Hot diggidy daffodils, we’ve got a new telly show to talk about! From the collective brain caverns of Sam ‘I-was-married-to-Kate-Winslet-don’t-you-know’ Mendes and Skyfall scribe John Logan comes the long, long, long, looooooong-awaited Penny Dreadful. Forget about your violent, over-sexualized stories of literary characters forging and toying with uneasy alliances for personal and social gain like that Throne full of Games or whatever it is, Penny Dreadful is all about… er… a bunch of fictional Victorian characters teaming up to stop an unnatural and vicious power and service their own ends in the process, possibly by having a load of sex. Hmm. Well you got me there, hypothetical reader.
So Penny Dreadful has what you’d expect from a show billed as a ‘psycho-sexual thriller’ by the guy who brought us all American Beauty : sex, violence, a whole mess of bloody guts just hanging around like it’s the hip new thing to do, spooky occult-ish goings on and Eva Green being oh-so Eva Green-y. Unlike that one show we all already watch, Penny Dreadful keeps it’s cast quite lean, with four major folks being the driving force of the show, shall I ramble about them? Yeah, you know what? I think I will.
First met is Eva Green’s Vanessa Ives, a woman whose special abilities consist of doing aforementioned spooky-occult-ish-goings-on with cards, crucifixes and spiders and giving everything a stare usually employed by disapproving cats. Very little is given away about Vanessa’s character apart from her almost perennial attachment to all the spookiness and spiders. Aside from that she strides past and above all the freaky-deekiness and growling men-folk, treating them as if she had owned them for at least 10 years, 3 of which were spent in the corner of the loft being ignored. You know the kind of no-tosses-given attitude I mean.
Next in our little pantheon of characters is ol’ gun-hand Ethan Chandler. I say “ol’ gun-hand”, but Josh Hartnett’s keen-eyed cowboy is more a victim of youthful hubris, as keenly dissected by Green’s Vanessa within moments of meeting. Hartnett totally sells the man-in-a-foreign-land, the too-grizzled-for-his-youth, the out-of-my-depth-with-this-supernatural-crap and the so-obviously-running-from-something routines, but then again such routines don’t equate to grandest acting decathlon. Absolutely nothing wrong with Hartnett’s performance though, it’s just not ground-breaking is all.
If acting up a storm is what you’re after then please extend a slightly-terrified welcome to Timothy Dalton’s Malcolm Murray: The Most Intense Man On The Telly. Whilst Dalton doesn’t get the amount of screen time you’d expect in our first foray into Penny Dreadful when he’s there he seethes with a bubbling violent tension, which he lets out in growling soliloquy, poetic threats and occasionally actual, bloody violence. Even when his inner emotional weakness is flaunted before him, there’s still the worry he’s going to do something rather extreme. And stabby.
And rounding us off, almost as if required to in a tale of Victorian fiction, is * drum roll * Victor Frankenstein, come on down! Yep, that most famous of mad scientists makes his inevitable appearance thanks to Harry Treadaway, who does the best he can, but Vickie is such a well-trodden character that it’s hard to get something new from him that hasn’t already been said.
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wnjqJhT84vE
As you’d more than likely expect from an inaugural episode this first one does a fine dance of introducing our main cast, dangling plot threads of various lengths before them and watching the mesmerizing results against a backdrop of a decaying Victorian cityscape. That said, despite everything in Penny Dreadful hinting at greater and deeper levels of spooky-sexy-violent-ness with spider-like Egyptian vampire-cults, Eva Green smouldering away as she does, and her alliance with the self-serving Ethan Chandler and the nigh-on-boiling temperament of Malcolm Murray that could only lead to great, terrible things, the show kind of ends on a note so bum you might as well have continually flashed a picture of a derrière for the last 5 minutes.
So, in the show’s last gasp it throws up it’s token scene of “Here’s Victor Frankenstein and his creature! Again!”. Treadaway’s Victor and Rory Kinnear’s Creature get a little time together but overall it’s a yawn and a half to end on. Yes, this first episode is about alluding/signposting the central character’s motivations (Malcolm Murray’s lost daughter, Ethan Chandler’s self-exile in a two-bit travelling show, Vanessa Ives’… erm… okay she’s a mystery, whatever) but another ‘Doctor and his creation’ scene, as nicely framed as it is just seems… hackneyed? Do I want to say hackneyed? Yeah, that’s what it is. Let’s go with that.
But never mind! We’ve still got a case of missing daughters, vampires, grisly mutilations, ancient and hidden hieroglyphics, mysteries, the occult, Timothy Dalton’s beard and as I may have mentioned: Eva Green not giving a cuss.
Here’s to next week!
Penny Dreadful is on Sky Atlantic, Tuesdays at 9pm
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