MovieChat Forums > Labyrinth (2014) Discussion > Rarely Boring Miniseries

Rarely Boring Miniseries


These days when people routinely develop 13 episode seasons that hold attention, momentum and focus on interesting characters one would expect that a mini-series that's about 4 episodes worth would do much better, especially when it's arranged as 2 tv-movies.

So, what went so terribly wrong? .

I suppose that the fist problem was many times repeated cardinal sin of adaptations - insisting on being "faithful to the book" and book is as a rule written for different kind of audience - the one that's happy with things being dragged on and is taking material in a chapter a day.

The first problem of this series however is the visual/editing structure of a soap/telenovela. Concurrently developed arcs with frequent switches at mostly arbitrary points without much of a correlation. It destroys the flow. Related is the problem that this was apparently made/edited for a lot of commercial breaks and that is very much visible. These days we expect miniseries to be made for cable with eventual burden of injecting ads being left to a broadcaster and not designed into the show.

Then, the present day arc looks highly contrived and without much in lieu of characters that would capture the audience. There was an opportunity to push the envelope of actual reincarnation, even multiple reincarnation. If we can buy the Grail story, we can certainly buy the reincarnation and it would create strong, mythical feeling that "The Cathars were right". I'd even push the envelope further and let Jessica Brown Findlay and Katie McGrath play dual roles and shine.

Either way, this thing required serious rethinking and rewriting to make it interesting for the long form visual medium. Instead it look like it was done by an amateur infatuated with Mexican telenovelas. I also remember one spoiler within the show when a character spells out that the citadel has never been breached, killing huge part of the suspense in an instant.

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