ANYTHING BUT REALITY:

Swords and Sorcery Return to Syndication (BROOKS BARNES, 10/26/08, NY Times)

Before Mr. Raimi went off to turn “Spider-Man” into a multibillion-dollar movie franchise, [Sam Raimi and Rob Tapert] were credited with creating a genre of television beloved (at least for a time) around the globe: the syndicated fantasy action drama. Heavy on dragons and fire — not to mention men in lace-up leather pants and scantily clad women wielding swords — their “Hercules: The Legendary Journeys” and “Xena: Warrior Princess” were both pop-culture phenomena in the mid-1990s.

Audiences eventually overdosed on the genre, largely because production companies flooded the market with copycats. At least 65 syndicated one-hour dramas arrived from 1991 to 2000, with entries like “Conan: The Adventurer,” “Highlander” and “The Adventures of Sinbad” borrowing directly from the Raimi-Tapert formula. A changing television business accelerated the genre’s death, and by 2007 there was not a single syndicated drama in production.

With the clutter cleared out — and with local television stations grappling with a sudden need for programming — Mr. Raimi and Mr. Tapert are back. Their syndicated series “Legend of the Seeker,” produced in conjunction with the Walt Disney Company’s ABC Studios, will make its debut on Nov. 1 on stations reaching about 95 percent of the country. Based on the best-selling “Sword of Truth” books by Terry Goodkind, the series combines elements of fantasy and adventure with exotic settings furnished by New Zealand. [...]

Imagine “The Lord of the Rings” Parts 1, 2 and 3 with a (much) lower budget and characters that show more skin, and you’ve got “Legend of the Seeker.”