In the US: Sundays, 10pm ET/PT, Showtime. Starts May 11
In the UK: Will air on Sky Atlantic in May
Sometimes, it’s nice to have a fresh pair eyes come to a genre, free of its cliches, unwritten expectations and rules, and history, and throw everything up in the air to create something new and different. If that writer or director is also extremely talented, so much the better, since they can perhaps create a new ‘paradigm’ for that genre that will change it forever.
Look at literary history and you’ll see how neophytes have created some of horror’s greatest icons: consider, for example, Bram Stoker, Mary Shelley, Oscar Wilde and Robert Louis Stevenson, 19th century authors who without any history of writing horror came fresh to it and created Dracula, Frankenstein, Dorian Gray and Dr Jekyll.
That, though, is the utopian vision. The flipside, of course, is that the new arrival, no matter how talented they are, simply won’t know what hoary old tropes they’re recycling and will add precisely nothing, no matter how well written it is.
So how much should you be looking forward to the self-consciously titled Penny Dreadful, a US-UK co-production between Showtime and Sky Atlantic, that’s written by no lesser a scribe than John Logan and exec produced by Sam Mendes? Neither has done much by way of horror but still have the likes of Skyfall, Gladiator, Coriolanus and American Beauty under their belts.
The series, as you might imagine all those of you who know what a penny dreadful was, is a Victorian horror show. It pulls together the acting talents of Timothy Dalton, Josh Hartnett, Eva Green, Billie Piper, Rory Kinnear, Helen McRory and Simon Russell Beale, to name but a few, and imagines a London where the works of Shelley, Wilde and co are all true and Dracula, Gray and other creatures of the night really do skulk in the dark. It’s up to Dalton, Green and Hartnett to rescue those in peril from the supernatural horrors that are mere legends.
Revolutionary or merely Alan Moore’s League of Extraordinary Gentlemen again? If you’re in the US, you can watch and find out below; the rest of you can watch the trailer then follow me after the jump and I’ll let you know.
Continue reading “Preview: Penny Dreadful 1×1 (Showtime/Sky Atlantic)”
