A Showtime show? Not my usual...
Penny Dreadful was an interesting show for me. It stars two of my favorite actors, Eva Green, and Josh Heartnet. These two make a great team, but the real high points come with the production value alone. The scope of this show is impressive given what it is.Suffice to say, I was entertained, but truthfully it was nothing to write home about. It wasn’t bogged down with the obnoxious corny bullshit that all but ruined (or made depending on your preference) Van Hellsing, and didn’t come off as pretentious like Beowulf. Both strong points.
It is a cocktail of abstract monster lore, inner struggle drama, and gore fest (not really) horror. Dread is the perfect word and it accomplishes it perfectly in both tone and diction. But for all it’s strong points it did always feel a bit washed out. There wasn’t anything to any of it. The characters were all so isolated in their own bubbles that despite throwing them together in seemingly arbitrary situations (I very much suspect this is a result of source material or rather genre of source material) they never seemed to fuse into cohesive narratives.
What I mean by source material is simply what the name is based on. These "Penny Dreadfuls" were short stories sold for a penny sometime in England or something. I'm not really a historian of that period.
The pop around towns and time lines with dangling plots and even some minor plot holes and inconsistencies, but it’s all pretty irrelevant. If you go into this show to pick apart the narrative in nuance, you’re gonna have a bad time. It plays like something profound at times, but it’s generally nothing more than a series of short adventures in a dreadful place with dreaful people. The show? Not so Dreadful. Check it out if you’re into it.
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