The Shannara Chronicles

After 4 episodes: The visuals are unexpectedly beautiful but it suffers quite a lot from typical teen drama bs. But the fantasy world seemes interesting enough for me to keep watching.

Wasn't expecting to last through the first episode of this show after reading the reviews on Metacritic. To my surprise I watched episode 1 all the way through and would’ve continued on if I could. The elf that talked like a Southern California valley-boy at the start was slightly annoying until he couldn't talk any more ;-) Odd choice of phraseology in parts, but overall pretty good. As soon as episode 5 rolls around, it digresses into something you'd expect from MTV or CW. By the 5th episode, it reaches the point where you could watch the remaining episodes out of order and it wouldn’t really matter. It’s similar in tone, production value, and content to the British series Merlin — if you enjoyed that one in it’s entirety, welcome to heaven. Think Game of Thrones for kindergarteners ;-)