Penny Dreadful
With a cast of characters that includes vampires, mad scientists, reanimated corpses, and hunky werewolves, one might suspect that Showtime greenlit Penny Dreadful in an effort to chase the monster ratings of creature features like The Walking Dead and True Blood. But in their deal to acquire the show from Skyfall scribe John Logan, the network might have missed a Faustian twist in the fine print. Yes, Penny Dreadful has plenty of beasts sexy and savage engaging in acts that will slake a viewer’s baser thirsts. But the most captivating demons in Logan’s vaudeville trunk of horrors are the entirely human ones: regret and shame.
Though its assemblage of literary ghouls makes it easy to compare to the film version of The League of Extraordinary Gentleman (just with a different former-Bond, and not awful), Penny Dreadful’s soul belongs to the stage. It’s the most theatrical show on television, and its keen interest in expression through performance finds the ultimate outlet in Eva Green, who proves that bigger can be better. While a liberal blending of Victorian horror with horror movie tropes keeps the show’s humors pumping, the carefully modulated madness of Green’s Vanessa Ives is the beating heart holding everything together, and she’s equally capable of guiding Penny Dreadful through its subtlest moments, as she is at inspiring its most gonzo ones.
The grab-bag of tones and archetypes bubbling up alongside one another mean that, sometimes, the chosen ingredients don’t make for a good match (Billie Piper’s turn as an Irish working girl is what happens when bad character writing meets a worse accent). With such a short run for the first season, there’s a sense that the jumbled mythology Logan’s come up with to tie everything together isn’t his main focus, and that’s just fine. Penny Dreadful loves characters above all else, and gamely follows its collection of lonely creations in their search for a connection, whether it takes them behind the curtain, or down the darkest alleys.
