...I don’t want to write off this series completely even before it airs. There are a couple positives I see so far, after all. The “cuteness” factor is at least somewhat appealing, albeit odd and out of the blue. Many of the fan favorites from the original seasons return for this season, just…many years younger. Heck, the writing could even be good this time, even though that’s left to be determined.
Basically, what I am trying to say is: while this concept feels awkward at first and could very well miss, it could still end up being good. While Pahkitew Island and Ridonculous Race don’t recapture the writing and magic of the first few seasons in general, they still had decent enough writing to be watchable all the way through. There’s still a little potential yet for this franchise to deliver something worthwhile. At the same time though, I can’t help but feel unfortunately pessimistic. Revenge of the Island wasn’t that good of a season, and All-Stars totally bombed. Viewership has gone down because neither of those seasons were good, and even still the franchise hasn’t been able to regain “greatness” status, to put it into coarse words. The writing quality has been declining, the seasons have lost some charm, and it’s just gotten worse as a franchise all around. However, the target audience is also something that I’m worried about as well. With the TD franchise, they’ve always had a target audience of teens and young adults, but with the main characters being de-aged to preschool levels…that leaves me skeptical concerning the traditional target audience for this franchise.
The silver lining is that if this season does do poorly, then fans can rest easy in that the season is non-canon, since in season 1 (TDI) all of the characters were meeting for the first time. Logically speaking, based on the timeline, this would mean that TDD would have to be non-canon…unless the writers decide to make the timeline and canon confusing. Either way, it would be nice to see the TD franchise get back on its feet, but we’ll see how this season folds out.