I was half-watching Merlin last week and I don't understand why they even bothered to use the names of characters from Arthurian legend and literature. If they'd made exactly the same series and used a bunch of pseudo-Medieval/fantasy names, or even made it about Young Merlin's adventures many years before all the famous Arthurian stories occurred, I probably would have found the show fairly entertaining. Instead I just kept going "What the hell?"

Seriously, PRINCE Arthur? Way to miss the point. I'm struggling to come up with a good comparison here, but it's kind of like making a Batman series where Bruce Wayne had an idyllic childhood with his totally not-murdered parents.

That said, I may very well wind up half-watching the later of the two episodes on tomorrow because there's not much else on in that time slot.