MTV announced today that it's working with Jon Favreau and Smallville co-creators Al Gough and Miles Millar to develop a series based on Shannara, the bestselling fantasy series by Terry Brooks. They're serious about it, too: apparently the deal involves a straight-to-series commitment, bypassing the pilot stage altogether.
Shannara makes sense -- MTV is clearly out to duplicate the success of fellow fantasy series Game of Thrones, and, according to the Hollywood Reporter, Brooks' 25-volume saga is the world's best-selling un-adapted fantasy book series.
On the other hand, one of the reasons Shannara has thus far stayed off the screen is that it's just not all that interesting. It's not bad, but it is generic: there's not a lot that distinguishes it from its genre neighbors, and while it's consistently sold well, it lacks the innovative world-building and die-hard fan community that have propelled A Song of Ice and Fire and kept series like Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time on the bestseller list for decades. There are dozens of series that fit the Game of Thrones-for-the-tween-crowd model MTV's obviously shooting for that would make for infinitely more interesting shows.
The irony is that Brooks has written a series that would make for fantastic television -- not Shannara, but the lesser-known Landover books, which chronicle the adventures of a man who buys his very own fantasy kingdom through a luxury-goods catalog. It's a clever twist on the high fantasy genre, and the misadventures of a modern lawyer grappling with the lemon of a fairyland he's bought his way into ruling seem like a natural fit for television, and a possible antidote to fantasy-meets-modern-life misfires like *Grimm *-- or at least a more interesting option than Shannara.
