I will admit that this has been a daunting article to write. Besides the ennui and dread brought on by the Covid-19 outbreak, I also find myself in the position of trying to do justice to what is, without a shadow of a doubt, my favorite television show ever: Penny Dreadful.
There was a brief shining moment in 2015 when Penny Dreadful, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, Game of Thrones, and Hannibal were all on TV at the same time and that exists as my own personal high-water mark for “peak TV.” Those seem like halcyon days right now, and Penny Dreadful, whose “spiritual sequel” City of Angels premieres on April 26th, deserves to be lovingly memorialized. And hey, in these days of social distancing, what better time for a (re)watch of a truly outstanding Victorian Gothic drama (either in preparation for the new series or just because it’s an amazing show)?
For those of you who have not yet had the chance to experience the series, a brief description is in order: Penny Dreadful is a three-season fin-de-siècle drama created by prolific screenwriter, John Logan and aired on Showtime and Sky UK. It follows deeply Catholic clairvoyant, Vanessa Ives (played to absolute perfection by Eva Green), retired colonial-African explorer, Sir Malcolm Murray (Timothy Dalton), and American sharpshooter Ethan Chandler (played by Josh Hartnett) in a supernatural mystery that brings them into conflict and connection with a number of famous literary figures from 19thcentury Gothic fiction. This includes Victor Frankenstein, Dorian Gray, Henry Jekyll, and much of the cast of Bram Stoker’s Dracula. The show is thematically concerned with the ramifications of religious faith in an era of secular rule, the meaning of evil, and the difficulties of being a woman in an age of unrestrained patriarchy.
Let me start by saying that I was always baffled by the reception that Penny Dreadful got, both from critics and casual viewers. It was repeatedly snubbed by the awards circuit and received the dubious and baffling nomination for “best campy show” from Fangoria. In my own circle of Victorian-fiction academes, it was especially loathed—a fact I found borderline distressing, given how perfectly it wed Victorian Gothic fiction to the prestige drama format.
I think some of that blowback was a reaction to the name of the show itself. A “penny dreadful” is a Victorian slang term for a lurid piece of sensational or supernatural fiction, often sold, loosely bound, for a penny. Some of our most famous 19th century stories came from penny dreadfuls: the Tale of the Flying Dutchman, Feast of Blood, and Sweeney Todd, to name a few. The subject matter of the show is certainly in line with the content of penny dreadfuls. There are scenes of grotesque gore, unsavory sexual Gordian knots, and frequent engagements with the colonial Victorian (read: racist) misconception of the savageries and mysteries of the non-white world (all things that penny dreadfuls were obsessed with). But the show is tonally nothing like a penny dreadful. It is slow moving, well-written, character-driven and elegiac. It is, in short, not a guilty pleasure. This has, consistently, been the hardest thing to communicate to others as a fan of the series. For one reason or another, people expect a campy, sensationalist show about naughty Victorians fighting monsters, and while that descriptor might technically be accurate, the show will inevitably disappoint people looking for that fix.
So why should you watch Penny Dreadful? There are too many reasons to enumerate here, but I’ll try my best. Two warnings: first, light spoilers lie ahead. Second, the series was cancelled before its fourth and final season (much like HBO’s beloved Deadwood) and had to wrap up the entirety of its plot in a two-hour finale that does its best with the amount of material it needs to cover but ends up being disappointingly fast-paced and giving ignominious short shrift to its single best character. But let us press on with a few of the elements that set the show apart from almost anything else you’ve ever seen, starting with…
Eva Green as Vanessa Ives
French actress Eva Green is probably best known for her tragi-sultry portrayal of original Bond girl Vesper Lynd, or (unfortunately) as Helena Bonham Carter’s replacement in the role of overused and under-utilized muse for director Tim Burton. But she is a brilliant actor—one that can take exploitative, derivative dreck like 300: Rise of an Empire, and somehow make every scene she’s in unforgettably electric.
