'Childhood's End' Was Not What It Should Have Been

Compressing the story was probably the cause, but the show was too shallow for the story they were attempting to tell.  I think the three movies with three different casts and three different directors would have been a much better call.  Tywin was fine as Karellen, even if the costume was a little cartoony, but the rest of the actors had too little to do.  I guess they did the best they could considering the limitations of the production, but the novel is about history and transcendence while the show wasn't at all.  The ending seemed sadder than it should have because of the short time with which humanity was living with the Overlords.  Tee vee Milo probably would have taken the opportunity to go off exploring with Karellen since that was his whole life and he was not especially invested in the last generation of man; since he was also really into his girlfriend, he probably would have convinced her to go with him at first, so they would have had reason to leave Earth; the characters in the book had completely different backgrounds and motivations.  Perhaps the book is and always was unfilmable, so what we got was the best we were ever going to get anyway.

What SyFy did is buy themselves some real excitement by tackling Childhood's End in an effort to put the science fiction back into their programming.  That's not nothing, and maybe it will lead to more and better in the future.  Or not.  I think they're part of NBC and Comcast, so...