POLL: End Game Opinion of the Series

[patrick8729]

Hey,   Assuming you didn't see The Time Traveler's Wife since posting, it is an fascinating concept,  but the movie is mostly a well done romantic drama.  I did like it although the time travel concept was subsumed by the characters personal interaction, and that's not a bad thing.  Very well acted.

[airyie]

^still haven't seen it, but that is the first good review I've seen for it in a while.
I'm going to stop by the 7-11 later and see if they have a re-packaged version for a cheeper price.

[HairyDresden]

I loved both the books and the TV series. I saw the TV series first before realizing they were based on characters from books.  When I discovered the books, I was a little taken back by the differences, but then I ended up enjoying the different story lines.  I think I'd have been more upset if they tried to make each book into an episode or base a season on one book (like they did with True Blood). I liked that they did something different and it worked.  I am still so bummed it was not renewed though.  I really, really loved that show...it made my Sunday night!

[Khouri]

I love the books so much...so I was really disappointed with the series. When you read the books you start to get a feel for what Harry would look like...his attitude....and his general comportment. You also get a feel for how Karrin Murphy would look...and her general attitude and comportment. You even get a feel for Bob...and how his skull would look and talk. Then along comes the series...and everything has changed. I recognize that things can be better fleshed out in a book....but come on! Everyone...especially Murphy...just didn't ring true.
I'm afraid that's what happens when you let TV executives get hold of a script and make changes. If I had my way....Jim Butcher would have been executive producer of the series...answering to no one....and if his idea of what the series should look like doesn't float...then so be it. But I just got the sense that someone who hadn't read the series...or didn't care...had the final word on the project....and seriously dropped the ball.
Maybe they should try an "IT"-type mini-series for one of the books...and see what they can do with that.

As a reader from over the pond I can only agree with your sentiments, It seems to me that's what "Hollywood " does on a regular basis,Take a perfectly good story and screw it over with what some unknown bunch of scriptwriters think would be most palatable to the general audience. For instance the Hockey stick (lame), The 4 x 4 replacing the beloved Beetle (don't tell me youv'e run out of aircooled VDubs), Bob (was the actor someone's out of work brother).

If your going to make a TV series at least try and stay true to "some" of the important stuff in the books otherwise what's the point.

I love Jims work and always will but the TV series is a goner and it's better for that.

[Darkling]

I love Jims work and always will but the TV series is a goner and it's better for that.

There are a lot of us here who did and do like the show.   Realistically there are certain aspects of the books that simply cannot translate well on TV and I feel at least with Harry Dresden that was very much the character of the books.

[MitchellTF]

I was torn between decent, and great. I gotta say, the series was enjoyable, and there were parts that didn't quite match the books. But a lot of the changes were understandable, a lot of the hatred seems overblown.

And, honestly? Ghost-Bob was pretty awesome. He was played very well, too. Heck, if a new series was made, I'd want Bob to be done like that again.

 When I read the books, the images of the characters I see are those from the TV Show. Even if the personalities are different.

[Darkling]

And, honestly? Ghost-Bob was pretty awesome. He was played very well, too. Heck, if a new series was made, I'd want Bob to be done like that again.

I agree.   Terrence Mann as Bob / Hrothbert of Bainbridge was probably one of the best things about the show.  I was very disappointed we didn't get to learn more about his backstory.

 

[bkwyrm]

I agree.   Terrence Mann as Bob / Hrothbert of Bainbridge was probably one of the best things about the show.  I was very disappointed we didn't get to learn more about his backstory.

 

I liked Terence Mann as Bob also, but his story should still have been Bob's, air elemental, spirit of intellect, etc. .
That lost love thing was a mistake.

The Dresden Files is still on my hard drive (Relax I bought from iTunes when the series was still running. That's when I finally admitted to myself that I was an die-hard fan of Harry's.) because I just can't bring myself to delete it not because I thought it was good.
If I had to characterize the brief season it would be as an enormous missed opportunity and a bitter disappointment.
If they thought so little of the series Jim created why did they bother to buy it and can Jim get the rights back so he can try again?

[Darkling]

I liked Terence Mann as Bob also, but his story should still have been Bob's, air elemental, spirit of intellect, etc. .
That lost love thing was a mistake.

