MTV wanted its own Game of Thrones. What it got was a show about a tree.
Trailer, via MTV.
A Tree Called the Ellcrys
The Shannara Chronicles is an American fantasy drama created by Alfred Gough and Miles Millar. It adapts Terry Brooks’s The Sword of Shannara trilogy, and it ran for two seasons and 20 episodes, first airing January 5, 2016, and ending November 22, 2017.
The premise is simple enough. Demons were banished from the Four Lands into a place called the Forbidding, locked there by an ancient tree called the Ellcrys. When the Ellcrys starts dying, the lock fails. Three heroes — Wil, Amberle and Eretria — set out to protect the tree and stop the demons from returning.
That is the whole engine of season one. A tree is sick. A girl has to save it.
The show films in the Auckland Film Studios and on location elsewhere in New Zealand. That location work is not a small thing. The Four Lands look like a country you could walk across, which is more than most fantasy television of the period could manage.
Wil Ohmsford and the Unpredictable Magic
Austin Butler plays Wil Ohmsford, a young Healer. The synopsis describes him as armed with an unpredictable magic. That word, unpredictable, is doing a lot of work, and the show rarely pays it off.
Wil is the audience’s way in. He is not a chosen one in the usual sense. He is a healer who keeps getting pushed into fights he did not ask for. Butler plays him straight and a little guarded.
Manu Bennett is Allanon, the last druid. Bennett is the show’s most reliable presence. He arrives with weight and bad news, which is exactly what a druid should do.
Ivana Baquero plays Eretria, the runaway Elf. She is the show’s best argument for itself. Baquero gives Eretria a hard, watchful quality that the scripts do not always earn.
Poppy Drayton plays Amberle, the other half of the quest. The three of them — Wil, Amberle, Eretria — are the spine of season one.
The Cast Grew in Season Two
MTV greenlit a second season in April 2016. In May 2017, the show moved to Spike, now Paramount Network. Season two premiered October 11, 2017, and closed November 22, 2017.
The casting history tells its own story. In December 2014, Manu Bennett was announced as Allanon. In January 2015, Ivana Baquero, Austin Butler, Poppy Drayton, Emelia Burns and John Rhys-Davies joined.
Then season two added Malese Jow, Vanessa Morgan, Gentry White, Desmond Chiam and Caroline Chikezie as series regulars. That is a lot of new regulars for a show that had not yet proven it could hold the ones it had.
- Austin Butler as Wil Ohmsford
- Ivana Baquero as Eretria
- Manu Bennett as Allanon
- Aaron Jakubenko as Ander Elessedil
- Marcus Vanco as Bandon
- Melise as Mareth
- Vanessa Morgan as Lyria
- Gentry White as Garet Jax
Look at that list against the first season. The show kept adding pieces instead of deepening the ones it had.
Two Seasons, Two Networks
Here is the shape of the thing, laid out plainly.
| Season | Network | Premiere | Episodes | Source Book |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Season 1 | MTV | January 5, 2016 | 10 | The Elfstones of Shannara |
| Season 2 | Spike | October 11, 2017 | 10 | Original material |
Season one roughly follows The Elfstones of Shannara, the second book of the trilogy. That is a smart choice. Elfstones is the most propulsive of the three novels, and it gives the show a clear quest with a clear deadline.
Season two had no such book to lean on. It premiered on a different network, with a bigger cast and a thinner map. The show did not get better. It got busier.
On January 16, 2018, it was announced that the series had been cancelled after two seasons, and that the producers were shopping it to other networks. It was later considered officially concluded.
That is the ending. Not a finale. A shopping trip that went nowhere.
The Score Is 5.2
The published critical score for The Shannara Chronicles is 5.2/10, with a Metacritic score of 52/100. That number is fair, and it is fair for a specific reason.
The show is not bad at the things people notice first. It looks good. The New Zealand locations give it a scale that a soundstage would have killed. Bennett is good. Baquero is good. Butler is good. The Ellcrys is a genuinely strong image — a tree as a lock, a dying tree as a countdown.
What the show cannot do is decide what it is about. Season one is a quest. Season two is a scramble. The move from MTV to Spike should have been a fresh start. Instead it read as a demotion, and the show never recovered its footing.
The Four Lands are the problem. They are named, they are mapped, they are populated — and they never feel like a place with rules. Fantasy lives and dies on rules. The Ellcrys has rules. The Forbidding has rules. Everything else is vibes and sword fights.
The unpredictable magic in Wil’s hands is the clearest symptom. Unpredictable magic is a promise that the story will eventually explain itself. The Shannara Chronicles never does. It just keeps handing Wil new problems and hoping the audience stays.
What It Got Right
The casting of Manu Bennett as Allanon was the show’s single best decision. A druid needs to feel like he has been alive too long and knows too much, and Bennett plays that without effort. When he is on screen, the show has gravity. When he is not, it drifts.
Ivana Baquero’s Eretria is the second-best decision. She is not written as a love interest first, which matters. She is written as someone with her own reasons, and Baquero plays those reasons even when the script forgets them.
The New Zealand shoot is the third. Fantasy television in 2016 often looked like a backlot. This did not.
What It Got Wrong
The show never solved its central character problem. Wil is a Healer with unpredictable magic, and that is a passive setup. He reacts. He is pushed. He does not drive.
Season two’s expanded cast made this worse. Adding Malese Jow, Vanessa Morgan, Gentry White, Desmond Chiam and Caroline Chikezie as regulars meant more people to service and less time for any of them. Aaron Jakubenko’s Ander Elessedil, Marcus Vanco’s Bandon, Melise’s Mareth, Morgan’s Lyria and White’s Garet Jax all arrive with potential that the season cannot cash.
A second season on a new network is a second chance. The Shannara Chronicles spent it on expansion instead of repair.
Why 5.2 Is the Right Number
A 5.2 is not a disaster. It is the score of a show that is watchable, well-cast in places, and fundamentally unsure of itself. The Shannara Chronicles is not a failure of execution. It is a failure of nerve.
It had a trilogy of novels, a clear first-season arc, a strong lead trio and a genuinely striking central image. It had two networks willing to air it. It had 20 episodes to figure itself out.
What it did not have was a reason to exist beyond the fact that fantasy was working on television and MTV wanted in. That is not nothing. It is just not enough.
The cancellation in January 2018 was not a shock. The producers shopping the show to other networks was not a shock either. The shock would have been a third season that fixed any of this. It never came.
The Shannara Chronicles ends where it began: a tree, a quest, and a show that could not decide what it wanted to be when the tree was safe.
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