Kaleidoscopic XVI: More Is More, 1996, Paula Nadelstern

Back in my late high school teens, in old Ann Arbor town, one of my guilty pleasures was watching Bill Kennedy’s “…at the Movies”. He had a regular weekend show on WKBD, in Detroit. He moderated all the movies that were shown. He had a persona and wit imitative of Ed Sullivan. He usually began his show with his take on the day’s movie fare. Sometimes the movie was a “moderately good picture”, but on others it was “one of the most boring movies ever made.” I always appreciated his honesty. If the weather was nice out, I felt a little guilty about wasting a beautiful weekend afternoon in front of the TV, but if the weather was not, then I was left guilt free. Today, was another rainy day here in Saint Louis. So, this afternoon was time for some guilt-free guilty pleasure. Back in high school, there was not much in the way of choice of how one might indulge oneself in such a situation, but now we have Netflix and the Internet, so the possibilities are nearly infinite. Today’s guilty pleasure is “The Shannara Chronicles”, a 2016 MTV series, based upon the Terry Brook’s novels. It just so happens that when I wasn’t watching Kennedy, I was reading Brook’s books. At that time “Shannara” was criticized for being nothing more than a cribbed version of “The Lord of the Rings”, but I still ate it all up. So, it should come as no surprise that I have enjoyed watching the first few episode of the TV series. Although, it did take me an episode or two to warm up to the series, because so many of its troupes have been so over used in the intervening years. Still, this is someone who will watch fan fiction on YouTube, so my bar can’t be set too high. To echo Kennedy’s words, it is a “moderately good” show.