I have to disagree. (Warning: the following is only opinion.  I am not starting a ghost vs. Spirit of intellect thing. I am just explaining my personal taste in the matter.)  I feel it added to the character.  Go into the spoiler section for the books and do a search for threads about free will.  There are long, long, long debates about Bob of the show and free will.   All these overly philosophical answers to explain away how he is able to make choices and yet does not have free will simply because he's bound by an enchanted skull. That's loss of Freedom NOT Free will.    It's not semantics, philosophically speaking it's important and there is a difference.   With these debates still raging about the books can you imagine what would have happened if you had a character like Bob making choices and then claimed he had no free will on the show?  You'd have to spend like forty minutes of an episode just trying to explain that to the audience and most still won't get it.  Most readers still don't get it.    I could hear The Nostalgia Critic screaming in the back of my mind the catch phrase 'Start making sense!'

The fact is the spirit of intellect thing doesn't make sense to many people.  Have you tried to survey how many people, who read the books after seeing the show, were disappointed Bob of the books wasn't Hrothbert of Bainbridge?  I have.  The number is kind of high.

The fact is spirits of intellect aren't that interesting to me.   Part of the show's Bob's appeal was his mysterious past.  His angst.   The fact that he actually was a human soul and had sympathetic qualities because I don't really care for the ghosts of The Dresden Files novels. I love the books, just not the book ghosts.  As a person who has studied parapsychology I find the psychic echo version of ghosts really boring.  Now human consciousness living on after death and able to make contact with this plain of being, that's interesting.   

And I've got a soft spot for snarky and sardonic ghosts.  Hrothbert of Bainbridge, Captain Daniel Gregg (The ghost and Mrs. Muir), Sir Simon de Canterville (The Canterville Ghost).  These are fun ghosts.   Bob of the show was fun.  He was an actual person.   

The horny air spirit whose back story is never even properly questioned by our hero in the novels has started to bore me because no ne in the books acknowledges his mystery.  He was funny at first with his pop culture and snark and lechery but when you stop and think about it, he's repetitive.   Not to mention why does Dresden never ask what his original personality was like before he adjusted himself to the personalities of his owners?  You'd think this is the sort of thing Harry would have wanted to know ...years ago.
         
I'm sorry if this offends anyone.  Jim Butcher is a fun writer.  I like his books.  They're fun.  They're brain candy.  But the fact is if you speculate too long about the spirit of intellect version of Bob there are quite a few things you can poke holes at.

If they thought so little of the series Jim created why did they bother to buy it and can Jim get the rights back so he can try again?

They didn't think little of Jim Butcher's book series or they wouldn't have wanted to use it at all.   There were changes, most of which were very necessary.   You have to be realistic with what can or can't make sense on TV and what a TV audience will respond well toward.  Certain things seem great in a novel that just won't work on TV. 

The mystery about Hrothbert of Bainbridge's past is what kept me hooked with the show. It was something interesting that didn't exist in the books. And it didn't severely disappoint my ghost-obsessed imagination with the most boring type of echo hauntings.   You can have four vampire courts and five types of werewolves, trolls, goblins, faeries, zombie dinosaurs, skin-walkers and demons but a human soul-consciousness as a ghost doesn't exist in the books?   That disappointed me on multiple levels. That's why I'm kind of hoping things might change with the next book.

[bkwyrm]

I'm not offended, and I doubt anyone would be, I just disagree with you.
Bob, as snarky as he is in the books should have been left as is and he does have a back story spread out in the books.
When Harry released one of Bob's past personalities Bob nearly killed him (I don't have the books on hand to check but I think that's in "Dead Beat". ).
We have, in fact been getting bits and pieces through out the series and, if they bothered to check back with Jim, Bob could have been expanded as a character in the series.
He wasn't a ghost?
I doubt many would have noticed or cared about the distinction.

They didn't think little of Jim Butcher's book series or they wouldn't have wanted to use it at all.   There were changes, most of which were very necessary.   You have to be realistic with what can or can't make sense on TV and what a TV audience will respond well toward.  Certain things seem great in a novel that just won't work on TV. 

Now about what works and what doesn't.
This wasn't about what a TV audience can make sense of, they can make sense of everything from "The X-files" to "Fringe" and track the twist and turns of Walter ( Who is "grey" morally if ever a sympathetic character was.) and the seasons end of "Burn Notice" has just put Michael Weston in immediate moral peril that's been building for 3 seasons now.
Terence Mann as Bob struck me as a necessary change, that was correct even if turning him to the remaining half of a pair of star-crossed lovers wasn't.
Making changes with the Blue beetle was necessary, finance wise, these are things you do when you switch from the printed page to the screen.
Make visual what you can, drop long expository passages (Unless you can get Kate Blanchett to read them of course.), and in general map out the visual realm and your story arc so you know where you're going and why.
What we got was no story arc, looting a few of the books for points of interest (werewolves!), the awful treatment of the characters Jim created.
What we saw was a waste of money, time and talent, spent in an attempt to make something as formulaic as possible.

