BBC's The Watch 'shares no DNA with Terry Pratchett's work', says daughter

Trailer has 3X thumbs down! Just removed from my watch list.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/oct/12/bbc-the-watch-shares-no-dna-with-terry-pratchett-work-daughter-rhianna

The Watch, a new series from BBC America and BBC Studios, will air in January in the US, but a trailer shared over the weekend has prompted an outpouring of criticism from fans. Describing itself as “inspired by” Pratchett’s novels about the City Watch, the new trailer for the series shows Richard Dormer as a punk-rock version of the Watch’s grizzled commander Sam Vimes, in a show that BBC America is pitching as about a band of “misfit cops as they fight to save a ramshackle city of normalised wrongness from both the past and future in a perilous quest”.

“Look, I think it’s fairly obvious that The Watch shares no DNA with my father’s Watch. This is neither criticism nor support. It is what it is,” wrote Rhianna Pratchett, a game designer and author, on Twitter.

The award-winning science fiction and fantasy author Aliette de Bodard was one of many to criticise the new trailer. De Bodard said she was “super disappointed”, and would not be watching the adaptation. “I feel someone took my teenage years and just repeatedly trampled them while setting them on fire,” she wrote on Twitter.

Neil Gaiman, who co-wrote Good Omens with Terry Pratchett and shepherded the recent adaptation as showrunner, added his voice to hers. Fans, he pointed, out, like the source material, “so if you do something else, you risk alienating the fans on a monumental scale. It’s not Batman if he’s now a news reporter in a yellow trenchcoat with a pet bat”.