Colon and Nobby.

ometime hopefully next year, the BBC will be airing a TV adaptation of the Discworld. Called The Watch, it's been described both as 'CSI Ankh-Morpork', a 'character-driven comedy', and as a 'punk rock thriller', so goodness knows what we're getting. It's set to be 8 episodes, and as of a few days ago, however, the core cast has been announced, and they look like this:

(Image source; text added)

The link provides brief descriptions of the characters, which go nicely with the pictures to springboard my thoughts off. (I don't think I recognise any of the actors, so this is based purely off the photos.)

Sam Vimes, Captain of The Watch, disempowered by a broken society that’s reduced his department’s jurisdiction to almost nothing.

Dormer looks suitably grizzled; I can certainly see him working. That description... pretty much sounds like Early Vimes.

The mysterious Corporal Angua who is tasked with Carrot’s training and keeping the rookie alive.

gOsH i WoNdEr WhAt ThE mYsTeRy Is. ^~ I think Corlett's face looks suitably... I don't know, otherworldly? Definitely like there's Something Up. I've seen some complaints about turning her into a glorified babysitter, but I don't think that's what's happening here: I think Angua will get her own story just as much as Carrot did in Feet of Clay when training Angua. (It also takes a lot of the kinda-creepy-in-hindsight factor out of their relationship, which the books have between the Big Beefy Superior Officer and the One (Acknowledged) Woman. Yeeeeeah.)

Constable Carrot, the idealistic new recruit, raised by dwarfs, but really a human abandoned at birth.

Yep, that's Carrot. ^^ Sad that we've lost the 'Lance Constable' title, but them's the breaks. Hugill doesn't look like he'll have the proper tapering shape for Carrot, which is a shame, but I'm sure we can cope.

So, the top row come off pretty well. The bottom row have been a bit more controversial.

The formidable Lady Sybil Ramkin, last scion of Ankh-Morpork’s nobility who’s trying to fix the city’s wrongs with her chaotic vigilantism.

It's hard to know what they mean by 'chaotic vigilantism'. Is that just the way she occasionally points dragons at things, or are they going for a Bat-Sybil plotline? I could kind of see the latter...

One complaint I've seen that kind of stands up is that Rossi is both quite pretty and quite skinny. Book!Sybil is quite deliberately not. Taking a prominently not-conventionally-attractive character and making her the opposite isn't a particularly good look.

(And yes, she's black, which is a very good move in and of itself; but we'll come back to that.)

The ingenious non-binary forensics expert Constable Cheery, ostracised by their kin and finding a new home and identity within The Watch.

It sounds like we've got major compression of Cheery's story - her entire arc in Feet of Clay is about coming out as a woman in a society that subscribes to a gender unitary. Are they actually substantially changing this (either Dwarfish society as a whole or just Cheery's story), or just tweaking the language a little? Impossible to say at this point.

As for the casting: I think Eaton-Kent would be a good call even if they were playing Cheery as 'she' rather than 'they'. This is a role where you actively want someone who can play a convincing man, and then switch to playing both a convincing woman and a convincing in-between state. (Book!Cheery does both, the latter when she's nervous about how other Dwarfs will take her gender.) Though they're probably too tall to play a Dwarf properly. ^~

The wounded, wronged Carcer Dun, out to hijack destiny itself, take control of the city and exact a terrible revenge on an unjust reality.

Oooookay. Of all the people they could have chosen to play as an apparently sympathetic villain, they picked Carcer, who is a complete sociopath who kills for sheer glee. That was a bad choice. Granted, Pratchett painted a lot of the Watch's criminals as pretty heinous, but even Dr. Cruces was less evil than Carcer. (I would have gone with Edward d'Eath, the unhinged royalist who, in fact, tried to hijack destiny and take control of the city.)

As for Adewunmi, I can't really compare him to the book character, because they've changed the book character completely. The one obvious thing is that he's black.

Which makes perfect sense on the Discworld; Pratchett specifically says that it's a world where black and white get along just fine and gang up on green. But as had to be pointed out to me, if you look at the whole casting list, what you have is:

-Four white actors, who will be playing the police.
-Two black actors, one of whom will be playing a 'chaotic vigilante', and one an unhinged sociopath.

... of course, you could make similar comments about the other characters: 'of course they cast the alcoholic failure/bloodthirsty werewolf/fish-out-of-water/short, bearded axe-wielder as black!'. But the fact that both non-white actors are playing the two characters outside the law isn't a spectacularly good look.

Of course, all of this is based on very little information, and I will most assurely watch the whole thing start to finish. ^^ There's discussion of the writing and production team at the link way up there, and I'd love to hear anyone else's thoughts.

To avoid taking up another post with it, I've also finished a sequel to my previous PPC artwork. This time the agents went into Disney's Peter Pan, and Constance made sure to check the disguises before they set off.

Then she took a moment to swap over who got which costume. She has no regrets.

(DeviantArt)

hS

I mean... they have to be in there, right? They just haven't been cast yet. Right?

I think it's clear that they're not so much playing fast and loose with the timeline as ignoring it altogether - kind of like the MCU does with Marvel Comics, or new Star Wars does with the old EU. That isn't necessarily a bad thing in this specific case: it lets them do their CSI: Ankh-Morpork thing but still have actual character change. The only ways to show Cheery's 'coming-out', or Angua and Carrot getting together, are either to directly adapt the books they happen in - or ignore the book timeline altogether. Pterry's characters mostly stayed pretty static between books, Carrot's meteoric promotions aside.

I think the reason I'm more forgiving of this than, say, monkeying with Tolkien's timeline is that the Discworld was never about history. Vimes' resurrection of the Watch doesn't spring out of the entire story of Ankh-Morpork: it arises from the right-here-and-now need for Vetinari to check the power of the Guilds. The history is there, but it's just there to flesh things out, not to provide essential motivation.

Put another way: you can have Vimes without Old Stoneface, but you can't have Aragorn without Isildur.

(Is Carcer not supposed to be pretty, btw? It's been a bit, but I figured on him having a kind of disarming face until you get close enough to see the madness in his eyes. Kind of like Teatime.)

hS