DangerousDag

The one positive thing that I can say about the show is that it looks fantastic. The sets and costume designs are sweeping, masterfully executed and period-accurate, and the cinematography is extremely well done.

All of which makes it doubly disappointing that such craftsmanship was wasted on such trashy show.

The mere concept of The Crown is terrible. No matter how often the show's producers and defenders attempt to defend their shallow, tabloid-inspired approach to their subject matter as a fictional drama rather than an attempt at a documentary, the vapid, overwrought scriptwriting makes it clear that they believe they are writing for an audience who are too stupid to be able to make that distinction.

And so, what we are left with is a show that pretends to be merely a fictional interpretation of real events, but which in reality portrays its subject matter with such a juvenile earnestness that it can only be meant to be taken as gospel. It hardly seems plausible, given how little the producers can actually know about the truth behind the events they are portraying. Either way, they are just purely dishonest.

Even to someone such as myself, who is not the biggest fan of the royal family, this show comes across as a voyeuristic, reality-show-level melodramatic portrayal of their lives, with absolutely no effort made at honesty, subtlety or nuance. The Crown makes Regency costume dramas seem like high art by comparison.

The scripts manage to be dense and glassy at the same time, where characters use entire paragraphs to expound on concepts that could be dealt with in a single sentence, but the producers clearly feel that all of the extra explication is needed in order to get their point across to their audience, whom, as I said, they clearly believe are morons. Perhaps they are right.

In most cases, I don't mind a slow-building narrative. I'm not the kind of action-hound who gets bored if there's not an explosion on screen every five minutes, and I enjoy the quiet moments of character development and the plodding pace that are often necessary to create an interesting, immersive story with a dramatic climax.

Unfortunately, this show has all of those elements except for the interesting story and dramatic climax. Instead, what begins as an intriguing, thoughtful spy drama fizzles out into nothing as its characters talk each other to death, dwelling for entire episodes on the most predictable of plot twists and ultimately satisfying neither themselves nor their audience.

This is a truly tragic example of what happens when script writers become too carried away by their own conceits, and forget that what they're writing is a story, and not just a series of character introductions. This interminable, soporific psychodrama delivers a huge array of beginnings and no endings or climaxes at all. Each time it seems to be building up to something big, that something ends up being just another pithy, needlessly verbose dialogue penned by writers who clearly think they're much smarter than they are.

What an absolute waste of top-tier acting talent.

Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time books are, at their core, an aspirational story: a high fantasy designed to lift the spirit with a tale of people and nations coming together to triumph over a seemingly-insurmountable enemy. Its appeal to its legions of fans has always been that it doesn't give ground to Ice and Fire-style nihilism and subversion. It's the kind of story that provides its audience, not just with an escape, but with hope and optimism.

At its very core, this television series is a fundamental betrayal of that story, of its author, and of the fans who could have made this show a success if they had been treated with respect by the producers. Instead, I predict that the show will be an abysmal failure.

Jordan's characters and the world they inhabit have been dragged through the mud by this interpretation. Not a single character is recognizable from the books, and what replaces them is a cast of vapid, inconsistent, hollow shells of human beings that only a narcissist could relate to.

Plot elements that have nothing to do with the books have been thrown into the show for no reason other than to sexualize it, likely in an effort to create a clone of Game of Thrones, rather than anything approaching a faithful interpretation of Jordan's work, which depicts almost no sex anywhere in the books. Characters who stand on their own in the books as heroic individuals are made into villains or bumbling buffoons in order to elevate other characters who, in a faithful interpretation, would not have needed the help.

Characters whom readers of the books came to love and admire for their courage, their innocence, their determination, their faithfulness or their sense of right have been robbed of all of those things, clearly for no reason other than to appeal to the edgy Millennial nihilism of the show's writers. Never mind that millions of Millennials, myself included, grew up enjoying the Wheel of Time books as a welcome escape from exactly that sort of stale, insipid cultural bankruptcy.

But the ultimate betrayal is the first that I mentioned, and one that encompasses all of these elements: the abandonment of the forthright, optimistic, aspirational tone and themes of Jordan's story. It seems beyond the intellectual and emotional capacity of this show's producers to create something that might be in the least bit inspiring or enriching. Instead, they seem determined to trap themselves and their audience in the cultural desert that pervades almost all of modern entertainment, a landscape devoid of heroes, optimism and inspiration, and devoted instead to edgy self-indulgence and moral agnosticism.

Wheel of Time, and its fans, deserved better.