Too Much TV: THE WHITE QUEEN (2013)

George R. R. Martin says that the secret ingredient that has made his "Song of Ice and Fire" novels and their Game of Thrones TV adaptation so compelling is the influence of historical fiction. He has dubbed Maurice Druon's novels, set in 13th century France, as "the original Game of Thrones," but you can find similar qualities in many novels about the vicious intrigues of kings and queens. Philippa Gregory's "Cousins Wars" novels were written after Martin got his fantasy series under way, but they illustrate his point as well as any historical fiction. The BBC adapted three of the novels into The White Queen's ten episodes, and Starz premiere's a sequel, The White Princess, this weekend. By a coincidence only comic book fans can appreciate, the head writer for The White Queen was Emma Frost, who resumes that role for Princess. Her team took three Gregory novels, each of which apparently retraces the same historical ground from a different character's point of view, and made them one chronological narrative with three protagonists. The setting is 15th century England during the Wars of the Roses pitting the usurping house of York against loyalists of the house of Lancaster. The title character is the young widow Elizabeth Woodville (Rebecca Ferguson), whose family, the Rivers, are Lancastrians. So naturally she falls in love, after some initial difficulties, with Edward IV (Max Irons) the Yorkist king of England. Edward's insistence on marrying Elizabeth angers his mentor, the Earl of Warwick (James Frain), who had been arranging his marriage to a French princess. Warwick's family, the Nevilles, and Edward's family, particularly his brother George (David Oakes) deeply distrust the Rivers family -- and not without reason. One of Gregory/Frost's conceits is that Elizabeth, at times accused of witchcraft, is guilty, learning various folk magics from her mother and later handing them down to her daughter, the title character of the sequel. Running parallel to Elizabeth's rise are the travails of Warwick's daughter Anne Neville (Faye Marsay), who becomes queen as wife to Edward's baby brother Richard (Aneurin Barnard) after her sister Isabel marries George (David Oakes), the treacherous and ultimately mad middle York brother, and the conspiracies of Margaret Beaufort (Amanda Hale), whose son Henry Tudor has a distant claim to the English throne.

Edward's marriage to Elizabeth drives Warwick to an ill-fated rebellion in which George briefly participates. Forgiven, George seethes in peacetime, his hopes for land, wealth and power thwarted when Richard's marriage to Anne denies him control over the Warwick estate and Edward aborts an invasion of France. Finally, with his wife dying, George snaps, accusing witches of conspiring against him while retaining a sorcerer himself. Something that will surprise many viewers is the way George irredeemably plays the villain role usually reserved for Richard II, who in Gregory/Frost's revisionist scenario is a sometimes ruthless but relatively well-meaning prince and king, not to mention young, in a historically appropriate way, and handsome, which I write off to genre requirements. But if the popular image of Richard III is still largely shaped by Shakespeare's Tudor propaganda, which portrays him as a singular monster, he looks good by comparison on White Queen because just about everyone on the show is a monster.

The show may look superficially like shoulders-and-sheets romantic history, and offers a fair amount of female nudity to satisfy the market for that sort of thing, but its main virtue is its refusal to romanticize any of its queens or princesses. Elizabeth is all too conscious of the enmity of the Nevilles and is willing to use witchcraft against them; Anne, at first the most innocent of the girls, descends into paranoia about Elizabeth after her father and sister die; Margaret is a relentless fanatic out to destroy anyone in her (that is, Henry's) path to the throne. Informed by her supremely cynical later husband Stanley (Rupert Graves) that Henry will have to walk past five corpses -- Edward and his two sons, Richard and his -- Margaret puts her trust in God and gets to work sowing mutual distrust between the two households and particularly the two wives. She's probably the most hateful (and Hale the plainest) of the principal women, but by the end none of them are really likable. "Men go to battle; women wage war" was this show's motto, underscoring their common ruthlessness for family's sake, while the York tragedy shows that families all too readily could turn on themselves. With so much power and wealth so tantalizingly close, the characters have no other center of gravity. Morals are sacrificed to family interests, and family ties are sacrificed to personal ambition.  

