BBC's The Watch is apparently Discworld in name only, because adaptations are hard.

[Makeitstop]

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

I'd been looking forward to this for roughly a decade. These are not only my favorite of the Discworld books, but also the ones that should be easiest to adapt to to TV. And with the Good Omens series being mostly faithful and enjoyable (still wish they'd kept the cold war) I had kind of let my guard down.

Well, big mistake. This show is now only "inspired by" the books. The setting, the characters, the plots, all are getting "reimagined" to the point that they have little in common with anything you'd find in the original versions. It's being described as cyberpunk and/or as having a punk rock aesthetic. And most of the characters wear the identities of their book counterparts the way Buffalo Bill wears his victims; There's some recognizable aspects there, but it is all horrifically wrong.

Apparently the source material needed to be modernized (punk rock is at the height of its popularity now, right?) and was too hard to faithfully adapt to the screen according to the show's producers. So they made something that they thought would "bring in a new audience" and compared it to the Kelvin timeline for Star Trek. Probably not a good sign that they felt the need to reassure us that the books will still exist, so nothing they do to the material can really harm it.
https://collider.com/the-watch-bbc-america-discworld-interview/

This should have been an easy win. Take a police procedural, put them in armor, sprinkle in a few simple costumes and effects for the nonhuman characters in the background, and you are most of the way there. Everything else is about being true to the characters, themes, style and concepts of the work, and if they can't do that, perhaps they are in the wrong line of work.

[Sir Will]

I don't know anything about the series besides hearing the name Discworld before but, wow, your description sounds bad and I feel for all existing fans.

[Rocketboy1313]

Guys, every Discworld adaptation has been some flavor of bad.
They are slow, or cheap looking, or too crammed with things... and they all tried to be faithful to the source material.

Let them take the material and run wild with it.
Maybe you'll get a fresh take.
People didn't know they would like Soviet Superman or Vampire Batman till they had them.
Punk rock fantasy cops sounds interesting.
If you don't want to watch it, then don't.

[Deledrius]

Guys, every Discworld adaptation has been some flavor of bad.
They are slow, or cheap looking, or too crammed with things... and they all tried to be faithful to the source material.

OTOH, this is exactly the source of the disappointment... there still isn't a single GREAT adaptation of Discworld, and this one's apparently just giving up entirely. For fans of the source material, you have to understand that being a pretty valid sadness.

It's such a rich, colorful world, it's a shame no one's stepping up to do it justice. I think most would accept that due to the nature of the work adaptations will be different (I personally think the Going Postal one comes pretty close, even if it's abridged), but it requires someone to put in the effort. It's a huge franchise, and could fuel many miniseries with a large TV/movie audience if done well. On a corporate level it seems silly to keep leaving it fractured and barely touched (or, for The Watch, nearly divested entirely of those connections). Everyone else is scrambling to haphazardly build shared universe properties as slapdash as they can, and here's one ready-made to dive into deep and provide new fans with so man opportunities to spend...

[Rocketboy1313]

OTOH, this is exactly the source of the disappointment... there still isn't a single GREAT adaptation of Discworld, and this one's apparently just giving up entirely. For fans of the source material, you have to understand that being a pretty valid sadness.

There isn't going to be one until more regular adaptations exist.
The series is a comedic deconstruction of fantasy tropes.
While that is fine in a book, where there are 10,000 fantasy novels that people can and do read.
Fantasy is not as prevalent in TV and Movies for the visual and narrative shorthand to quickly translate.
They would have to create an expectation and then break with that expectation in the same show, that is hard to do.

It is like trying to tell a joke to someone who doesn't know what any of the words mean.
Imagine "Stranger Things" in a world where all of the media they are referencing or inspired by did not exist, or only sparsely existed. People know what ET and Stephen King are, but if they didn't the show would just be a weird distorted period piece.

[Makeitstop]

Guys, every Discworld adaptation has been some flavor of bad.
They are slow, or cheap looking, or too crammed with things... and they all tried to be faithful to the source material.

Hogfather could have used more adapting, but it was still enjoyable. I really liked Going Postal as well. Color of magic was weak though.

They certainly could have benefited from a larger budget and more ambitious production to really bring the world to life, but what we got I found quite enjoyable. If only someone had made a full length series with the resources necessary to really make the world come alive on the screen. Something that could take advantage of having a central location and recurring characters to make efficient use of sets, costumes and effects. Something focused on a more mundane element in the middle of this fantasy world, keeping the main focus on the most inexpensive parts of the world, allowing them to stretch their budget a bit further so that when they need something big, flashy and expensive they can afford it.

Let them take the material and run wild with it.
Maybe you'll get a fresh take.
People didn't know they would like Soviet Superman or Vampire Batman till they had them.

If you aren't happy with a Batman adaptation you can just wait a week for the next one. We have a glut of Batman and Superman adaptations, so any one bad version is inconsequential.

Discworld on the other hand has had very few adaptations, and its taken more than a decade to get another one.

Punk rock fantasy cops sounds interesting.
If you don't want to watch it, then don't.

If they wanted to make a show about punk rock fantasy cops, that's fine with me. But make it its own thing. Set it in Frisbeeland, call it The Guard, and leave Discworld out of it.

