Penny Dreadful, Sky Atlantic's new huge-budget, high-concept TV drama began last week. It's dripping with high production values, but at the same time it's a strange mix of things.
First, it reminds us of Alan Moore. Like Moore's The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, it mixes various iconic stories and characters into a steampunk sort of setting. While League had Alan Quartermain, Tom Sawyer and Captain Nemo, Penny has Frankenstein, but also overlaps with Dorian Grey and Mina Harker from Dracula.
Second, it reminds us of Ripping Yarns. Ripping Yarns deliberately set out to debunk this sort of tosh (particularly in the episode The Curse of The Claw), and also loved getting cameos from famous friends.
Within these confines it's pretty good, and it's great to see Timothy Dalton in such a meaty role, but as with a lot of the recent Sky stuff, it's not as good as it thinks it is. Yes, it's suspenseful... but one person's 'nail-biting suspense' is another person's 'get on with it', and more often than not we fall into the second camp.
'Mad Men' is the honourable exception to our Sky avoidance. Or more accurately, it's the only thing non-terrestrial and non-freeview that we bother to tune in for or tape. Hence the recent silence, since it's the only channel featuring anything that hasn't been shown 58 times already. With the summer lull upon us, the schedules are full of cheap stuff, like dud Jubilee coverage and Olympics promos. We were hoping for a pleasant diversion in bite-sized chunks, set in the faded, tawdry splendour of Margate.
The trailer promised much, not least a starry cast, and on this at least it's delivered.
Admittedly, we are only one down with four still to go, but on the strength of the first story, featuring David Tennant, Joanne Froggatt and Vicky McClure, it's going to be a struggle. Hurrah for scriptwriters. Hurrah for Mike Leigh for coaxing decent dialogue via workshopping and improvisation. Either would have been welcome here, but instead we got actors with rabbit-in-headlights expressions, obviously uncomfortable at being given banal storylines and having to come up with lines on the spot. Needless to say, they conveyed love by saying "I love you" and "I love you too", and on unexpectedly bumping into an old acquaintance they say, "Well this is..." and "Yeah, yeah, it's...yeah." It was like watching well-known actors appearing in something like TOWIE. What's worse, the advance publicity suggests that the next four episodes will be essentially the same story (person either bereft or in relationship fancies alternative) with slightly tweaked scenarios. Sad to say, but there were also some likely TWNH moments: would Serena really fly over from Canada to look up old flame Nick, rather than attempting, initially, to find and friend him on Facebook? Would Nick be so hung up on her that he jumps straight into an affair that he hides from his wife but no-one else? Would said wife be so quick to forgive him?
Good on the actors for being game, and all that, and good old Margate for being a better backdrop than most would credit, but slight stories and even slighter lines make an extremely underwhelming watch.
