Game of Thrones fans can turn to Amazon Prime Video for a bloody, sexy steampunk tale of fantasy folk in a harsh human world.
Game of Thrones is over. Penny Dreadful is dead. Therefore, if you’re searching for your fix of violence and sex with a dream flavour, Amazon Prime Video will take you away with all the fairies in its new show Carnival Row.
Produced from Aug. 30, it’s Game of Thrones using a pixie cut.
The Steampunk-esque fantasy is set in a world where winged fairies, horned pucks and other impish fantasy folk wash up in a human universe that does not always need them.
Cara Delevingne adopts An Irish accent and a set of wings as Vignette, a fairy freedom fighter running from her homeland. She follows a tide of elfin refugees to Carnival Row, a Victorian-esque ghetto for dream creatures policed by Orlando Bloom using a bowler hat and a gravelly accent.
Basically it’s Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes falling in love with Tinker Bell, against a backdrop of Thrones-esque dynastic nastiness.
Based on a Travis Beacham first script that has been much talked about in Hollywood for a decade and a half, Carnival Row’s world-building is enormously dense. But this history and tradition aren’t always smoothly introduced. The opening text presents a bunch of factions — the Burgue, the Fae, the Pact — followed by much more fantasy place names. Not all these are significant, and it will not help there are different names for the same groups depending on how racist the speaker is.
The narrative Splinters as the battle between people and fairiefolk divides and defines each strata of society, from the grubby bordellos to the corridors of power. At the bottom, Bloom’s dogged detective chews on a string of grisly murders, while at the exact top Chernobyl and Mad Men star Jared Harris is losing his grip on the city. But naturally, ministers and murderers are entwined within their own way.
It’s sex. There’s a Good Deal of sex in Carnival Row, Including scenes that will delight anyone with a fairly specific fetish — or if this be fairy-specific fetish.
The backdrop is a heightened steampunk take on Victorian London or New York. Carnival Row’s venal Victoriana is a sort-of familiar universe, a semihistoric setting exploding with guts and blood as well as other bodily fluids, like Deadwood or From Hell.
Where Game of Thrones largely avoided the More fantastic elements of the fantasy genre — or at least introduced them gradually — there is no getting round the fact this is a show about fluttering fairies. The opening episode struggles to reconcile its mature tone with that air of goofiness: the gory violence matches with all the gothic sense, but the crude language particularly feels tacked on.
It doesn’t help that the murder puzzle nominally forcing the plot is Thoroughly underwhelming: We are always invited to grieve a murder victim we never met when she was living, and the procedural factors are weighed down by cliches like the very best cop who barks,”You’d better come to me with over a hunch!”
It’s also Difficult to know if Bloom’s Frowning flatfoot is intended to be a decent policeman or not. Clues have a tendency to slap him in the face, while in the very first episode the victim of an assault refers to her assailant in copious detail, right down to lace, uniform and a distinctive tattoo on his arm. “Anything else?” Bloom growls, his brow knitted in concentration. “The smallest detail? …”
Still, as the Thrones-esque horribleness operatically Spirals, the entire wacky jumble coalesces. If you stick around for episode 3, things come together with a flashback into the mortal war which provides the backstory to this world. Somewhere between Sport of Thrones snowbound Winter Wall and the real life Crimean War, it affectingly fleshes out Bloom and Delevingne’s background.
One of the greater subplots is a regency-style play about venal Aristocrats distressed to find that they must discuss their fashionable address using a horned and hoofed beginner. Tamzin Merchant sinks her teeth into the part of a spiteful ingenue whose naive games descend into darkness.
The Whole issue is underpinned by layers of subtext managing racism, immigration and colonialism. It is not always subtle, along with the creator’s choices are ripe for unpicking. However, it does weave timely topics in among the pseudo-historical shenanigans and lurid actions, taking in those who grease the wheels of oppression for their own benefit and a society that denigrates others while secretly enjoying their company.
A Second season has been verified, and the series does end Ardently with directional changes for the dream city. With Carnival Row, Amazon might not have found its Game of Thrones — but it could be the new Penny Dreadful.
