Penny Dreadful

Also, this series if full of spiders. Seriously, dude; don't touch it.

Penny Dreadful is a sumptuous, Gothic-historical series. Set in a monster-haunted Victorian London and populated by a mixture of literary characters and original creations, this is pretty much my kind of show and I wanted from the first to love it.

I did not love it.

I'm not sure why Gray rates a place on the
poster above Frankenstein.

The first series tells the interweaving stories of a group of characters who have all become enmeshed in what is referred to as 'the demimonde', the world of horror and monsters, during the hunt for a master vampire and a girl he has abducted. Wild West Show gunslinger Ethan Chandler (Josh Hartnett) is - ostensibly at least - the everyman newcomer of the group, which also includes explorer Sir Malcolm Murray (Timothy Dalton), father of vampire-abducted Mina, and his daughter's best friend, the demon-hounded medium Vanessa Ives (Eva Green). Another new recruit is Victor Frankenstein (Harry Treadaway), who is far more British than his name or literary backstory suggest, and Sir Malcolm's stoic and mysterious manservant Sembene (Danny Sapani) completes the set. Hovering around the edges of the group are Brona Croft (Billie Piper), a terminally tubercular prostitute with a God-awful Irish accent, Frankenstein's abandoned Creature (Rory Kinnear), and Dorian Gray (Reeve Carney), the (immortal) human equivalent of a hairless cat.

This show immediately preceded the great
eyeliner shortage of 2014.

So far, so promising; interesting set up, classic quest storyline, and a pretty top-notch cast. So where - aside from Piper's accent - did it all go wrong for me?

For starters, I found almost none of the characters to be all that interesting or sympathetic. Sir Malcolm is a dick, Vanessa is lauded for her strength and power and then shown to exist almost at the whim of greater forces, Frankenstein is a whiner, Chandler is mopey and Dorian is annoying. The only characters I really clicked with were murdered after minutes of screen time. Determined to make the characters cool and unflappable, the series succeeds largely in making them dense, their jaded suavity apparently blinding them to certain key revelations, such that - for example - no-one seems inclined to stop and note that Chandler can control wolves. They also hunt vampires and do so almost exclusively by breaking into their nests at night. The fact that the vampires are almost always at home and slumbering when they do so is perplexing, as is London's apparently inexhaustible supply of white-haired vixens in black dresses, since it seems to take a matter of days, at most weeks, for the master vampire to completely restock his goth snugglepile.

For much of its run, the primary tension of the series seems to be who Dorian Gray will sleep with next. The show sets up its characters to be mysteries, but goes too far and gives us too little to care about. This is thrown into sharp relief in the final episode when two Pinkerton detectives come looking to take Ethan back to his father. This is an interesting twist, but comes too late in the game to be much more than a throwaway.

Oh, and the series keeps teasing Dorian Gray standing in front of an unseen portrait. Gosh, I wonder what that's going to turn out to be about when it finally pays off?

Conversely, Vanessa gets an entire episode of backstory. This suggests that the series sees her as its protagonist, but this is not borne out by the narrative, in which she is constantly a passive player, driven by crude passion into acts of reflexive rebellion which, rather than marking her as an independent and sexually liberated woman, are intrinsically linked with her subjugation to forces of evil. In fact, for a series so obsessed with sex, Penny Dreadful is shockingly sex-negative.

It also lacks any strong female protagonists. Vanessa's power is weakness and her role to be a tool - even in the final denoument she is a passive player and a hostage; Brona just bitches, coughs blood and ultimately dies of TB, leading her to a fate that has pretty much been ordained for her since she first expectorated into a hankie; and Mina is mere a vessel for the voiceless villain of the piece (although for a moment I hoped it had done something interesting and she was the villain.)

Every so often, it gets it right, and something really works, but overall the series is laden with too many plots that do not come together well enough, and characters who are not quite likable enough for me to want to go the extra mile to find out how it all fits in the end. I made it to the end of the series largely on stubbornness.

On the other hand, a lot of people seem to have loved it, so what do I know? Maybe glumly self-absorbed badasses serially sleeping with a smug hedonist is what the people want.