Like just about everyone here I watched the series come together with obsessive interest and growing alarm as I started seeing those little mis-steps on the road to the premier.
I don't think the writers lacked smarts, indeed there were enough touches that cropped up "Polka Lives!" that showed they knew the world but the blond-brunette switch followed by the dearth of information about what the episodes would include rang alarm bells.
SyFy blew this one and it had nothing to do with what a tv audience will and won't watch, they watch good tv if it catches their interest.
What they did was turn Jim's books into bad formulaic TV and if I were ever asked to give a course on what not to do with an interesting new book series you just bought for television I would use the Dresden File show as an object lesson.
With the best will in the world (They don't get money for flops and that's certainly motivating.) they gutted Jim's books and produced bad tv and it had nothing to do with what works on screen and what doesn't.

[Darkling]

I doubt many would have noticed or cared about the distinction.

Clearly you haven't seen the fan fiction archives...

Now about what works and what doesn't.
This wasn't about what a TV audience can make sense of, they can make sense of everything from "The X-files" to "Fringe" and track the twist and turns of Walter ( Who is "grey" morally if ever a sympathetic character was.) and the seasons end of "Burn Notice" has just put Michael Weston in immediate moral peril that's been building for 3 seasons now.

You're talking about the first season of a forty minute an episode urban fantasy.  The shows you're comparing to to are high budget major network productions that were long established before they added any real complexity to the storyline.  Do you remember the first season of X-files?    It's nothing like the final season.  It was two FBI agents with a week by week strange paranormal or extraterrestrial case that Dana would try to explain away.

We're talking about the first season of a weekly TV series about a wizard living in modern day Chicago as a private eye with a past of having murdered his mentor who wanted to likely use him as a weapon, meanwhile his female cop friend is having trouble adjusting to his supernatural world and is highly suspicious of everything.  When you think about it that's a lot of plot to cover in just twelve episodes.  There's simply not enough room to overly complicate Bob's back story with something that hasn't even been fully covered yet in the books thirteen years into the series.

Consider also Scifi only had the rights to the first five or six books.  If Jim Butcher had finally elaborated on Bob's back story with a clear cut explanation they would not be allowed to use it.   And the explanation has to cover: 1.  Why Harry doesn't question his lack of past.  2.  The still running headache inducing debate about free will (because the Dresdenverse definition of free will is VERY questionable that being bound by an enchanted skull suddenly destroys will. No, freedom and free will are not the same thing. They should NOT be treated like the same thing. It's highly disrespectful to real historical slavery because they were stripped of freedom as well, just their chains were physical, not magical.  Bob's shifting personality according to his owner can be viewed as the lack of free will but what about the claim that the faeries have no free will just because they can't lie?  That doesn't make sense to me.  3.  What Bob's original personality was.  The fact is once it was revealed that Bob's personality in the books was not really his own, but an adaptation of Harry's subconscious when he first met him, I lost intersted in the skull all together (so did most of the Hrothbert of Bainbridge fans).  How can anyone really care about a character whose personality is nothing more than something programmed?   And Harry doesn't stop to ask or wonder what his SLAVE'S original personality was?   That's kind of cruel when you think about it.   Without several books to try to justify it the TV audience is going to be turned off by it.   I am turned off by it.   That's why I've stopped looking forward to the skull's snarky scenes in the books.

Also I'm partial to human soul spirits.   The actual continued consciousness of an individual after death.   Other flavours of spirit bore me after a while.   They're vanilla to my rocky road ice cream.   

Terence Mann as Bob struck me as a necessary change, that was correct even if turning him to the remaining half of a pair of star-crossed lovers wasn't.

Again, clearly you haven't seen much of the Dresden Files fan fiction archives.  Even in fanfiction net you'll find more fan fictions mentioning Winifred than Mab.   When you consider how rarely Winifred was even mentioned this is pretty impressive.   Over two hundred of the three hundred Dresden Files fan fictions on fan fiction net contain the show version of Bob or have tweaked the skull version of Bob to be the ghost.   Not necessarily on this forum, but in general, you're going to find the ghost version of Bob was liked more, and not just because he was physically standing there.

