Carnival Row: A Partial Review
Sep. 8th, 2019 08:21 pmI watched the first two episodes of Carnival Row early in the last week. It's urban fantasy, mystery, and horror all wrapped up into one. It's a beautiful style, a new world with a bleep-ton of backstory to it. It's neo-Victoriana, with well-thought faerie culture. It thinks about colonialism. It is right up my alley.
There are some issues. It's way too dark for my TV -- I have to have no lights on and the shades drawn to actually see what's happening on the screen. While there's both male and female nudity, the female nudity seems a lot more salacious than the male nudity. There is a thriving sex industry, but no indication that anyone other than skinny women are whores. (And there is very little respect for these sex workers, but that's also part of the fantasy racism.) The background cast is very multicultural, which is nice. Almost all of the speaking cast is white, white, white.
But, as of the end of episode 2, the good is outweighing the bad, and I am excited to get to episode 3.
( Now we're getting into some more serious spoilage )
I am very disappointed in what really looked to be an interesting, new story.
There are some issues. It's way too dark for my TV -- I have to have no lights on and the shades drawn to actually see what's happening on the screen. While there's both male and female nudity, the female nudity seems a lot more salacious than the male nudity. There is a thriving sex industry, but no indication that anyone other than skinny women are whores. (And there is very little respect for these sex workers, but that's also part of the fantasy racism.) The background cast is very multicultural, which is nice. Almost all of the speaking cast is white, white, white.
But, as of the end of episode 2, the good is outweighing the bad, and I am excited to get to episode 3.
( Now we're getting into some more serious spoilage )
I am very disappointed in what really looked to be an interesting, new story.