Halo had no shortage of enemies before Paramount pulled the show’s plug. Hardcore fans hate its massive deviations from the source material. Some critics couldn’t stand the bizarre pacing and lack of heart. The show was always a mixed bag, but there were always fans hoping to see the show find its footing. While the second season was a fair measure better than the first, there will likely never be a third. The news of Halo‘s untimely demise came out in July, but the show still firmly maintains its position on Paramount’s top ten.
Halo’s Fight is Over, but Its Paramount Top Ten Position Remains
Halo ran for two seasons on Paramount+, a streaming service that bases a weird amount of its programming on video games. The show is a very loose adaptation of the Halo games, but the consistent changes bothered people a lot. The most notable example is that Pablo Schreiber, the star behind the Master Chief, spends too much time with his helmet off. There are many things that the character never did in the game, but his TV counterpart challenges those traditions. I’m not a purist, and I firmly believe that the problems with this show run deeper than a lack of faithfulness to the source material. The real issue is a fundamental lack of heart that consistently leaves all the emotional beats out to dry. There are a few decent action scenes and some strong character moments in season two, but it never amounts to much.
The Halo show sits in a bizarre limbo. It’s visually impressive, but the scale never quite matches that of the games. The new lore is a mess, but the emotional weight it adds to some of the characters works. Its action is frequently very compelling, but it rarely presents those conflict scenes with anything approaching style. Originality escapes the project at every turn, but the show inherited that problem from its source material. Halo is still in Paramount’s top ten because the streamer doesn’t have much else to offer. For all of its faults, it still has the absurdly popular franchise’s name attached. This may be the most serious attempt to do Halo for a broader audience. Characters, concepts, and stories that people love can only leave their original medium with care, talent, and luck. Despite its problems, it’s still bittersweet to see Halo go.
Go back and watch a few classic TV shows. Most of them don’t reach the heights you may remember during their first seasons. Halo showed a marked improvement between the first and second season. Everything got better, but it still couldn’t dig itself out of the hole it wound up in. Would the third season continue that pattern and push into enjoyable territory? We’ll probably never know. The modern streaming era would have killed tons of great shows after an unimpressive season or two. As rough as a lot of Halo was, we’ll never know what we lost when Paramount chose to let the game end.
