Exec. Producers: Marc Guggenheim, Rene Echevarria, Guillermo del Toro, Jon Amiel, Travis Beacham, Orlando Bloom, Gideon Amir, Gary Ungar, Paul McGuigan
Starring Orlando Bloom, Cara Delevingne, Simon McBurney, Tamzin Merchant, David Gyasi, Andrew Gower, Karla Crome, Arty Froushan, Indira Varma, Jared Harris
There’s this city, you see, that has a twisting river wending through it, and lots of bridges, rowhouses of brick, gas lamps and hostels, miasmic fog and a variety of English and Irish accents. But it’s not London, you see. Never London. Any resemblance is pure coincidence, even if the lower-caste parts of town are plagued by a serial killer called “Unseelie Jack.” Carnival Row is where they keep the whorehouses.
And it’s actually not the London of Dickens and Sherlock. It’s the seventh century in this world (back when Londinium was a Roman outpost with the advantage that the Thames happened to be shallow enough to be fordable), and some of the residents have wings, and some have horns. I hope they paid royalties to Brian and Fiona, creators of “Saga.”
The winged ones are recently landed immigrants, Fae driven from their land by a group called “The Pact.” The Pact seem to be interested in killing as many of the Fae as they can, which is why so many have fetched up in Not-London.
The original residents are not amused, and hate and fear the new arrivals. A significant portion of the show is dedicated to mutton-chopped and indignant non-Londoners huffing about the “Pixies”, and spewing the same sort of bigoted and racist bile that you are likely to overhear at any Trump rally. There’s a third type of creature in not-London, a ‘faun’. They’re the ones with the horns. Upper class not-Londoners don’t [sniff] approve of them, it seems. Oh, and there are centaurs.
Complicating matters is the fact that the horrors that have befallen the Fae are, in some way, the fault of the not-English. Nothing like unadmitted guilt to really crank up the racial tension, eh? But then, we wouldn’t know anything about that, would we?
There’s a police inspector (Orlando Bloom) on the heels of Unseelie Jack and a plucky girl Fae (Cara Delevingne) who fetches up on the rocky shores of not-Britain following a shipwreck, the sole survivor. It turns out that she and the inspector have a history, he being a veteran of the battle that led to the Pact annihilating the Fae.
If it sounds like a brave young couple defeating the vile creatures that infest the not-National Party and show bigotry for the moral disease it is (and it’s so heavy handed in the first ep that I figured that is where they were going with the story, a big FU to Donald and Blojo) then it probably would turn out to be another over-financed but simple-minded tale.
But we get to meet Unseelie Jack, and he lets us know that there may be a damned good reason why people should hate and fear the Fae, and right then I thought, “Oh, this is interesting” in a not-English accent.
Visually, the show is utterly gorgeous, rich in detail and verisimilitude and borrowing just enough from Dickens and Doyle and Vaughn and Staples to keep it thematically sound without just being another Jack-the-ripper knock-off story.
There’s enough there to provide hope that, like one of the Fae characters, it will flutter its wings and take off in the sooty skies of not-London.
Now on Amazon Prime.