Spoilers, sweetie.
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It takes a special kind of chutzpah to take an experimental mini-series and end it with a mostly-cliffhanger, wondering out loud if there will be a second "season" to continue the storyline. Especially when the storyline has been presumably building to a grand finale wherein the shotgun satirizing of heroic fantasy tropes will reach some sort of conclusion.
It would have been great if "Galavant" was up to the level of quality and excitement necessary to make people roar with anticipation and enthusiasm.
There's nothing particularly wrong with "Galavant," just not quite enough "right" about it to make the whole thing work. The musical numbers are entertaining (and I can very easily see picking up a copy of the soundtrack), but the story stringing them together felt more like filler, the musical tail wagging the narrative dog.
Characters were often inconsistent to the degree necessary to set up or execute the songs the writers wanted to include, and the story zigged and zagged all over the place. There were dozens of great, even brilliant, moments, but the sum felt less than the parts.
And the conclusion simply felt … wrong. If they were going to have a cliff-hanger, then fine, but after the sense that this was a distinctly limited series, there needed to be some greater sense of pay-off from the first season, rather than a bare and fairly-out-of-character railroaded cliff-hanger.
If "Galavant" makes it back for a second go (which I doubt, but I haven't been following along the ratings), I'll be there to watch it, but I'm not going to participate, let alone start, any letter-writing campaigns to make that happen.
I didn't make it to the finale. I didn't make it to the third episode. I wanted to like it. I tried to like it. I expected to like it. Didn't happen.
However, I do have to commend them for being ballsy enough to end on a cliffhanger when so many shows strive to wrap things up for the finale just in case they don't come back.
I made it through 3 episodes before I gave up. I just didn't find it that amusing and I'm not much for musicals to begin with. It really felt like a bad community theater project more than a network quality show. The evil king was the best part and he was boringly predictable.
That's funny.
Apparently the ratings were … not good.
http://blogs.wsj.com/speakeasy/2015/01/25/galavant-finale-what-we-loved-and-hated/
Which article I pretty much agree with in full.
As we started watching the finale, I thought, "Hmmm, wonder if it would be worthwhile getting the inevitable disc of the show, just to enjoy later." After that ending (which seems highly likely to be the ending), I've really no interest in doing so.
I might get a collection of the music, since a number of the songs were pretty funny.
Loved it, a great show that was not the normal dreck on broadcast american TV.
Reminded me of the old Hope/Crosby road show movies if Hope got to sing the songs as silly as he could. Actually, it was pretty much The Princess and the Pirate or Monsieur Beaucair but with more silly songs.
Plus it had Vinnie Jones being Vinnie Jones, with is always +1000 cool Internet points.
Honestly, the only things it lacked to make completely full of win were Tim Curry, Clancy Brown or Maggie Smith.
I liked it. Not loved, but liked. (Things to know about me – I love musicals, and I’m really tired of sitcoms that aren’t funny, crime procedural/soap opera crossovers, and superheroes.)
The music had it’s moments and it helped move the story along in places. I had no real issue with the casting (even the cameos). And here’s were the but comes in…
The book was weak. The strength of any musical is a balance of good music and a good book. Sometimes one is slightly better than the other, but usually to succeed you need both to be B or better. Galavant had a very weak book. Galavant ran out of things to do two episodes too early (the show was called Galavant and we saw more of the King and Garrett than we maybe should have). The Princess also ran out of things to do too early. Writing parody is much harder than it looks on the outside, especially when trying to keep that up over 8 episodes.
I’ve liked some of Dan Fogelman’s other writing work (Cars, Bolt, Tangled, even Fred Claus), but he really let me down here.
I couldn't make it past the first episode.
I'll be honest and admit I think I just don't know what's supposed to be funny anymore. The only sitcom I ever watch is The Big Bang Theory and everything I read is that it's terrible and I shouldn't find it funny. Meanwhile all the sitcoms everyone loves — Park and Recreation, Community, anything by Adam Sandler, etc. — I find boring and unfunny. Clearly I've gotten too old and out of touch with what passes for funny these days.
+Les Jenkins , try Last Man Standing. Especially if you like Tim Allen or enjoyed Home Improvement.
+Marty Shaw I keep seeing that mentioned here and there. I'll have to see if it's on Hulu+ and check it out.
+Les Jenkins There are no sitcoms on our watch list these days (except BBT, because, we, too, are terrible). And the ads for sitcoms we FF past do nothing to change our minds.