By keeping the names and a few token details, all they are doing is taking advantage of a little bit of name recognition while making it that much harder for an actual adaptation to get made. The people listening to pitches for new projects don't care if something was faithful or not, they just hear that it has already been done.

The best case scenario is that the show is a moderate success but is completely forgotten shortly after airing. At least then it will have only a minimal impact on future adaptations. But if it is a dismal failure it will only hurt the Discworld brand and make it that much harder for anything to be done with the series.

The much scarier thought is that it could be so successful that it leads to more like it, becoming the dominant version of Discworld in the minds of the public. I doubt that it will happen. And I don't know how much of the series they have rights to or for how long, so I don't know if they could stretch this out if they wanted to. But a popular and utterly unfaithful adaptation can do far more harm then an unsuccessful one.

Look at Starship Troopers. I'm not exactly a fan of the book, but if I was I'd be rather pissed that the vast majority of the people know only a hateful adaptation that maliciously distorts and slanders the original. Despite the occasional rumor, we're probably not going to see a reboot happen anytime soon. And if it does, it will likely not be going back to the source material in any meaningful way, just more of the same but with power armor this time and sanitized a bit for greater marketability (now that I think about it, that's basically the cartoon, which is arguably the best version).

OTOH, this is exactly the source of the disappointment... there still isn't a single GREAT adaptation of Discworld, and this one's apparently just giving up entirely. For fans of the source material, you have to understand that being a pretty valid sadness.

There isn't going to be one until more regular adaptations exist.
The series is a comedic deconstruction of fantasy tropes.
While that is fine in a book, where there are 10,000 fantasy novels that people can and do read.
Fantasy is not as prevalent in TV and Movies for the visual and narrative shorthand to quickly translate.
They would have to create an expectation and then break with that expectation in the same show, that is hard to do.

It is like trying to tell a joke to someone who doesn't know what any of the words mean.
Imagine "Stranger Things" in a world where all of the media they are referencing or inspired by did not exist, or only sparsely existed. People know what ET and Stephen King are, but if they didn't the show would just be a weird distorted period piece.

You don't need to read a lot of fantasy books to enjoy Discworld. I hadn't when I started the series. I had read Narnia as a kid, Lord of the Rings as an older kid, and that was about it. Sure, there were occasional references to tropes I was unfamiliar with or which were simply outdated by the time I was reading it, but those were few and far between. The books do a good job of establishing things properly when they are important, and the stories themselves generally work without relying on an assumed knowledge of all things fantasy. And you don't need to be deeply familiar with fantasy to get a joke about trying to hit exactly 1 in a million odds in order to ensure success, or to see the humor in a world running on narrative causality.

If anything, it was the non-fantasy references which were more elusive. My knowledge of British urban legends, classic rock, and the early days of Hollywood were far more limited. But much like MST3K, Discworld works even if you aren't familiar with the very specific references. You can tell there was a joke there, you might be intrigued and want to look it up, but if not you can just keep going. It's no different than slipping in a bad pun, the worst case scenario is that you don't notice it.

In fact I'd go so far as to say it is doing a disservice to the series to label it as a mere deconstruction of fantasy. Certainly it starts out that way, but we also got cop movie and tv show tropes, a gothic horror land of classic movie monsters, fairy tales and their Disney counterparts, Shakespeare, Greek myth, Lovecraftian horror, world history, and so much more. Not to mention the constant parallels to modern life.

And even ignoring all that, fantasy is extremely popular these days. If anything, they have lots of new tropes to lampoon, and that's great. If they had said that part of adapting it was making sure that the deconstruction would include more recent trends in fantasy, with jabs at things like Game of Thrones, and the Hobbit movies, I'd have been all for it. But that isn't what we're being offered.

[ChrisTheLovableJerk]

I think Discworld is like Sandman. The only proper way to adapt it is an animated series aimed at adults. I know there were animated Discworld shows before, but I've yet to see them. And Disney wanted to adapt Mort as an animated movie, but dropped it when Bob Iger (or some high up executive) told them to 'drop the Death angle'.

[CharlesPhipps]

Vimes being punk is probably the most bizarre choice they could make.

If you want to imagine him adapted right, just get Philip Glenister, tell him to play Gene Hunt and put him up against dragons.

[Ixthos]

Guys, every Discworld adaptation has been some flavor of bad.
They are slow, or cheap looking, or too crammed with things... and they all tried to be faithful to the source material.

I don't know, I rather liked the cheap looking ones, they really matched how Discworld appeared to me, as it is after all set in a second hand set of dimensions, in an astral plane never intended to fly.

Perhaps I will like this adaption, but it seems odd they removed so many of the elements present in the original books, especially when they were integrated so well into the plot.

[Worffan101]

Guys, every Discworld adaptation has been some flavor of bad.
They are slow, or cheap looking, or too crammed with things... and they all tried to be faithful to the source material.

Let them take the material and run wild with it.
Maybe you'll get a fresh take.
People didn't know they would like Soviet Superman or Vampire Batman till they had them.
Punk rock fantasy cops sounds interesting.
If you don't want to watch it, then don't.

...I thought Hogfather was great.

I watched the trailer, and it looked like you standard boring Incoherent Postmodern Zaniness (tm). Pass.