The Age of Commercialism

Simply Perfect

Awesome Movie

A lot of perfectly good film show their cards early, establish a unique premise and let the audience explore a topic at a leisurely pace, without much in terms of surprise. this film is not one of those films.

Any fan of Jim Butcher's great series had to be sad when this died. If you read the books, you'll find that they get quite complex and sprawl. You'd need to have a Lord of the Rings budget to bring them to television. This had a SyFy channel budget. So, instead, this series aimed lower. The fatal mistake early on was focusing on Dresden's role as a PI, creating a lot of "filler" type episodes. They kept the magic and "big issues" to a relative minimum until the end, by which time it was too late. It became the Rockford Files with a bit of magic. Who knows what would have happened had it continued? It didn't continue for several important reasons. First, early plots were so-so, careening from one isolated event to another with no theme, no overall arc, no real chemistry allowed to develop between the characters. There were just random episodes in the life of a PI with magic. By the time they changed course, it was too late. Try #10, on how Harry killed his Uncle. Good stuff, and true to the books. Why wasn't it #1 or 2, so people could relate to Dresden's character? Ep. 11 was great, too. It continued moving away from the mundane PI stories. Too late! Too many early episodes were hackneyed. Second, the cast was generally quite good, but Blackthorne did have limits. He seemed to personify Dresden in many respects--the humility, the bedraggled do-gooder demeanor. I get why he won the role. But he didn't have much acting range, he had 0 charisma, and when he strained, so did the show. Murphy had too little to do early on. Bob, perhaps, had too much. Overall, there is fun to be had here and I still enjoyed it, especially beginning with #10. There wasn't quite enough magic early on, though. It would've been nice if it had had more time to find its voice. I think it would have.

So after reading many of the books, I finally got around to watching this show. Sadly, it's all too obvious to me why it only lasted a season.Normally when I watch a book-to-film adaptation, I prefer they keep it as close to the books as possible, even with word-for-word conversations if possible. In this case, I was prepared to give it a lot of leeway, expecting episodes where even the events are wholly different from the books. That I would have been OK with.The problem is, the show is just nothing like the books, in any way. None of the characters are similar (including Harry himself). The feel of the show is completely different.The Harry of the books is tall, snarky, sarcastic and tough. He's a total bad-ass, who wears a big black leather duster and generally carries a .45 or whatever other handgun he has available in his pocket, while wielding a big staff that barely fits in his banged up old Beetle.In the books, Murphy is a very petite, smart-as-a-whip fireball with a softer side she doesn't like to show.As for the feel, the books are far more detective noir, with a lot of insane action thrown in, none of which is present in the show. As I said before, Harry's a bad-ass. He's far more likely to be slinging fireballs than breaking out of jail and leaving behind an illusion. Heck, he's not even *good* at illusions.I'm just left completely dumbfounded as to why they even tried to rewrite it for the show, because there's so much more going on in the books. Usually, the *reason* they don't stick too the books too much is because there's not enough action. In this case, the show actually has less action than the books. It's pretty sad.I give it a 5/10, which is pretty darn generous considering what it should have been.

This was one of the best fantasy/sci-fi shows on TV. It got steadily better over the season, and the main actors playing Dresden and Murphy were great. It tackled a wide variety of fantasy tropes while staying grounded in the Chicago setting, and the dialog was generally very well written. The hapless detective angle is a great mix with the urban magic setting in both the books and the TV show.I think there are a couple of things that doomed it. First, the series differs dramatically from the books in all sorts of ways in the characters. Even Murphy's name had to be changed (apparently for legal reasons due to the presence of an actual CPD officer named Karyn Murphy. Bob was dramatically different in character, and was represented by a visual presentation by an actor (no doubt the logic was a floating skull is hard to turn in to a good on-screen character).I saw the series first, and my enjoyment of it lead me to read the books, which I also really enjoy. If I'd hit them in the other order, it's highly likely I would have been turned off in the first few episodes by how the characters changed.Thing is, some of the changes in the show were improvements. The Morgan character was more multidimensional than the attack dog in the books. I found Bob to also be more interesting and multidimensional than the lecherous skull in the books. But Paul Blackthorne and especially Valerie Cruz did a fantastic job of presenting great characters. Sure, they differed in many significant ways, and if it had been a movie I might be more upset at the departures from the book series. But an ongoing TV series simply can't reiterate the plots and characters verbatim from the books when you're talking dozens of episodes. So it's too bad that those differences may have dragged it down.The other factor was that it simply wasn't marketed all that well by SyFy. Combine the two issues and I suspect that viewers tuned out after the first few episodes and SyFy never built up the needed numbers. It's not a crying shame on the level of Firefly, but it is a shame and a show that I really think would have benefited from renewal. As it's now readily available on DVD and Netflix instant, I'd strongly encourage people to give it a try and not base their opinion on how well it matches the books. I'd also encourage people to read the books.

I have only just discovered The Dresden Files - I had never heard of it before. Very entertaining, cleverly written and CANCELLED. I also don't understand why networks constantly air these types of show with the episodes missing or out of order. It is almost as if they are determined that they should be cancelled. What is worse - the episodes on DVD are also out of order. This was done with American Gothic too - it made nonsense of the whole thing. I was one of many petitioners who waited 10 years for it to be released on DVD only to find it was a total mess!I agree with many of the other reviewers that whenever a series comes out that is remotely intelligent it gets taken off the air. Bring back the aforementioned American Gothic and FIREFLY and all the other really good, short lived sci-fi series. There is too much dumbing-down going on. Start catering for those with more than half a brain cell and a desire for a good yarn - PLEASE!!