But in an ensemble show where it was hard to find a weak link (though we can quibble about late-entrant Perdita Weeks and her under-developed “thanatologist,” Catriona Hartdegen), Eva Green was the undoubted queen. The AV Club put it succinctly in reviewing an episode in the final season, stating:
At least once per season, John Logan and company get together and decide (with all due respect to the excellent ensemble cast), screw it: this week we’re doing The Eva Green Show. And who can blame them? They know what they have in Green as well as we do: a fearless actress who has no time for pedestrian concerns about vanity or what some might consider to be over the top.
And it’s that commitment to a kind of furious hamminess that transcends parody which makes Eva Green so undeniably good. Take, for example, this scene from the second episode of the series. In it, the characters participate in a faux seance meant to conjure a long-dead spiritual guide. Green’s character, Vanessa Ives, is instead possessed by the spirit of Malcolm Murray’s deceased son. She plays it with a kind of frenetic energy, almost (almost) too silly, but so completely committed and vulnerable that she makes it impossible to look away, both for the other characters and for the viewer. She embodies what makes Penny Dreadful great: a masterful balancing act of sincerity and camp that manages to be more rewarding than either could be on its own.
There are three Vanessa-centric flashback episodes throughout the series that track her doomed desire for inner peace, love, and independence. The last of these, 2016’s “A Blade of Grass” (S3, Ep. 4) is essentially a two-person play with her and Rory Kinnear (who plays Frankenstein’s monster in the rest of the series) in which she says next to nothing, acting with pained glances, mumbled words, and overwhelming sorrow against the blank backdrop of an asylum’s padded cell. Green is absolutely phenomenal—one of the great actors of our age—and it is hard to imagine a better stage upon which to display her talents than the one she’s given in Penny Dreadful.
Classic Characters Properly Understood
There is no shortage (to my eternal delight) of books, graphic novels, films, and TV shows that are interested in teaming up the great heroes and monsters of Victorian fiction. You can probably trace the phenomenon back to the Universal Studios monsters who were mostly drawn from 19th century fiction, with later highlights such as Kim Newman’s excellent novel Anno Dracula (1992) and Alan Moore’s graphic novel series The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (1999) serving as strong representations of the subgenre, overall. Penny Dreadful is the apotheosis of this subgenre.
It achieves this through meticulous and careful study of the characters it chooses to follow, always deferring to (and occasionally elevating) the source material when trying to tell new stories. Take, for example, Victor Frankenstein (played by Harry Treadaway, most recently of Star Trek: Picard). Frankenstein is, of course, the creation of Mary Shelley in her Romantic novel of the same name, first published in 1818. Penny Dreadful is set in 1891—seventy-three years after Shelley’s novel. This makes Frankenstein somewhat anachronistic (the majority of other fictional characters who appear are taken from novels written within about ten years of Penny Dreadful’s in-world date). But, rather than simply update the resurrection-obsessed doctor or draw from his Universal Studios portrayal as an electricity-obsessed mad scientist, the show leans into his anachronistic presence. Penny Dreadful’s Victor Frankenstein is overwhelmed by notions of Romanticism and poetic impulses.
In the pilot, Frankenstein speaks about why he is interested in resurrection as a scientific goal, saying, “Life and Death, Sir Malcolm, the flicker that separates one from the other, fast as a bat’s wing, more beautiful than any sonnet […]” to which Timothy Dalton’s Sir Malcolm replies, “You have the soul of a poet, sir.” The series continually reminds us that Frankenstein, though a brilliant scientist when it comes to praxis, has an outdated philosophy of science that puts him at odds with more modern characters like Henry Jekyll (Shazad Latif) and Abraham van Helsing (David Warner) and directly in conversation with the scientific notions of Mary Shelley’s era almost a century prior. It is a brilliant way to reconcile the presence of Frankenstein and also pay homage to show’s capital-R Romantic notions; after all, the series ends with Rory Kinnear—whose Creature names himself after elegiac, pastoral poet John Clare—reciting Wordsworth’s 1807 “Intimations of Immortality.”
