though there’s plenty of reasons to mourn a show that’s covering up its central emptiness with so much narrative busy work, there are glimmers of hope that maybe, if the show gains some footing in its second act, it might still find itself in time.

Fantasy fare like this generally has a pretty low bar to clear and a pretty forgiving target audience, but the heavy-handed jargon, pointy elf ears and brooding self-seriousness of The Shannara Chronicles might be too much for even those fans. It doesn’t help that the characters seem to be allowed to switch from talking dour fantasy-novel heroes to bored millennials whenever the mood strikes them.

The world-building is imaginative and impressive, but the mythology is exhausting to keep up with, especially when the reward is basically just a romance-novel version of The Lord of the Rings.

The fact that the mostly inert The Shannara Chronicles is utterly familiar on both levels is a reminder that a truly vibrant fantasy story requires some sort of invention.

MTV's big swing at epic fantasy is a lot of hokey bombast, wasted on a cast of callow babes in the exotic woods. [4-17 Jan 2015, p.15]

It's not terrible but it is quite MTV-y with a soundtrack that at times feels more like any typical teen angst drama and looks that suggest of-the moment fashions (male elves sport a variation on the manbun hairstyle).

The three central characters are all blandly pretty faces who give continuously stilted line readings and never convincingly embody their respective mythic archetypes, so it's up to the old pros to pick up the slack.

Every time a character opens their mouth for some tin-eared quip that wouldn’t be out of place on a soapy drama like Gossip Girl, it knee-caps the rest of the storytelling. And wherever the dialogue isn’t weirdly contemporary, it’s frustratingly clunky.

With its quests broken up into bite-sized pieces and its carefully crafted band of adventurers, Shannara is like watching someone else play a prepackaged Dungeons & Dragons campaign, only not as much fun.