I have returned from the wild and exotic city of Toronto in the far away land of Canada!
Let me tell you something, in case no one ever has before: Making a TV show is freaking hard work. The crews work six and seven days a week, and they average fourteen hour days, with one break of less than an hour for lunch. This week, I would get to the set between 7 and 9 am, stay until 8 to 10 pm at night, and then go back to my hotel room and spend another four or five hours banging away on my next book. Eat in there, somewhere. Sleep whenever it wasn't too inconvenient.
Apologies to those who had hoped to get together with me during this visit, but see above re: hours being worked.
I have now visited the new set, seen all of the principals in action, and have even seen two full episodes in early post-production drafts, and I now officially hereby retract what has, until now, been a moderately positive opinion about the upcoming series.
Because I think the show is going to kick some serious ass.
I want to watch it. Now, please. Hurry up, come on people, more show.
Some quick thoughts on the revised version of Bob: he does exactly the same thing for the story as the original Bob. He just doesn't cost an extra zillion bucks a show, and can participate a little more in what's going on in Harry's life, emotionally speaking. Terrance Mann is a freaking riot, just as snarky as you could wish, and he can flip from /scathing/ sarcasm to serious drama in the blink of a freaking eye. Highly approve.
Paul Blackthorne works himself hard on this show, and from what I can see has earned some respect from the crew and his fellow cast members. He plays an excellent Dresden--though he gets laid more than the in-books Harry, partly thanks to the show doing a lot of flipping back and forth in time. They cover quite a bit of Harry's backstory as they go through the season, from when he was a kid travelling around with his stage magician dad, to when he was taken in by Justin, to later in life, when he was a grown adult who had not yet learned of Justin's treachery. Story details have been altered, but nothing enormous, and (more importantly) none of it done capriciously or stupidly.
And Dresden gets beaten like a frickin' drum.
In the two episodes I watched and half-episode I saw filmed, he was hung by his heels from the rafters and turned into a literal human punching bag, sucker punched unconscious, tortured/interrogated three times, tasered once, shot with a crossbow twice, bashed unconscious with a table, drained of life-force twice, gave himself psychic migraines using dangerous magic twice, had his fricking /skin/ partially ripped off, abducted twice, and handcuffed/restrained twice. More, if you count the pilot.
Mmmmm. That's good sufferin'.
No wonder Paul, when asked about how he'd like to see Dresden evolve, respond with something along the lines of "Evolve? I just want to see him /survive/."
I also got to look at a bunch of the effects, which are largely running on a "less is more" philosophy that stresses subtle, cool stuff over big flashy stuff, a la X-Files.
Some of them are just awfully nifty. I also got to hear about at least one fairly high-profile guest star in the remaining episodes, but I'm not allowed to say who it is yet. SciFi probably wants to dump that one out there themselves.
Anyway, it's interesting as hell to see how all that work gets drawn together into the final product. And seeing as much as I have, I'm a GREAT DEAL more confident about how the show is going to come out.
Jim
PS--OH! I also showed the crew the "Carol of the Harry." I had originally just shown it to one person, but she got all excited over it and showed it to someone else, and pretty soon the producer, director, script supervisor, the assistant directors, some of the cast, and pretty much everyone else who was in the room at the time were crowded around my laptop watching it. Everyone was really impressed that there was already a fan video and the frickin' SHOW hadn't even come out yet. Quoth one producer, watching the video, "Good lord. I'd hire this person." A director, watching it, went "Damn, this gets ME pumped about the show. (Look around.) Hungh. Maybe I'd better go get people to make it, huh."
