Sci-Fi Bulletin: Exploring the Universes of SF, Fantasy, Horror and Spy-fi!

Simon Allen is the executive producer of the new BBC America series The Watch which arrives on BBC Two next month, and he chatted about the creation of the show…

What’s so wonderful about the books is that Pratchett, as an author, is present in them, there’s a self reflexivity to it all, and they were struggling to translate that into television. They felt that when you take that meta commentary and that self awareness out, you lose what’s special about it. When you put it back in, you have something that’s driven by voice overs or narrators and that didn’t feel compatible with the demands of linear television at that time.

So I went in there thinking, ‘I think you need to build something that exists in its own right but has the tone and the feel of the books. One way of doing that is to try and do in the medium of television what the books do in the medium of literature. Let’s use television grammar – subtitles, music that seems to be self aware and so on.’

Click here to read the full interview, and for our other coverage of the series, click here.