Riese’s piece of…

Now I am a sucker for steampunk, so when I saw a competition for a steampunk iphone case I entered the contest (despite not owning the iphone) and the case theme looked quite interesting.

The case was based on Riese, a web series promoted by SyFy (hereafter known as scifi) so of course I looked into it.

Riese is the story of a princess, on the run after her kingdom is usurped by a cult called the sect, Riese travels across what was once her kingdom viewing the evils visited on the land by the sect.
Now, I am disappointed in Riese, I see plenty of leather brass and gears in the wardrobe, but where is the actual steampunk? I see no airships, no real steampunk innovation at all really, infact apart from the costume department everything about Riese seems better suited to a high fantasy setting, hell the story is better suited to a medival setting, part of me wonders if the choice to go steampunk was made in order to cash in on the popularity of the style.

Each of the episode is between 5 and 11 minutes, it seems odd to me that the episode spacing follows as such, not only is the duration odd but some episodes are slow and in others nothing really happens.
From the writing style, I get the distinct feeling that the story for Riese was designed to run as a movie, the web series is relatively new and needs specialist timing, you need to balance the amount of story with action and I feel Riese doesn’t get the mixture right.

Otherwise, through out the entire show we’re given a voice over explaining almost everything, a narator that doesn’t just guide us into Riese, but instead holds up a neon sign showing us that the bad guy is doing something.
There is a saying around, “Show, don’t tell” basically the idea is simple, don’t make it a point of forcing the information down my throat when you can show me the same information in a simple step.
To further that, many times during the voice-overs we were given various shots of the world map, instead of using it as a device to aid character movement, the map was displayed when there was no action on screen, the over use of the map really distracted me.

Over all, I wanted to like this series, I had high hopes for SciFi’s steampunk series, but it wasn’t right, the show isn’t steampunk and it’s not a good story for a web serial.
And then of course, we had around 90 minutes of content, that’s the same as a feature film, but very little happened, there was no logical end point at the end of the series and it just felt as if the story had barely progressed, whether the show had been planned to go anywhere from the first point by the end of the first season we should have had an “Ahh” moment where the show felt like it had a small conclusion which would lead to the overall stoey arc.

My final thought is a simple one, the concept didn’t work, it felt miss-sold and badly drawn out.
If you want a steampunk web series, avoid this one and wait for the next.

Two velociscopes out of ten.
Steampunk’d.

Okay, if I did it I would have made three main changes.
1) Ditch the steampunk, you have no content in the show that would break if used in another setting.
2) Even out your episodes out, a uniform length where something happens.
3) Learn your medium, in a regular tv series, after 3 hours we just get into the plot, with a webseries after an hour we want to already be on our way to a small resolution.
This could have worked better if handled just a little bit differently.