White Queen may not really be a "Game of Thrones," since our title character makes it all the way through, and will be played by a new, older actress on Princess, and it had nothing like the HBO blockbuster's budget, but a similar spirit of fascinating hopelessness prevails, embodied by a terrific ensemble cast -- and there's magic! I steered clear of Queen until Starz started advertising Princess, mainly because I took it to be no more than historical soap-opera, despite the arresting poster image of Ferguson grabbing a sword by its blade. Now, thanks to Queen, while I can't help wondering how Princess won't seem uneventful by comparison, I won't be waiting to watch it.

Too Much TV: WESTWORLD (2016-?)

For cable series with short seasons (13 episodes or less) I've tried to wait until after a season is over to write a review, but in Westworld's case an uncertainty about what the hell is going on is such an essential element of the show that I feel entitled to write something now, with only six episodes aired so far. HBO's long-in-the-works series is a radical revision of Michael Crichton's 1973 movie, the author's first imagining of a high-tech theme park where nothing could possibly go wrong ... go wrong ... go wrong...Anyway, it follows in the footsteps of the Battlestar Galactica reboot by vesting its androids with personalities, and goes further by making them the most sympathetic characters on the show. As reimagined by Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy, with significant input from J. J. Abrams, Westworld is a vast playground where guests can take part in storylines with highly interactive "hosts," each with its own backstory. The guests pay huge sums for the ultimate privilege of using the hosts however they please. They can play along with the established storylines and be heroes, or they can go "blackhat" and kill, rape or otherwise the hosts with virtual impunity. Atrocities are routine, but every time a host is "killed," it's taken to the shop to have its body repaired and its memory purged, and then sent out to start its story over. Behind the scenes, employees battle for creative control of the storylines, and sometimes exploit the hosts in quasi-necrophiliac fashion. Ruling over it all is the perhaps too blatantly named Robert Ford (Anthony Hopkins), the co-creator of Westworld who now theoretically answers to the Delos Corporation but seems to do as he damn well pleases regardless of heavy monetary losses and pressure from the Delos board to deliver new storylines.

We'd have no show if nothing went wrong, and the problem evolving as we arrive is that some hosts are starting to remember the traumas they've suffered. A line of Shakespeare, "These violent delights have violent ends," seems to be a trigger phrase activating deeply hidden protocols in the remaining first-generation hosts, thirty years after Westworld's opening was marred by the death of Ford's partner, a man we know only as Arnold, who has loomed ever larger as the series progresses. Two hosts serve as our point-of-view characters to these changes. They represent opposed western archetypes: the rancher's daughter Dolores (Evan Rachel Wood) and the whorehouse madam Maeve (Thandie Newton). Dolores got the trigger phrase from the host that played her father, and gave it to Maeve almost at random. Both hosts relive brutal attacks as dreams, and both seem to be victimized by the so-called Man in Black (Ed Harris), apparently a philanthropist in real life but a sadistic superman in Westworld. A regular if not addicted guest, the Man in Black has mastered the system so that he's virtually invincible, but continues hunting for hidden levels. He seems to believe that Westworld has not lived up to its potential and seeks to awaken that potential through extreme violence and cruelty to the hosts. He has a privileged status at Westworld ("That gentleman gets anything he wants," one staffer says), and why that should be is one of the show's most compelling mysteries so far. He now hopes to discover a maze that may be Westworld's ultimate level. For the hosts the maze is an Indian myth, but it may be something more than that. "The maze is not for you," one tells the Man in Black, and it may be for the hosts; a test they can undertake with a hint of true freedom at the end.