But more than just reconciling discrepancies in time period, Penny Dreadful is engaged with correcting more sensational portrayals of well-known characters in order to better meditate on the original versions of these literary creations. Take, for example, the show’s treatment of Dorian Gray (Reeve Carney, who currently stars in Broadway’s Hadestown). There is a persistent and largely incorrect characterization of Dorian Gray in most media. Many portrayals combine the seemingly ageless and immortal dandy with his rakish mentor, Lord Henry. It’s a fun characterization, to be sure: Dorian becomes a nihilistic, hedonistic rake who moves, like a cancer, through the gentry: defiling women, murdering men, and deflecting attacks on his character with a wry sneer. Essentially, he is often portrayed as a monster worthy of his portrait—see, for instance, Stuart Townsend’s portrayal of the aesthete in the mostly lamentable film adaptation of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (2003). I’m not denying that Stuart Townsend is everything a human man should be, but it’s not really the novel’s version of Dorian Gray.
In Wilde’s 1891 novel, Dorian is an innocent par excellence. He is distinguished, not by a gleefully corrupt and degenerate nature, but by a naiveté that is, by turns, charming and tragic. His portrait reflects his deeds (which are increasingly dark) but he indulges in vice mainly as means of pleasing the ideals of Lord Henry and his sinister Yellow Book. Dorian isn’t the man your father forbids you to see because he has a dark or troubling reputation, he’s the man your father encourages you to see, only to regret it later.
All of this is to say that Penny Dreadful gets it right. The show’s Dorian is consistently characterized by a lack of understanding of the complexities of the human heart. He seduces and murders and toys with people, but Carney perfectly sells Dorian’s utter non-comprehension of how vile his acts are. Even in his final scene, faced with the revenge of his spurned lover who only spares him because she understands the futility of his death in easing her troubles, Dorian calls after her, “You’ll be back, and I’ll be here. I’ll always be here” as the camera pans away to show him, child-like, dwarfed by a portrait wall, unable to understand that he has ruined his best chance for companionship.
A Steampunk-Free Victoriana
In my article on Amazon’s Carnival Row, I might have overstated my distaste for Steampunk as a genre. I should clarify: I don’t hate Steampunk, but I am frustrated by how much, at its height, it became synonymous with any fantastical form of Victoriana. As steampunk literature scholar Mike Perschon makes clear in some of his lectures, Steampunk is a fundamentally optimistic and meritocratic endeavor that takes the figure of the genius as its center and makes them unflappable so long as they have enough scrap metal to invent with. But the dominant mode of Victorian literature is rather different and much less optimistic, a realism shot through with doubt and a sense of stagnation.
Penny Dreadful is full of the Victorian fascination with uncertainty and malaise. Vanessa Ives battles with the meaning of her Catholic faith weighed against her diabolical birthright. Brona Croft, a consumption-addled sex worker (Billie Piper at her very best), struggles to put her life back together and find edifying meaning after it’s been destroyed, several times over, by both cruel men and the patriarchy generally. Frankenstein’s monster searches for glimmers of humanity in his fellow man, despite having left humanity behind all together. If you are looking for a show that tries to take a measured and thoughtful look at the Victorian era (while also including vampires, werewolves, demons, and the undead), look no further.
A Complicated Legacy on Race
The major shortcoming of Penny Dreadful is its treatment of characters of color. For the first two seasons, the only person of color in the show is Sembene (Danny Sapani), Sir Malcolm’s valet and aide-de-camp who has the tiniest bits of a backstory hinted at, only to have them cut short in a weird moment of uncharacteristic self-sacrifice. It’s a real letdown in a show that is otherwise fantastically conscious of the hideous realities of our century-old past.
It is also surprising, given that the show is otherwise greatly interested in calling out Britain and America’s galling genocides and colonial horrors. Ethan Chandler is positioned as the quintessential American—a rancher, sharpshooter, and ex-cavalryman whose heroics are constantly called out as being in service of the genocide of Indigenous Americans. The series’ third season takes Chandler and others to the American West where manifest destiny is lambasted even more thoroughly through the introduction of Chandler’s father (played with perfect, sly malice by the inimitable Brian Cox) and his Apache mentor (Wes Studi).
