Of course, since I originally described the show as the best of bad TV, there’s still a few asterisks at the end of every episode of The Shannara Chronicles. For one, the show doesn’t do the best at mixing its creatures and races: the Gnomes have tangible prosthetics that look like the hilarious off-shoot of the demonic troll from Ernest Scared Stupid (that was a compliment), while something like the Changeling is so purely CGI it wouldn’t be hard for a passerby to ask what game you’re playing while an episode was on. Both work, and neither appear in the same scenes together, which helps, but it never quite feels like they exist in the same world.
Races other than Gnomes and Elves aren’t delved into much, but that’s something stemming from the simple nascence of the show more than anything else. Still, when the writers attempt to dredge up some kind of modern through-line of minority racism (humans are segregated and hunted, Elves are pure, Gnomes are… rude), it’s not exactly at home in a show with this dearth of nuance.
But, like most guilty pleasures, The Shannara Chronicle‘s blunt delivery is satisfying, its cheesy lines endearing (“My feelings for you are what keeps me going,” Wil says to Amberle at one point; they’re making out soon after), its unabashed embrace of cliché after cliché somewhat prophetic. Of course the show with an opening scene where its heroine is quite literally stumbling through a forest, blind and smacking into trees, will be awkward and need time to grow, feel its way through unwelcome, burdensome plots to ultimately see the forest through the trees.
Will we ever make it there? I’m not sure. But who would want to? As it stands, The Shannara Chronicles has found creativity and originality, somehow, in a niche of pedestrian fantasy. The minute it shifts from that groove and attempts to battle the behemoths of its genre, it’ll get squished. Stay lowly, The Shannara Chronicles. Bathe in the muck and rip asunder the land of stupid, high-fructose TV that you currently rule over in your cool, shiny Elven palace. Stay you, stay weird. I guarantee that you’ll have at least one viewer if you do.