Dolores seems headed for the maze, accompanied by two corporate guests, one striving to be a good guy, the other a practiced blackhat. She's coached by a voice in her head that has enabled her to override the programming that prevents hosts from harming living creatures. She's also coached in a different way by one of Ford's top aides, Bernard Lowe (Jeffrey Wright), who breaks one of Ford's personal rules by interviewing a fully-clothed Dolores. Ford prefers that the hosts go naked in the shop to discourage the staff from humanizing them, though he has a sentimental mockup of his own family, including a host version of himself as a child, in an isolated location in the park. Dolores and the Man in Black seem to be on a collision course, unless you buy into the popular fan theory, perhaps inspired by NBC's nonlinear family drama This is Us, that their storylines are actually happening many years apart. Meanwhile, Maeve seems to be figuring things out for herself without the same coaching Dolores gets. She remembers waking up accidentally and seeing the inner workings of Westworld, remembers being shot despite having no scar where the wound should be, and cuts herself open to find a bullet staffers had forgotten to remove. Piecing these details together, she starts getting herself killed deliberately in the hope of waking up in the shop again, and eventually gets her wish. Now, while Dolores continues to blunder toward her destiny, Maeve blackmails some Westworld staffers into explaining how she functions and upgrading her for purposes that remain to be seen. While all this is happening there's evidence of corporate espionage inside the park, and increasing evidence that Arnold hasn't had his last word yet on the future of Westworld and its hosts....

Much of what I could say about Westworld right now remains speculative, but for genre fans that's part of the fun of the show. The show is a kind of mystery or puzzle in which speculation is essential to the experience; if you're impatient for explanations it won't be for you. The game-like nature of the show extends to its soundtrack, which each week challenges you to identify the contemporary rock tune being covered on the player piano in Maeve's brothel. The show exists, as my mom used to say when we asked why too often, to make you ask questions. Who is the Man in Black? How did Arnold actually die, if he's actually dead? Who among the guests or staff might actually be hosts? Any show can beg questions like this, but Westworld's writing and acting make the questions worth asking and trying to answer. When Hopkins first appeared, I thought dismissively that he'd become the rich man's Malcolm McDowell, but he seems to be on his game here, while Harris makes an evilly enigmatic Man in Black. Wood and Newton are the real stars here, as well as our surrogates as seekers after the truth of Westworld, In their contrasting quests they seem more human than human, given the despicable nature of so many human guests in this decadent playground. But there are plenty of sympathetic humans as well -- presuming that they're human, of course. The mysteries of Westworld give the show an expansiveness beyond its massive budget. My worry is that once its mysteries are resolved it will lose a lot of its mystique. It may be better not to know enough than to know too much, but only time will tell one way or another. For now, it's my favorite new show of the fall.

Too Much TV: GOMORRAH (2014 -?)

Inspired by Roberto Saviano's dangerous expose of organized crime in Naples, and presumably also by Matteo Garrone's film adaptation of Saviano's book, Stefano Sollima's TV series debuted in Italy in 2014 and reached the U.S., subtitled rather than dubbed, on the Sundance Channel this summer. By the time the first season premiered in America, a second season had wrapped in Italy, with more reported on the way. Sollima is the son of the late Sergio Sollima, who directed some decent crime films back in the 1970s along with his better known spaghetti westerns. Perhaps fitting for a second-generation director, Gomorrah is a blend of old and new. It's still relatively new in its deromanticized portrait of Italian organized crime, leaving behind the stylish men of respect for tattooed goons in hoodies like you'd see just about anywhere on earth. But at its heart the TV Gomorrah is a familiar sort of family saga of tragic dimensions, anchored by powerful performances by Maria Pia Calzone and Salvatore Esposito as a mother and son struggling to hold their crime family together after Don Pietro Savastano (Fortunato Cerlino) is sent to prison, and even better work by Marco D'Amore as the man who comes between mother and son and eventually becomes a mortal enemy to both.

Gennaro Savastano (Esposito) starts out as a spoiled, overgrown kid who idolizes one of his dad's best soldiers, Ciro Di Marzio (D'Amore). Don Pietro wants Ciro to make more of a man of his boy by taking him out on his first killing. Genny is eager but uncertain, impatient to prove himself yet prone to freezing at crucial moments. Tasked with killing a man, Genny manages to wound him but can't bring himself to finish the victim off. Shamed by his failure despite Ciro's attempt to cover for him, Genny wipes out on his motorcycle and the accident leads to Don Pietro's arrest. Caught speeding on the way to the hospital, Pietro is caught carrying drugs by cops who refuse to be bribed or intimidated. At first it looks like Pietro will keep running things from behind bars but the state isn't as pliant as it used to be. As he's forced into solitary confinement, it becomes Genny's responsibility to lead the family. Ciro sees this as his big chance to be the power behind the throne as Genny's top adviser, but Genny's mother Imma (Calzone) doesn't trust Ciro. Lady Imma, as she's usually called, is not your grandmother's mob wife. She knows full well what her husband does and has some strong ideas on how to run a mob herself. She effectively becomes Don Pietro's regent and makes a point of marginalizing Ciro. Imma has a global vision as well as solid plans for expanding operations on the ground, and she doesn't scruple at having people whacked to further her plans. People who dig the powerful women on American TV should see Imma as a sister-in-arms.