You can't blame Terrence Mann's Bob being a ghost on what ended the show.  The show had high ratings (go to neilson's website archives if you don't believe me).  There were times when the show's ratings beat those of Battlestar Galatica.    Check the forum archives of syfy's own forum for the show.  There was a poll back in 2007 on who was your favourite character on the show.    Guess who beat Harry Dresden himself by about twenty five percent more votes? 

In fact, I came across a very recent interview with Terrence Mann where he was asked about Dresden Files. Apparently he's still getting fan e-mail asking him about Bob and Winifred and if there's a chance he'd ever play Bob again.   Simply do a google search.  Hrothbert of Bainbridge has more fans than the spirit of intellect ever had.   So, like it or not, people with the same views as me (and there are more of us than you may realize) really liked him as a ghost and probably would have loathed a spirit of intellect even if it was Terrence Mann.  That's not enough humanity.  There's more to humanizing a character than giving him a physical / visible body.   We're not that shallow.

  

[finnmacha]

So, I'm guessing this is no longer an issue, but I recently found TDF Season 1 on Netflix and was able to watch it in it's entirety. As a big fan of the books, all I can say is...really!?

From what I saw, there was absolutely nothing...well...Dresden about the TV series! Now, I'm not stupid. I know transitioning from written to visual medium can be dicey at best, but I was absolutely unthrilled with the series.
Call me shallow, but:

An Army Jeep?
No trenchcoat?
A hockey stick!?!?
Murphy a single mom?
Butters a college drop-out slacker? Ok, so that's just how he came off to me. I expected him to pull out a Mt Dew and a bag of Cheetos everytime he was on screen.
A magic store?

And while Paul Blackthorne has been lauded around here, for me, he was quite possibly the most un-Dresden actor they could've cast. I know everyone has a different "vision" of the characters of their favorite novels and I've always pictured Dresden in the novels as looking a bit like the author himself. Tall, lanky, a little "geeky". Blackthorne just seemed too....polished. And where was the ever present Dresden sarcasm?
I'm going to leave the "look" of the show alone as I'm sure there wasn't a huge budget and they did what they could. I'll also leave Bob alone as I get how a disembodied voice in a skull wouldn't translate well to a TV series. But, again, where was the sarcasm?

Suffice to say I was sorely dissapointed and if there's a Big Screen adaptation in the works, I hope it gets completely re-tooled.
I'm sorry if I offended anyone or hurt anyone's feelings, but, man! Really!?

[Darkling]

An Army Jeep?

If you bothered reading these forums these questions would have been answered about forty eight times by now.  

The fact is the beetle can only work in the books. When you got a six and a half foot tall actor those long takes are going to be brutal.  Besides that Beetles and Beetle parts are expensive and they would have had to slice one in half for interior shots.  

Think about it.  The Jeep is low tech.  It's old.  It serves the same exact purpose as the beetle.  Besides...  

(click to show/hide)

The Beetle doesn't exist anymore in the books either.

No trenchcoat??

I heard this was a mobility issue.  A trench coat / duster would have been difficult to move around in.

A hockey stick!?!??

Dresden is a blue collar wizard.  The idea was he would enchant whatever he could get a hold of.  Some people debated that a hockey stick is less conspicuous.   According to Jim Butcher the Hockey stick was supposed to have emotional significance for Harry but the show was canceled before they could get into that.  Apparently Harry's father used to take him to play hockey.

Murphy a single mom??

I don't recall if it was on this forum or not but I remember reading that Jim Butcher wished he had made Murphy a mother but it was too far along in the book series to do it.

Butters a college drop-out slacker? Ok, so that's just how he came off to me. I expected him to pull out a Mt Dew and a bag of Cheetos everytime he was on screen.?

That's not fair.  Butters physically of the show was exactly what was described in the books.  Or did you miss the short nerdish polka loving guy with issues bit that's all through the novels and show in regard to him?

 
A magic store?

That's a scrying crystal.  It's traditional occultist magick.   As in real folklore. They had magical practitioners and occultists on set to make sure the magick in the show was real and researched.  Every symbol on Bob's skull for example is real spirit binding symbols, mostly from the Key of Solomon (One of the oldest known Grimoires of the dark ages). If you pause your DVD on any scene in Harry's lab you can see dozens of artifacts used in real magical tradition.  The magick on the show was impressively researched.  To this day I can't find any fantasy show that even remotely made as big of an effort into it's occult research.  Remember, Nic Cage was executive producer.  He's very into the occult and he wanted accuracy in occult / New age / Hermetic tradition.  Harry has a tracking spell he uses in almost every novel, you realize.   And quartz crystals DO come up in the books.   Wow... Just Wow... The fact that a fan of the books actually complained about this AND how Butters looked goes beyond ... that just blue my mind.  As someone who has studied parapsychology the fact that THIS was something that bothered you, the extensive research into the occult, using rare and out of print real grimoires...  My headaches...   This was one of the aspects of the show they went all out for.