Similarly, the show takes on the awful legacy of British India by bringing us a mixed-race Henry Jekyll obsessed with the taming of mankind’s inner savagery as a means of revenge against the white British father who disowned him. At its worst Penny Dreadful sidelines its characters of color to the detriment of the show as a whole. At its best, it uses its white-centric perspective wisely, reckoning with the cruelty of the Anglo-American world without having anachronistically thoughtful, enlightened characters.
Dr. Ferdinand Lyle
Penny Dreadful’s best kept secret might be Simon Russell Beale, a veteran stage actor who plays queer, fastidious, deliciously flamboyant Egyptologist Ferdinand Lyle. He is, alas, a bit player in the first and third seasons, but is promoted to a regular cast member in the second where Lyle is a delightfully magnetic presence, played occasionally for comic relief but also given the kind of thoughtful, non-kill-your-gays arc that fussy, older queer characters are rarely afforded. Watching Beale joyfully chew the scenery only to suddenly ground a moment in radical tenderness is one of the greatest rewards of watching (and rewatching) the show. That, and the fact that his hair is magnificent.
And That’s Not All…
This is, and can only ever be, a partial encomium for why Penny Dreadful deserves your attention, either as a first-time viewer or as a returning one. I’ve spoken very little about Billie Piper, who does incredible work in a double role that shows off her range (and arguably one of the better fake Irish accents on TV). I haven’t discussed Jonathan McKinstry’s incredible production design, which includes excellent use of the spectacular Dublin Natural History Museum. I haven’t told you that the show regularly includes disorientingly sensual and quotable dialogue, like Vanessa Ives asking if a rare flower is poisonous only to have Dorian Gray respond: “like all beautiful things, I hope so.” I haven’t even mentioned that the third season features Broadway legend Patti LuPone as a genuine action star! There is simply too much to recommend the show—certainly too much for an article-length review.
As we inch closer to the end of April and the premiere of Penny Dreadful: City of Angels, I’m filled with both cautious optimism for a return to John Logan’s terrifying, mournful world (if not the characters I have spent the last year trying to make into custom, handmade Funko Pops) and a sense of dread that it will not live up to the series that preceded it. Even four years after its cancellation, Penny Dreadful continues to my gold standard for what a great speculative fiction drama should look like, and it continues to be impossible to let go of the show’s enduring, fascinating strangeness.
Note: All three seasons of Penny Dreadful are currently streaming on Showtime and Netflix, available on Hulu with the Showtime add-on, available on Amazon Prime with Showtime (30-day free trial) or for purchase, as well as for sale other platforms.
Tyler Dean is a professor of Victorian Gothic Literature. He holds a doctorate from the University of California Irvine and teaches at a handful of Southern California colleges. He is one half of the Lincoln & Welles podcast available on Apple Podcasts or through your favorite podcatcher. More of his writing can be found at his website and his fantastical bestiary can be found on Facebook at @presumptivebestiary.
I loved this show when it came out. The first and second seasons were really good. But man, the third season SUCKED. For all that the cast continued to give great performances, the plot itself was a huge step down from the previous seasons and was really badly handled. The ending was especially bad, for my taste.
Cool article!
I was hoping for some Brontë references in Penny Dreadful, my dissertation idea having been sparked by one of Rochester’s lines in the BBC ’83 adaptation of Jane Eyre that Dalton was in, but there wasn’t. But I wondered if by the 1890s there had been a backlash against the early Victorians; I need to do some research because my diss wasn’t about rep but about something else cultural, focusing on Charlotte Brontë’s novels.
I was so delighted to run across this article! I wasn’t a huge fan of the series-ender, and there were wobbles in the last three episodes generally, but they’d been canceled early and for the churlishness of “fandom” not any inherent badness. Anyway, Soul Sibling, thanks for reminding me how much I liked this unique show. Now to rewatch it on Netflix.
Looking forward to the spin-off City of Angels later this month.