In her most drastic move to separate Genny and Ciro, Imma sends her son on a dangerous mission to Honduras to arrange for a new supply of drugs while sending Ciro to Spain to negotiate with an old enemy of his, Salvatore Conte (Marco Palvetti), whose mother's apartment was torched by Ciro in the first scene of the series. For a while, you wonder how ruthless Imma is, whether she's interested in either Ciro or Genny coming home. But each mission proves a success, despite some rough treatment for both men. Genny returns transformed by his ordeal: leaner, meaner and initially embittered toward his mother. But if Ciro thinks that things will improve for him, he soon learns otherwise. Genny is now determined to be his own master, and finally begins to reconcile with Imma when she explains that that was why she sent him to Honduras. Whether she expected him to return as vicious as he becomes -- he now can shoot a waiter in cold blood for reminding him of having been a fat boy -- is doubtful, but they soon join forces in Genny's scheme to put a new political regime, beholden to him personally, in power at the next election.

When Genny's man wins it looks like all's well with the Savastanos, but Giro is tired of being trod upon. Seeing no room for advancement with Genny and Imma in the way, he decides to bring the whole thing down by secretly provoking a war between the Savastanos and the Contes. Until this point you could sympathize with Ciro because for all his amoral ruthlessness he has seemed a good soldier and faithful to Don Pietro, and you could argue that first Imma, then Genny, have treated him unfairly. But in the last hours of the first season Ciro proves himself a monster, goading a dumb kid into killing a Conte man, on the assumption that Genny will be blamed, then trying to blot out his trail by killing the kid. When the kid proves elusive, Ciro kidnaps the kid's girlfriend and tortures her to death to find out what she might know. The kid ends up in Conte's hands and confesses that Ciro put him up to the killing, while Imma receives a cellphone that luckily recorded Ciro's kidnapping of the girl as she was trying to send a message. This sets up a showdown between the show's two real masterminds, Imma and the "Immortal" Ciro, as Gomorrah builds to a suspenseful climax -- in fact, a double cliffhanger -- that tests Imma's ability to think steps ahead of Ciro and Ciro's survival instincts and pure luck. To go into more detail would spoil a show that doesn't deserve such treatment; the final hour is one of the most exciting hours of TV I've seen in a while, and I regret to report that it had me actually rooting for one group of brutal murderers and drug dealers to defeat another. That's really a tribute both to Marco D'Amore's success at playing a slow-burn villain and a natural empathy for family that Sollima and his writers exploit masterfully. It's good to know that Season Two is already in the can, though I wonder what can be done with so many in the large cast eliminated. Now it's just a matter of how soon Sundance wants to release it. For me, it cannot be too soon.

Too Much TV: OUTCAST (2016-?) and PREACHER (2016 -?)

In James Blish's story Black Easter triumphant demons dismiss the Bible as "propaganda," noting that "each of the opposing sides in any war predicts victory." Many modern genre writers have taken that idea to heart by adopting many of the trappings of Biblical mythology while rejecting the fundamental premise of God's omnipotence and inevitable triumph. They feel as entitled to play with the Judeo-Christian mythos as anyone does toward Greek or Norse or Chinese mythology. Some people, it seems, prefer the idea of demons running amok, or unsupervised angels running amok, without the bothersome absolutes of God as Christians in particular (if not also Muslims) understand him. As a sort of atheist myself -- one, that is, who acknowledges the impossibility of disproving the existence of an omnipotent being, especially one who likes to test people -- I have no problem with that, though I'd also have no problem with someone addressing in fiction how people might respond to indisputable proof of an omnipotent, jealous and judgmental creator. Right now people seem more comfortable imagining that the Bible describes something real, though not with perfect accuracy or honesty. Two Summer 2016 TV shows based on comic books grapple with the idea that the supernatural is not quite how the Bible describes it, or as believers see it. For one, this anti-Revelation is cause for black humor. For the other, it inspires one destructive crisis of faith while leaving the rest of us questioning what the "hell" is going on.

