MTV Does Fantasy: Is Shannara Worth Watching?

MTV hadn't even been invented yet when Terry Brooks wrote the first Shannara novel, and who would have thought that the former Music Television would one day become the home for a series based on Brooks' fantasy novels? The fit between Brooks' elves and MTV's Jersey Shore heritage is an uneasy one, and it remains to be seen whether or not the network can forge an alliance between two very different audiences.

During the years that MTV was running through a series of re-inventions that shifted the network away from its music-based roots toward a reliance on lurid reality TV, young mainstream audiences were showing a taste for fantasy. The Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter and The Hunger Games controlled the box office, and on TV, superheroes, the supernatural and the dragons and swords of Game of Thrones gradually took over. It's no surprise, then, that MTV would want a piece of the fantasy pie, and The Shannara Chronicles is the network's hope for a seat at the table.

It's also not much of a surprise that some critics are calling Shannara, which debuted this week, derivative and lightweight. MTV has never been a network to court the nerds who love sword-and-sorcery novels -- or any novels at all, for that matter -- so it's hardly a shock that Shannara is populated by pretty young actors reading awkward dialogue, or that its fantasy is not very gritty.

Perhaps more concerning for the show than the critical ambivalence, though, is the relative quiet on social media. While tweets referring to the series peaked at a few thousand while the premiere episode was airing on Tuesday night, mentions of Shannara had fallen off to a few hundred an hour by morning.