@2. My assumption on the Bronte front is that it’s just too far outside the timeline of the show. Aside from Frankenstein, every other literary figure is from a novel that skews pretty close to the 1891 start of the show: Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1888), Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), Dracula (1897). Even characters that don’t have a direct literary reference are still inspired by similarly period-appropriate figures. Sir Malcolm is a rough analogue of the colonial-African explorer, Allen Quartermain, whose trilogy of novels were published between 1885 and 1887, and Ethan Chandler is certainly inspired by Buffalo Bill who was the subject of a fictionalized number of fin-de-siecle penny dreadfuls.*
If you are looking for a Bronteian passage in the show, I think your answer might actually be Vanessa Ives herself. Her struggles with Catholicism, her doomed attractions to men (including a scholar) that she is ultimately not emotionally available to, and her depressed reclusion (which culminates in S03E01 “The Day Tennyson Died”) are all very reminiscent of the protagonist of Chuck Bronte’s Villette (1853). If you haven’t read it, I would highly recommend it. It’s firmly rooted in the mundane, but it’s a great, Gothic yarn and an excellent meditation on loneliness and isolation (it’s also one of her more autobiographical works).
There is also something of Jane Eyre in the Joan Clayton stuff in the countryside: trapped “madwoman” distrusted by the gentry, fire at an old house, sniveling toad of a supposedly religious man. It would have been cool to see Rochester and company, but I feel like they tonally tapped into it.
*This all assumes that Jessica Barden’s Justine is not meant to be a recreation of the protagonist of the Marquis de Sade work, Les Inforunes de la Vertu (1791). Certainly, the characters have similar trajectories and, if nothing else, it’s a great little reference.
@1. I totally agree that the end was a letdown. I have always read it as a deep breath with scattered companions before a final season that would have brought everyone back together and seen Vanessa exploring her new role as Amunet alongside a much slower build of Dracula’s plan to take over London. It may all be speculation of course, but those final two episodes felt like a madcap rush to tie everything up and, as a result, was deeply unsatisfying. But I certainly can’t argue that it ends either well or in the way that the showrunners wanted it to (though we still might have ultimately gotten Vanessa’s death under similar circumstances). Ah well.
Debbie Cannon I used to say that Six Feet Under was my favorite series ever. It has, however, been surpassed by Penny Dreadful. I have been watching the reruns and almost dreading the new series because I don’t think it can be nearly as wonderful as the original. I still miss it!
Thanks for this article! The show deserves it.
What an interesting and well written article. It was such a shame that they pulled it when they did. I feel a little sorry for [now Sir] Simon Russell Beale being called a ‘veteran’ stage actor, he was 54 when the show started and is about 15 years younger than Timothy Dalton.
I think one of the reasons the show was so well acted was that a lot of the characters were top thesp’s who really know their stuff. The aforementioned Timothy and Simon, Helen Mcrory, Rory Kinnear [who had much loved British actor Roy Kinnear as a father] Patti Lupone… the whole series was filled with absolutely top class actors.
Such expertise and the amazing sets and costumes must have cost a fortune, which perhaps proved to be part of its downfall!
My husband and I loved the show and we cosplayed as Ethan and Vanessa and got to meet the actors at SDCC. They gave us action figures of the character too. It was awesome, but like so many things we like, it was canceled early. They was an excellent cosplay of a female Monster: see at https://images.app.goo.gl/QhiAP49CfRgCSW569
I saw a few Vanessa cosplays in subsequent years, but we knew the show wasn’t bringing in big ratings. I also hope the new version is as thoughtful and I agree that the first series was very white and colonial.
Excellent article on an underrated show. The cast was superb and deep. It’s worth a rewatch. The intertwining plots were effective for most of the show. Thanks.
The episode where Vanessa’s mother discovers Vanessa being, uh, used by the demon possessing her and then promptly drops dead messed with my head. It was just that powerful.
I guess. I always like Eva Green, starting with Bertolucci’s underrated The Dreamers. She was wonderful as Vesper Lynd, and I watched 300: Rise of an Empire – even though I had never seen (and had no interest in) the original 300 – entirely because she was in it. But with Penny Dreadful she lost me. Maybe I have a lower tolerance level for camp, even leavened by other qualities. I do know that I prefer very subtle, interior acting (think Juliette Binoche in Three Colours: Blue, where you have to watch the corners of her eyes to see any emotional reaction at all). But while I liked Eva anyway in the other roles I’ve seen her in, in Penny Dreadful I just thought she was chewing the scenery a bit too much. Showtime doesn’t have nearly enough to justify its subscription price (unlike Netflix or Acorn or Criterion), so I got DVD boxes out of the library and after the 2nd season I had no motivation to continue. Eva was relatively restrained in the 1st season, but in the 2nd she seemed to dial everything up to 11. The rest of the cast was fine. Dalton remains my favorite James Bond, and I’ve never not enjoyed one of his performances. If libraries ever reopen, maybe I’ll finally check out season 3.