Preacher (AMC) is based on Garth Ennis's comics series for Vertigo, DC Comics' line of creator-owned titles offering alternatives to superhero action. The involvement of Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg (Sausage Party, but also The Green Hornet) should tip you off as to the overall tone of the show, but the real auteur of the show is probably writer/director Sam Catlin. There's a lot of weirdness for weirdness' sake in Annville TX, a methane-powered town (courtesy of the Quincannon Meat & Power Co.) where two rival sports mascots spend their whole lives in costume and former bank robber Jesse Custer (Dominic "Howard Stark" Cooper) preaches every Sunday in his father's old church. Jesse doesn't seem to have the calling, but three interesting things happen to him. His old girlfriend and partner in crime Tulip (Ruth Negga) returns in dramatic fashion, urging Jesse to join her vengeance quest for the man who betrayed them and drove off with their loot. A happy-go-lucky Irish vampire, Cassidy (Joseph Gilgun) literally falls out of the sky, having to leave a plane without a parachute when vampire hunters attack him. He'd still be a piece of abstract art in open country if a cow didn't happen by to give him nourishment. Most importantly, Jesse gets possessed by a dangerous entity -- others it possessed, all religious and quasi-religious figures, including Tom Cruise, exploded -- that confers upon him a voice that commands whoever hears it. With Cassidy as his helper or hanger-on and Tulip watching skeptically, Jesse believes he's been gifted by God to spread His word. He especially wants to convert the meanest man in town, Meat & Power proprietor Odin Quincannon (Jackie Earl Haley), an embittered degenerate who has espoused a Gospel of Meat since his family died in a horrific crash. Jesse (or "Preacher," as many call him) uses his new power to make some people change their evil ways, but his big goal is to make Odin "serve God." In fact, he wagers Odin that he can get him to serve God, or else he'll give up his church and the property it stands on. Jesse thinks he's won the bet, but he learns that what it means to "serve God" depends as much on who's listening as on who's talking.

Meanwhile, Jesse shouldn't really have his "gift." In the pilot we saw a Mutt-and-Jeff team of mystery men globetrotting to wherever the mysterious people explosions took place. When they reach Annville, we learn that they are angels (with a direct, primitive phone line to Heaven) tasked with reclaiming "Genesis," the entity possessing Jesse. The offspring of an angel and a demon, Genesis normally lives in an old economy-size coffee can and can be coaxed back inside if you sing "Wynken, Blynken and Nod" to it. Needless to say, these two incompetents -- luckily, they can rematerialize almost instantly after their terrestrial bodies are killed -- raise more questions than they can (or care to) answer. It turns out that Genesis doesn't want to leave Jesse, reinforcing his sense of mission even as Quincannon's unexpected defiance prods the Preacher to demand an irrefutable revelation from God Himself. Having stolen the angels' phone, Jesse promises his congregation that he'll talk to God in a way that everyone can see next Sunday. His triumph turns to existential disaster when it turns out that God Himself has disappeared to his angels know not where. It's almost anticlimactic after that when Annville is destroyed by a methane explosion, after Jesse, Tulip and Cassidy have set out on a quest to find God, more or less -- not knowing that they're being followed by the implacable, unstoppable Saint of Killers (Graham McTavish), a gunman doomed to relive the death of his family and his horrific vengeance upon an evil town until he's recruited by the angels to reclaim Genesis by killing its host....

Preacher goes against the grain of modern genre shows by virtually demanding indifference to the fates of most of its characters, having shoved most of its pieces off the board in its first-season finale. It's enough to invite indifference to the show's fate, despite strong ensemble acting and impressive craftsmanship throughout, unless you're committed to dark quirkiness as an end unto itself or find atrocity inherently hilarious. For this show the absence of God amid the evidence of angels, Hell, etc. makes everything a cosmic joke. Dominic Cooper does all he can with the role of Jesse Custer, but can't keep him from coming across as a self-pitying putz, while McTavish's Cassidy is occasionally amusing but ultimately a one-note stereotype of violent irreverence. Ruth Negga, who has a highly-touted role in the movie Loving this fall, enters the show like a super badass but rarely gets to live up to that entrance. Negga is a good enough actress to make you wish Tulip could convince Jesse to return to her world. However mundane it may be, it's probably a more compelling underworld than the snickering apocalypse Preacher promises.  I don't object to black comedy at all, but it had better be funnier than Preacher usually is if it really wants my respect.

