Penny Dreadful

Pilot: A pleasingly chilling start, excellently cast characters and Logan’s tight screenplay inspires great expectations for the next episodes. Season one: A bit reminiscent of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, just with more sophisticated character profiles and psychology that not even hmm... Sam Mendes would be ashamed of. I liked the work with the myths of old London and the repeated taste of Egypt, just like old times. Eva Green again dominates (the recollection episode is definitely the high point of the season) and it’s pleasant to see Timothy Dalton in a proper role. Not so much a horror as a reminder of family values, respect/disrespect for life and faith in emotions and love. (08/05/2014)

We've seen the familiar characters from Victorian literature together before in the “League of Extraordinary Gentlemen” comics (I'm ignoring that awful movie), where they formed a strange but workable team. In Penny Dreadful, unfortunately, their union is a bit ham-fisted. In fact, the series suffers from the same problem as True Blood: overstuffing and disjointedness, in short, they try to cram as many horror icons into the story as possible without regard for coherence (and I'm a little worried that it's going to get worse with each successive season). But what works brilliantly here is the combination of the atmosphere of old-fashioned horror stories with the dirty realism we're used to in, for example, HBO's historical series (here too, the precise production design plays a big role, successfully drawing us into the world of the time). Moreover, I admit that I haven't seen such a gloomy and, on the whole, scary horror series on TV for a long time. (06/30/2014)

I’m giving up halfway through the series. It’s boring, disjointed, full of mumbo-jumbo about nothing, and it doesn’t have a single character that would attract me in any way. The average rating is mainly due to the excellent execution, the solid performances and the exciting pilot episode, but the feeling was lower. (08/28/2014)

My interest was piqued by both the premise and the actors, so I decided to give this series a go. At the beginning of each episode, Penny Dreadful shows the same television logo as I got used to in Dexter, which is that of Showtime. So I was expecting this show to be as uncompromising. Uncompromising though it may be at times, it is also full of bullshit, even though I’m not saying that the paperbacks sold in the 1800s London were any better. But I don’t think it’s a good idea to pick up the most interesting elements from several books and mix them with some new plots into a single story. The only reason to watch this series are the actors. Both Eva Green and Josh Harnett delivered excellent performances. Eva might have been a just tiny bit better – she is able to play absolutely anything. (11/30/2014)

The topic, the cast, the creators, the production design and the chosen style promise great things. But this sham nickel-and-dime, Hammer-style League of Extraordinary Gentlemen which could feel at home in the company of the Victorian episodes of Doctor Who, despite its many undeniable qualities, does little more than promise; however much it is pleasantly peculiar in all circumstances and almost unprecedentedly true to its literary source. It can never permanently move up from the “promises on paper" box to the “fulfilled promises" box, even though it peeks into it at times. But it’s these passages that do more of a disservice than anything else to the series because while you are watching you can see how damn good it could have been. Which of course doesn’t mean that it isn’t good enough. (06/29/2014)