Thank you for the article. Vanessa Ives is a role so perfectly suited to Eva Green’s talent and appearance, one might think she was born to play it. Of course not, she is amazing in many different roles, and I am looking forward to her new ones always, but it was an instance of sublime casting.
Billie Piper was great as Brona, but gave me all the chills and thrills as Lily. Her speech to the Creature… oh, my.
I think the casting in general was perfect, and the actors did amazing job all of them.
You haven’t mentioned Helen MacCrory, and I love as the villain of season 2 so much.
But yeah, season 3 while still being brilliant from time to time, lost me before the ending, and the ending didn’t leave with the feeling of a story well told. I didn’t expect happy endings for anyone, of course, but I haven’t seen the one that fitted the story either.
A show with moments of greatness constantly undermined. And the ending was very weak and disrespectful of Vanessa’s character. I’m constantly amazed that shows spend so much money on the look and cast and seem to have third rate writers. Also looking at you Game of Thrones. And Avatar (my alternate ending is rather more Culture warship / tree ). Nevertheless a mostly enjoyable show particularly Billie Piper and Shazad Latif, and wonderful eye candy Dalton and Carney.
I loved everything except for the abrupt ending.
LOVED this show for the first 2 seasons, but started to get scared in the 3rd & was deeply disappointed in the ending. Would definitely like to visit the alt timeline where they got their 4th season & see how different things were.
Similar to others, I absolutely loved this show, right up to the ending, which utterly disappointed me. Not just in the, “darn, it’s over” kind of disappointment, but in the, “What, the hey? What could they have been thinking.”
So, at the time, I did a little searching and found an interview with the creators. I wish I had kept a link. It’s full the of the typical self-congratulation, but if you read between the lines, the creators/writers basically said, “We got bored with Penny Dreadful and want to move on to other things, so we shot it in the head.”
Given that kind of attitude and selfishness (exactly what do a show’s creators owe to the fans?), I do not hold out high hopes for City of Angels. Even if it starts well there’s too much chance the creators will get distracted half-way through.
Well said! I still cry about John Clare. Such an impactful character.
Pardon but when the third season wrapped up suddenly, and with a shorter episode run than we had expected, the creators repeatedly stated that the show wasn’t cancelled and it all ended exactly as planned. So, I don’t know where the comment in this article about it being planned for 4 seasons and cut short comes from. That might be the reality but the creative team explicitly denied it, repeatedly, right when it happened.
Anyway season 3 was awful. I mean it started just-ok and just as it felt like it was just getting somewhere and “the gang” was about to re-converge on London, we saw the notice about only a couple episodes left. Whiplash! Then, basically, the wrapup was having Vanessa basically give up and turn evil. It felt an awful lot like the hero saying, “Well darn Dracula, you’re actually hot. Screw it, I’ll turn evil after all.” It made no sense in the context of the show; she spent an entire episode fighting possession fueled by sheer determination and suddenly she is just too tired? It did feel like someone got fired and sabotaged the company website on the way out the door, you know?
I don’t think this show was “misunderstood” at all. It was very popular when it aired right up until it went off the rails and crashed and burned and basically invalidated itself.
I also mostly loved the show. The atmosphere was great. Large parts were absolutely chiling (especially the waxworks museum!). The things that let me down personally were the overall plot, and the look of the vampires. Billie Piper as “bride” of Frankenstein pretty epic.
I paused and then giggled at Chuck Bronte, haha. Picturing a cross between Charlotte Bronte and Chuck Tingle, don’t ask me why. Maybe I gotta write that now? Pounded in the butt by the madwoman in my attic?