It's too soon to pass judgment on the mythos of Outcast (Cinemax) because as yet we have but few clues as to what exactly is going on in Rome WV. Adapted from the newest comics series by Robert (The Walking Dead) Kirkman,  Outcast expands considerably on the first twelve issues of the comic, adding or enhancing supporting players and subplots. The main story remains focused on Kyle Barnes (Patrick Fugit), an isolated man with a record of domestic violence, now separated from his wife and daughter by a restraining order. Kyle's mother is a catatonic inmate of a mental institution. She and Kyle's wife both have been possessed by something; naturally enough, Kyle assumes it's the devil at first. He's reinforced in that belief by Rev. Anderson (Philip Glenister), the local exorcist. As Kyle's sister Megan (Wrenn Schmidt) tries to draw him back into the world, he finds that he has a special knack for dealing with the possessions Anderson ministers to. Kyle can hurt and even drive the demons out of people by touching them, inspiring awe and eventually envy in Anderson, especially once he suspects that his own exorcisms haven't worked as well as he'd assumed. Kyle has something Anderson's faith can't account for, something to do with the demons calling Kyle an "Outcast."

Kyle and Anderson discover an epidemic of possessions that the Rev. blames on Sidney (Brent Spiner), a newcomer in town who takes over the home of Kyle's neighbor who'd unexpectedly killed himself. Pale and black-clad, Sidney certainly looks the part of a satanic mastermind, and he plays the part when Anderson gets too nosy and confrontational, carving a pentagram into the Rev.'s chest as a warning against further interference in what we come to know as "the merge." It begins to be apparent that Kyle has power over the possessed while Anderson doesn't because they're not really possessed by the sort of demons Christianity tells us about. We learn that they come from someplace where they can't stay anymore, that they "land" in people randomly (Sidney had the bad luck of landing in a serial killer whose impulses he must struggle against), that the possessed can find their presence pleasurable once they get over a violently traumatic period of adjustment, and that the possesseds' loved ones can find the experience pleasurable too, one collaborating husband having found his wife more exciting once taken over. You could almost believe a modus vivendi is possible, except for the feeling that Sidney and his friends are going to do what they have to do whether we really like it or not. Whether Kyle is one of them in some way remains unclear, but it's significant that his daughter demonstrates similar power over the possessed in the season finale. In an odd parallel, both Outcast and Preacher ended their premier seasons with the protagonist leaving town -- you could almost imagine the two groups of characters meeting in some diner -- but the Outcast cliffhanger teases that Kyle might not be allowed to leave town.

Like Preacher, Outcast has a strong ensemble cast. Of this group, Philip Glenister steals the show as the tormented Rev. Anderson, a sincere servant of God who succumbs to the sin of pride in his determination to prove his exorcism methods as effective as Kyle's. Anderson's is the moral horror of a man fighting a holy war in the apparent absence of God. His tragedy is that he can only see what's happening in Bible terms, as a struggle with demons from Hell led by Sidney as The Devil Himself. Ironically, this puts him on a fatal collision course with an unpossessed punk who attaches himself to Sidney to spite the Rev., who happens to be dating his mom. At his best Anderson can still be helpful to Kyle, but at his worst you can believe he causes more damage, direct and collateral, than Sidney and his kind. Both Outcast and Preacher are noteworthy for the way ordinary citizens -- Reg E. Cathey's police chief is the standout in the supporting cast -- become willing to believe in outlandish things; Outcast is more noteworthy in this respect simply because Rome is a less outlandish place than Annville. Both shows steer admirably clear of "they won't believe me" tropes when the evidence of strangeness is too obvious to characters and viewers alike. Of the two shows, I obviously like Outcast better for the perhaps lame reason that it takes itself more seriously than Preacher does. For shows like these, that means Outcast more effectively and intriguingly plays out the implications of its fantasies, though again, Preacher could redeem itself if it were as funny as it thinks it is -- if it were Ash Vs. Evil Dead funny, for instance. It isn't a bad show at all, except that it won't pass the "who cares?" test for many people. In a highly competitive genre TV environment Outcast does get you to care, and it's the show I'm more certain to watch when it returns for another season.

