![]() The acting is just shy of campy, with Green the seductive standout. The pilot episode is particularly fun, with blooms and spasms of florid writing (don’t worry, the show is in on the joke) that introduce enough gothic intrigue to last a full season and beyond. Dorian (Reeve Carney) is also out there, slinking around like a rock star, but he’s yet to really get involved in the two episodes I’ve seen. ![]() Meanwhile, a handsome, eccentric young doctor named Victor (Harry Treadaway) is brought into the fold because of his medical prowess and his interest in the, shall we say, darker aspects of science. He and his mysterious companion, Vanessa Ives (Eva Green), recruit Ethan Chandler (Josh Hartnett), an American gunslinger with a shadowy past, to aid them in their investigation. Some sort of vampiric creature is stalking the streets of London, killing and abducting people, including the daughter of Sir Malcolm (Timothy Dalton), a former explorer with a passing knowledge of the occult. What the series may lack in Mad Menian depth it makes up for with heaps of gore and genuine scares. (One character is named Mina, hint hint.) The show’s title is a reference to a form of pulpy serialized novels that were popular in 19th-century Britain, so we should probably not expect too much subtlety or nuance. The series, from Tony-winning playwright and screenwriter John Logan, is about classic monsters and other supernatural types from literature, including Frankenstein and his monster, a hyper-sexed Dorian Gray, and some nasty vampires that, I’d have to assume, will at some point be connected to everyone’s favorite Transylvanian. In the first scene, a woman is killed while sitting on the toilet. Set in a dreary, scraggly late-19th-century London, Penny Dreadful has the stateliness of quality period fare, but it’s quickly apparent that the series is not going to be some muted exploration of time and place. I have tentative hopes that the network’s new series, Penny Dreadful (premiering this Sunday night), will do the same. ![]() Which is why Showtime shows are often at their best when they really lean into the skid-the network’s strongest show, Shameless, has admirably lived up to its name, giving us a parade of grotesquerie while sneaking in some real emotional wallops when they can. It’s there in every gratuitous scene on Masters of Sex, in every janky, incredible plot development on Homeland. But the network still has a guiding impulse, a house style maybe, toward artful schlockiness, a penchant for the seedier, the sensational. ![]() Long the less-respected younger sibling of golden child HBO, the network has made some strides in recent years toward the kind of quality that wins awards and admiration, with series like Homeland and Masters of Sex. ![]()
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