By the end of Steven Moffatt’s long run on Doctor Who, I was a little burnt out on his style. There’s only so much season-long cryptic puzzle-box bullshit I’m prepared to put up with, and by the time we’d gotten to Peter Capaldi’s Twelfth Doctor, it became apparent that the payoffs never lived up to the mystery.
All that said, I still have very fond memories of his first couple of years on the show, in which it felt like he was getting to use all his best ideas. Sherlock was similarly great at first, though the last season was pretty dreadful. Even so, I think Moffatt and Mark Gatiss’ new Dracula series could prove to be a monster hit.
The show intends to retell Bram Stoker’s story in a very original way, and considering how many different versions of that story there’ve been over the decades, that’s a pretty tall order. Moffatt and Gatiss recently spoke to the Radio Times and they explained their thinking on the Count as so:
“Having an evil lead character is actually really difficult. That’s been the main challenge I think. But how we’ve handled, that you’ll have to wait and see.”
“We sort of made a promise to ourselves and the people who are making it, paying for it, that we’d make Dracula the hero of his own story, and less of a shadowy presence. And that’s a really clever idea, but we had to make good on it!”
Retelling the story of Dracula but casting him as the hero isn’t an entirely original prospect, but then again, most of the time he’s gently turned into a romantic antihero rather than being outright evil. If they do follow through with their promise though, then this could be a fairly unique take on the character. I’d love to see a Dracula gradually falling towards evil rather than somehow being innately bad, perhaps increasingly giving in to his vampiric desires and losing his humanity over the course of the show.
Currently, they’re pitching the series to the BBC and Netflix, both of whom you’d imagine would be eager to snap this up in the hope that Moffatt and Gatiss can do what they did for Sherlock Holmes with Dracula. And while it remains to be seen where the show will ultimately land, one thing’s definitely for sure: given the way that Benedict Cumberbatch’s career took off into the stratosphere after Sherlock, expect to see a lot more of Danish actor Claes Bang in the future.