10 TV Shows That So Badly Wanted To Be Game Of Thrones
7. The Shannara Chronicles
The answer to the question "what if you crossed Game Of Thrones with Smallville?", The Shannara Chronicles was MTV's attempt to cash-in on the post-Thrones craze for epic fantasy, only with a series targetted more directly at their youthful teen demographic.
Like George R.R. Martin's unfinished magnum opus, The Shannara Chronicles was based on an established best-selling fantasy book series that itself owed a debt to The Lord Of The Rings. In this case it was Terry Brooks's Shannara series, which provides ample material for adaptation given that there have been 40 novels and stories in the series since 1977.
The show followed Game Of Thrones' white walkers and children of the forest in being an archetypal fantasy story about the return of dark forces once kept at bay by elfin magic. In the hands of Smallville creators Alfred Gough and Miles Millar, however, that story instead became the lens for a soapy love triangle of beautiful young people.
Like See, Shannara is technically set in a post-apocalyptic future. And, like See, this is basically irrelevant as the world has just taken on all the trappings of a medieval fantasy setting anyway. Otherwise, The Shannara Chronicles rarely rose above the formulaic, with Pan's Labyrinth's Ivana Baquero as a fiesty bisexual thief the only one of the leads anywhere near as engaging as an Arya Stark.
The series was dropped in 2017 after just two seasons.