Sorry, got carried away. I loved Penny Dreadful, especially Brona’s development. Maybe it’s time for a rewatch…
Thank you for such an excellent article on a show I adored. It is definitely up there with one of my favorite shows. Besides the much-deserved accolades on all of the acting, some of the cinematography had some really fascinating angles and composition. I’ve been thinking of a rewatch now that City of Angels is coming out.
Thanks for this lovely and thoughtful examination of one of the most literate and beautiful shows I’ve ever seen.
I agree with everything you mentioned, I just wish you’d spotlighted Josh Hartnett, who absolutely floored me in this. I’d always found him slightly wooden before, but on PENNY DREADFUL, Hartnett walked right into the story with this bold, brave, complex, and charismatic performance and he never had a wrong moment for me in a single episode to follow. I was exhilarated to see someone I had previously underrated putting in such beautiful work as here.
@Annosk, agreed—that single scene is one of the most electric and stunning across all three seasons of the show for me. I especially loved the subtle dialogue work Piper does there, and it’s emotionally brutal for so many reasons!
I also loved Kinnear’s gorgeous work as John Clare, and how his character arc begins in brutality and envy, but ends in love, poetry, and tenderness. Every single conversation Clare has with Vanessa is a master class in dialogue and acting, and so beautifully presented:
I agree with those who were disappointed in the abrupt ending of Season 3, but despite Logan’s public insistence that it wasn’t a sudden Showtime decision, it obviously was — the first two-thirds of season 3 is gorgeous and complex, and building to what were obviously going to be satisfying arcs for both Ethan, Vanessa, and the rest.
Then suddenly in S3 it’s all the more jarring and obvious when the show shifts into fast-forward mode, utterly abandoning the rich and exciting Western aspects of Ethan’s story, and ending in a flawed (if still beautifully done) finale in which a crucial thing happens in the lamest possible way. It did include lovely character moments, but it felt like such a waste. I felt sorriest for Hartnett, because he had done so much subtle and complex work, and then his arc was utterly abandoned and oversimplified (as was Christian Camargo, who brought quiet courtliness and menace to Dr. Sweet’s character). And of course Eva Green was superb even if Vanessa’s story at that point was ridiculously simplified.
I’m still so bummed about what Season 4 might have been, and how it might have wrapped the story up in ways it deserved.
But — I’m still so grateful for what we got. There was so much literate grace and beauty to the dialogue, the characters, the sets, costumes, and performances… It was a feast of fantasy and fiction, and I will always love it.
I could swear that, as I madly googled to find out WTF had happened with the final episodes at the time, that it was being played as “oh, this is always the story we wanted to tell.” A missing fourth season makes so much more sense, especially with new characters having been introduced so late on in the game.
I was already somewhat unmoored from my Victorianist roots by the time the show aired, having found academic employment in a different field by then. But I’m shocked to hear that the show was so widely dismissed and derided among Victlit academics — it’s such an interesting reworking of the cultural myths surrounding the characters. I gave a conference paper on Rory Kinnear’s wonderful portrayal of the Creature at a Frankenstein anniversary conference and have been meaning to turn that into an article ever since. Perhaps I should take this time of social distancing and make that happen.
As great as Eva Green is, I found Rory Kinnear even better, enough to make me at least think about watching his episode of Black Mirror….I have not actually done that, however.
And speaking of Timothy Dalton, he’s currently in Doom Patrol, worth the cost of the subscription to DC Universe alone (Harley Quinn is just gravy), and probably my current favorite TV series.
@24, honestly, I felt Logan was always protesting too much on that front. All his interviews about the end of PD were a round of interviews where he insisted — often in the face of resistance — “I wanted it this way. I told the story I wanted to tell.”
But let’s face it, it was simply good PR and him putting a good face on it for Showtime, which had obviously promised him future projects if he played ball.
I’ll always mourn the lack of the fourth season. It was very obvious to me that Season 3 was supposed to be Ethan’s season, and about what his arc and backstory brought to the prophecies about him (and Vanessa, and the gang), about Vanessa’s journey to the precipice, and about Lily’s growing realization that she is more than pure rage for men to hone and use.
