Some day, I will master the fine art of word wrapping. but not in this post. A little over two weeks ago, The Legend of the Seeker, a television series based on the Sword of Truth series by Terry Goodkind, made its 2-hour TV debut.

If you’ve read Mr. Goodkind’s work, you were probably quite excited about the prospect of the series becoming a television show- the books’ subtleties would not have translated well in a hour-and-a-half of film. On the other hand, an entire season or two of TV, even with television’s needs for decency and tame violence, should be enough time to get the point across. It might even have had a certain element of confusion as to what exactly is going on and why, like Lost or other long story arc-based shows like to do.

However, if you haven’t read any of the Sword of Truth series, you might enjoy this show more than I did. It’s a very generic, but otherwise unremarkable fantasy story, with a lot of the basic elements that made it noteworthy as a book stripped away (or at best hidden quite well) in the first episode. As you might have guessed by now, I had high hopes for this show, and I haven’t even read all the books. Realizing that it was put together by Sam Raimi and Rob Tapert (the people behind Hercules: The Legendary Journeys and Xena: Warrior Princess, not to mention Jack of All Trades and some comic book movie about a guy in a red-and-blue jumpsuit) as I watched the opening credits only pushed them higher.

Then the show actually started. It’s got a Xena/Hercules-y feel to it, which makes sense as it was also filmed in the lush landscapes of New Zealand.

Kind of like this.

The show drops us right into the action, with a pair of women (one of which we later find to be the heroine, Kahlan, being chased by a quad, a specialized group of warriors who work in a group of fou- I mean, six armored) men. One armored guy goes down to a dagger thrown in ‘bullet time’,then another of them scores a critical hit with a longbow on one of the women (appropriately the one dressed in black, while Kahlan is dressed in white).

Awww yeah... Natural 20. Sweet.

She then tumbles off the horse, down a slight slope and lives just long enough to hand off the MacGuffin, I mean, the Book of Counted Shadows, while the bowmen sort of wait for the exposition to end. Maybe they ran out of arrows. Maybe.

"Hey, guys? I'm pretty sure I can hit them from here... Guys? Guys?"

The story stumbles along from there, placing Richard Cypher, Hero of Hope (according to the promotional materials, anyhow,) in the role of Ordinary Medieval Joe; a common woodsman who suddenly finds himself in over his head with all this magic stuff.

He's just building a bridge. Seriously. No one of import even crosses this bridge in the whole episode.

He is forced to trust the local crazy man and a woman who won’t even acknowledge that he helped save her life until forced to, and probably only with the intention of converting him to her cause. Add to that the fact that the same man who Richard (with Kahlan’s help) had apparently killed a few scenes ago comes back and kills his father, and you have pretty much every fantasy clich ever lumped together. These three strangers, Wizard, Warrior (or Paladin, depending on your view) must work together, however unwillingly, to get the MacGuffin from back the henchman of the Big Bad Evil Guy.

The Face of Evil. And probably the plot hook for the next half season or so.

Most of the more interesting character interactions have been taken away to heighten the confusion and perhaps create a sense of epic fantasy, but that’s not the point of this story. Legend of the Seeker seems written like any other ‘coming-of-age’ story, but that’s not at all what it’s about. In the book Wizard’s First Rule, Richard is a smart and savvy character, and pretty much is an adventurer in his own right. The quad, like I mentioned earlier, works together as a well-trained unit, not a bunch of goofs with matching armor attacking unarmed women (however magical) one at a time with awkward, easily dodged sword thrusts.

Perhaps most vexing of all to me is the relationship between the characters, or the lack thereof. As the two of them are very friendly in the book, the realization that Zedd has been a wizard all this time is actually more shocking than the ‘crazy old guy at the edge of the village’ being one- that guy is ALWAYS a wizard.

There was a much worse scene where he is naked in the moonlight holding a chicken over his privates. Apparently ABC has prevented this image from making its way to the Internets, because I couldn't find it for the life of me. But still, would YOU trust this man?

Richard and Kahlan will grudgingly and awkwardly fall in love, since neither of them especially likes the other; as opposed to the more believable ‘friends first’ approach that they took in the book.

Don't trust her Richard, she's a witch! And the Chicken Man is a wizard!

It really just seems like they decided to push the audience into the middle of the action instead of building something and then altering it. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but the execution, even if you were to ignore the omitted canonical details that could have been preserved, causes it to fail at what might otherwise have been an entirely new take on the genre as presented on television.

While doing research for this post, I came across this letter to the fandom by Terry Goodkind himself. I was unaware that Disney was the force behind the show. It explains some, but not all of the failings of the show, as Mr. Goodkind was ‘intimately involved’ in the writing, but I still think that there is some explaining that needs to be done. Read and judge for yourself.