And because it eats us up and we gobble it down, we have strong opinions about fantasy around these parts. We’ve been fancasting Karen M Moning’s Fever Series’ non-existent Netflix show since before Netflix started originals. We’ve always wanted to see more fantasy on screen. We’ve always wanted our favorite fantasy series to make it there. Some of them like Kushiel’s Dart and The Original Sinners and Saga may never do so. Others like V Schwab and NK Jemisin and All Souls DO make it, and we rejoice when those adaptations are great. And then sometimes, a network or a streaming platform just develops* something they are calling “neo-noir urban fantasy” all on their own, and we are expected to swoon? In the immortal words of Cher from Clueless: “I don’t think so.”
*To be fair, Carnival Row was created by René Echevarria (The 4400, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine) and Travis Beacham (Electric Dreams), who began crafting the early concepts in the early 2000s.
Carnival Row May Not Be the Fantasy We Deserve
I sat down with the full season of Carnival Row with managed expectations but an open mind. After an impressive installation at San Diego Comic Con, I knew that at the very least, Amazon wasn’t trying to foist some no-budget nonsense (but with fae!) on unsuspecting viewers who miss Game of Thrones. The Victorian aesthetic at least reminded me of one of my absolute favorite shows to be brutally cancelled, Penny Dreadful, and with a cast like Jared Harris and Orlando Bloom and Indira Varma and Cara Delevingne, I was fully hopeful that it would be a welcome surprise.
But one episode in I feel more as if the aesthetics are a giant tease. The show is set in some sort of alternate universe; this is not the world we know, just full of faeries. No. It’s an altogether different world in which humanity developed on its own, only to discover an ancient species of fae and exploit their lands. We are dropped in the aftermath of a war between two colonizing human factions over faery lands – one (The Burgue) left the faery continent to the brutal occupation of the other (the Pact), and the resulting immigrating populations of faery refugees to The Burgue is our setting.
The Burgue (both the city and somehow the nation state) where the fae are “welcome” to relocate is a facsimile of industrial revolution era London with a sketchy area of brothels and markets inhabited by the different races of fae, all considered second class citizens at best. They’ve taken the accents, aesthetics and mores of Victorian England and pasted them onto a fantasy realm instead of doing more solid world-building. The laziness of having the fae use Irish accents as a short-hand for their unsuitable state of immigration and status as refugees is stark.
The world is meant to be wholly new, but familiar, but the ways in which it seems familiar make the subtle hints at world-building seem jarring and ill-fitting. It’s as if they couldn’t decide whether or not they wanted to build their own fantasy world or build a fantasy story in ours. Why do they live in “The Burgue” and not just London when the faery land is called Tirnanoc and that is the name of the ACTUAL Irish folklore island of paradise? Are we in an alternate universe or not? For contrast, when Karen M Moning wrote the fae into her modern-day Dublin, the Tuatha De existed all along in the same place as the world as we know it, only hidden from human eyes. If she’d needed an entirely new world, she would have built one.
That being said, the gritty political side of the show works well in an industrial revolutionary landscape. The politics are familiar and modern instead of medieval or feudal. There are guns and syringes instead of swords and arrows, there are medical abortions and amputations instead of milk of the poppy. I would simply have liked to have seen a structure surrounding the story instead of using the shortcuts we know of Irish immigration and British colonialism as templates.
There are pejoratives flying around toward every race of fae, and we are meant to see the prejudice and racism of those in The Burgue as abhorrent. Orlando Bloom’s character, Philo, is the only one with soft feelings and kind attention to them. It takes no time for the {spoiler about Philo} to make that softness seem a lot less chivalrous and more self-recriminating and self-serving. The slurs themselves feel as shoe-horned in as the nods to – OF COURSE – the Jack the Ripper homage who attacks female fae with racist and classist intent. There are fairies and centaurs and fauns and even unseelie races and werewolves, but the hierarchies are indistinguishable, and the human slurs for them are blanket. There’s an element to this mythology and language that I like, that shows the world-building without telling: the many races of fae, who see themselves as separate and distinguishable, are monolith to the humans. Humanity sets itself apart from them all, without distinction, and therefore all the faefolk are slurred with the same words.
Got questions about our new neo-noir fantasy @CarnivalRow?
Here’s @CaraDelevingne with SOME of the answers. #CarnivalRow arrives 30th August on Prime Video pic.twitter.com/Emxa8XAyW7— Prime Video UK (@primevideouk) July 2, 2019
Philo’s love story with Cara Delevingne’s character, Vignette (VIGNETTE!), is predictable and not as sexy as I want it to be. Although, there is quite a bit of sex and a hilarious scene where Vignette’s wings glow when she orgasms and I think she makes him levitate underneath her. Another character does the same thing during sex and a physically impossible (and I mean that in the actual sense of against the laws of physics) position results where the man is arched underneath a flying fairy as she rides him, pulling him up by what I assume is the strength of her vaginal muscles???? I don’t know. Anyway, another time Philo fails to make her wings glow, and I just … can’t. “It doesn’t happen every time, and it’s not supposed to happen at all with [you normal human loser]” is the most hilarious fantasy sex answer for the heroine to say to the hero that I have EVER seen. Ever.
But …
Carnival Row is the Fantasy We Got
The show is not un-watchable. Philo is a former sergeant in The Burgish (ugh) army who currently works as a police inspector. His hunt for the Jack the Ripper character in episode 1 leads to an unsatisfying conclusion, but sets the stage for a more fantastical one to come in the rest of the season, one that will ultimately hunt him (with a nod to the same type of Big Bad that we see in Stranger Things season 3). Keeping himself closed off to other people and brooding about the fae lover he left behind in the war is a great way to start the season. I only wish they’d hung out in that space a little longer. Keep the miserable, angsty, vengeful hot lead in torturous seclusion with meaningless sex with his landlady as his only consolation for longer than the span of one episode. Dig that knife a little deeper, and keep his secrets a little longer.
The political intrigue surrounding Jared Harris’ character, the Chancellor, and his wife, Piety (PIETY!) is 100% what I’m here for. Double-crossing and consulting fae seers and using female intuition and cunning to keep power is the kind of fantasy shit that keeps us coming back to the genre again and again. If you are just starting the show don’t use the scenes where the Breakspears talk politics to check your Instagram: this is the good stuff. This is the stuff that’s going to pay off in glorious fantasy fashion later on.
Despite the heavy-handed allegory of war-torn refugees thrust into a land that doesn’t want them, won’t help them and willfully resents them, the show has merit and fantasy chops. It will remind you of the fantasy novels that you read for the most ridiculous of pleasures; I found myself smiling just recognizing faery terms and mythologies that I only know from reading a ton of this shit for decades. Even though it’s missing many of the elements that make them great, it’s not wasted time to let these networks and platforms know that we are starving for that hot fantasy content. Soon we will be getting the new Lord of the Rings and The Wheel of Time. Someone tell them we are ready whenever they are for freaking Kushiel’s Dart!
All episodes of season one of Carnival Row are streaming now on Amazon Prime.