It seems obvious to me that S3 would have ended with Ethan achieving some kind of new awareness or abilities in America, even as Vanessa gave in to despair and Dr. Sweet, and as Lily prepared for her final battle against the men who tried to control her.
I believe S4 would have encompassed the final journeys of all the characters back to support Vanessa and to save her from the prophecy with their love and sense of family. I also believe in a parallel story, Lily would have battled Frankenstein, Hyde, and Dorian, emerging with her own power and potential, and with more compassion (just as John Clare had done).
Sigh.
@26 if that happened in the Bearanstain timeline, I want to go back to it. This one sucks anyway. Maybe in that one we got a 4th season, saner politics, and no pandemic. We can dream, right?
@27, I am 1000% with you on this. Let’s all go there! I absolutely want to go to a world where there is a season 4 (and fully realized season 3) of PENNY DREADFUL… and especially with no pandemic or political corruption or insanity.
Stay safe out there! Hang in there (you and all)!
This popped up in my timeline late.
Loved Penny Dreadful. I found the first season wonderful, but frustrating. The historical characters were in that uncanny valley where they are introduced as being “Frankenstein!,” but they really aren’t so you just find yourself arguing with the show about how “wrong” they are. Recommended it strongly to friends, but with the caveat that the famous characters used were not handled well.
When the second season was about to begin, I decided to rewatch the first. What a difference! Once I was not expecting Frankenstein to be “Frankenstein,” it was an entirely different show and I loved it. I think it is sad that camp has become the default manner of experiencing melodrama and extreme emotion. I’m using my Vic lit prof’s definition of melodrama, the exploration of the distance between law and justice, which certainly fits Penny Dreadful. Camp implies a distancing and a wink, gothic melodrama requires surrender.
As to the ending, I don’t know if it was Showtime or Logan who decided to cut the series short, but perhaps we should call the truncated show with ending that could well have worked with extra time to lead up to it. One thing missing from the discussion is that the ending fit in perfectly with Vanessa’s devout Catholicism. My reaction as someone old enough to have some memory of pre-Vatican II Catholicism was, I don’t like it but I deeply understand it.
Another thing tying the unsatisfying endings of GOT and Penny Dreadful is that the male writer(s) got absolutely lost when the ending came and it turned out to require an exploration of female interiority, agency, and resolve. And they completely blew it and turned years of work and audience engagement into Bitches Be Crazy. I had a screenwriting teacher who said that any man who’d been through a really ugly divorce should require a female editor to do a check on his female characters. The same should be expected for a man who has been writing a woman interacting with men, but is now moving solo through the world. It’s an extra level of difficulty which may not be recognized as such.
Thanks for the space to write out thoughts that have just sort of been in my head. I guess it is time for a rewatch and to pick up Showtime again for a month or two.
It’s on Crave in Canada, along with City of Angels.
I can’t decide if it would have been better for them to stick to their original plan for S3 and just leave it truncated rather than pull things out of shape for the ending than we got. It would have been nice to get a pay off for introducing Dr Jekyll.
Excellent article and I completely agree with everything you say!
****Spoilers*****
What I personally really enjoyed about this series was its new take on the mythology of Lucifer and Dracula, especially the later. It was one thing to introduce the notion of Dracula and Lucifer being brothers…both angels cast out of heaven by God to reside in two different planes (Hell and Earth) with different goals as far as the Mother of Evil was concerned (obtaining her soul vs obtaining her body.) BUT Penny Dreadful did a lovely job of casting away all the usual tropes about vampires (can’t walk in the sunlight, stakes through the heart can kill them, can’t see their reflection, etc. etc.) It also found a way to make Dracula even more frightening by introducing him as….an awkward, ordinary man. “He’s a strategist,” we’re told. The idea of a “thinking man’s Dracula,” to me is ten times more frightening than anything else. Even if these vampires (like the Nightcomers in Season 2) could be killed by ordinary bullets, it doesn’t take away from how terrifying (and somehow appropriate for the Victorian setting) that one of the most evil and dangerous creatures to ever walk the earth…could be standing right next to you chatting about a museum exhibit.