I can understand most of the questions but this one!??   Why was a WIZARD using a scrying crystal in a tracking spell!?!   To me that's like asking 'Why does he have a pentacle?!'

And while Paul Blackthorne has been lauded around here, for me, he was quite possibly the most un-Dresden actor they could've cast. I know everyone has a different "vision" of the characters of their favorite novels and I've always pictured Dresden in the novels as looking a bit like the author himself. Tall, lanky, a little "geeky". Blackthorne just seemed too....polished. And where was the ever present Dresden sarcasm?

It's there.  My favourite line being 'The barn door's open and the bag is seriously devoid of cats!'  That's from The Dresden Files episode Things that Go bump.  In a recent Q and A you can find on youtube Jim Butcher said he did not look like the wayhe hoped Dresden would look but he did act like him once the cameras started rolling.

[finnmacha]

If you bothered reading these forums these questions would have been answered about forty eight times by now.

 
Oh, I get that. I really do. In fact, I have read through these forums and found a lot of similar complaints and the fact of the matter is, no matter how many times someone tries to explain why certain changes were made, it doesn't change the fact that, with the exception of my Murphy complaint, the things that were changed were iconic parts of Dresden. It's kinda like saying Wolverine can be a guy with some knives, those claw thingies just don't work.

Dresden is a blue collar wizard.  The idea was he would enchant whatever he could get a hold of.  Some people debated that a hockey stick is less conspicuous.   According to Jim Butcher the Hockey stick was supposed to have emotional significance for Harry but the show was canceled before they could get into that.  Apparently Harry's father used to take him to play hockey.

I'll give ya this one. Still a damned silly looking staff and maybe it coulda been more Wizard Staff and less Magical Gun. Also, it's not like a guy carrying a walking stick draws much attention in the real world, doubt he woulda been much more conspicuous in the Dresdenverse.

That's not fair.  Butters physically of the show was exactly what was described in the books.  Or did you miss the short nerdish polka loving guy with issues bit that's all through the novels and show in regard to him?

Ok, ok, ok...maybe this was my own little hang up. 

That's a scrying crystal.  It's traditional occultist magick.   As in real folklore. They had magical practitioners and occultists on set to make sure the magick in the show was real and researched.  Every symbol on Bob's skull for example is real spirit binding symbols, mostly from the Key of Solomon (One of the oldest known Grimoires of the dark ages). If you pause your DVD on any scene in Harry's lab you can see dozens of artifacts used in real magical tradition.  The magick on the show was impressively researched.  To this day I can't find any fantasy show that even remotely made as big of an effort into it's occult research.  Remember, Nic Cage was executive producer.  He's very into the occult and he wanted accuracy in occult / New age / Hermetic tradition.  Harry has a tracking spell he uses in almost every novel, you realize.   And quartz crystals DO come up in the books.   Wow... Just Wow... The fact that a fan of the books actually complained about this AND how Butters looked goes beyond ... that just blue my mind.  As someone who has studied parapsychology the fact that THIS was something that bothered you, the extensive research into the occult, using rare and out of print real grimoires...  My headaches...   This was one of the aspects of the show they went all out for.

I can understand most of the questions but this one!??   Why was a WIZARD using a scrying crystal in a tracking spell!?!   To me that's like asking 'Why does he have a pentacle?!'

I'm not sure what this was all about, but my original question was about Harry working out of what appeared to be a Magic Store. I later learned it just looked like a store front and was his office/living space.

So, yea. I'm sorry for not perusing the forums a bit more and for beating the proverbial dead horse. In my defense, I had never had the chance to watch the show before just recently, so while everyone else's adoration/disdain had dimmed, mine was fresh. I've spent the last few days familiarizing myself with the board and, since I have absolutely zero problems with the novels, I doubt this'll be a repeat problem.

[Darkling]

I'm not sure what this was all about, but my original question was about Harry working out of what appeared to be a Magic Store. I later learned it just looked like a store front and was his office/living space.

Whoops, sorry, that was my fault.  I misread what you said. I thought you said stone.  I thought you were talking about the crystal he used in his tracking spell. And don't let me drive you off. I was in a bad mood when I replied to you.  The humidity here was getting to me.