Too Much TV: UNDERGROUND (2016-?)

My local cable provider picked up WGN America just in time for the first season -- it has earned a second -- of Misha Green and Joe Popski's series, the first event in a new wave of slavesploitation that will include a remake of Roots and a new Birth of A Nation movie taking the Nat Turner rebellion as its subject. While any slavery show is inescapably a commentary on American race relations, Underground can be enjoyed as a short-season series in the modern mold, full of plot twists, complicated characters and various degrees of darkness, along with some decent action. The plot is simplicity itself; we witness the planning and execution of a mass escape of slaves from a Georgia plantation, though the execution, predictably enough given the twists and complications, doesn't go quite as planned. The opening episode does one thing right above all; it introduces most of the major slave characters in one sequence as two of the escape plotters determine who can be useful or dependable. Characters are identified by name, assigned skills and character traits. It might seem like convenient exposition by some dramatic standards but I'd bet that TV viewers would like more such exposition than they normally get. By giving us a diverse cast of slave characters the creators can have things both ways in their portrayal of slavery. They can give us a crowd-pleasing narrative of resistance while showing the diversity, moral as well as vocational, of slave experience. Inevitably in an ambitious modern TV series you can't have a cast comprised entirely of innocents and moral exemplars, since you want to keep the possibility of betrayal in the air. The best case of this among the slaves is Cato (Alano Miller), trusted enough by the master to be promoted to overseer, self-interested and cunning enough to be a constant threat to the conspirators, yet also the person who starts the breakout ahead of schedule, for reasons of his own, almost immediately after his promotion. With him in the group, solidarity among the "Macon 7" can never be taken for granted. More ambiguous still is Ernestine (Amirah Vann), a privileged house slave and lover of the married master (Reed Diamond), whose daughter -- theirs, in fact -- unexpectedly joins the runaways. Underground is brave enough to show that real passion exists between slave and master and may contribute to self-loathing on both their parts. It's part of a complex brew that makes Ernestine an amoral yet sympathetic character, one willing to murder a fellow slave, who was in on the plot, in order to save her daughter from recapture, and finally willing to murder her lover/master with the comment that they're both going to Hell, only he'll get there first. You can identify a few of the Macon 7 as good guys, but ultimately none of them are squeaky-clean by the end of the season.

Underground hedges its bets a little by foregrounding its white characters early on, but they mostly recede to their more proportionate place as the season progresses. Along with Tom Hakes, the master, we're introduced to his brother John (Marc Blucas), who's become a lawyer in the north and is summoned back south to become Tom's campaign manager (whatever that means in the antebellum era) in an upcoming election. Tom doesn't know that John and his wife Elizabeth (Jessica DeGouw) are abolitionists who will turn their new home into a station on the Underground Railroad. The preservation of their secret is the constant subplot of the first season, while we wait for members of the Macon 7 to show up at their doorstep. This subplot gets mighty melodramatic if not soap-operatic at times, as when a U.S. Marshall finds out the secret but promises silence in return for sex from Elizabeth. Unsurprisingly, we learn that John's hands are not exactly clean; he'd once provided legal services for a slave auction, as we learn when a violent escapee whose wife was sold on that occasion shows up suddenly to take the Hawkeses hostage. The point of all this isn't to reduce everything to shades of gray, however, since on a show like Underground there's very little uncertainty about who the good guys and bad guys are, even after all their flaws or redeeming qualities are taken into account. The one exception to that may be the slave-hunter August Pullman (Christopher Meloni), who seems simply to be too much of a badass to be dismissed as a villain, though the idea that he does his thing for economic reasons (as opposed to anyone else?) doesn't really add much depth to him. I expected to see him dead by the end of the season but he seems to be unkillable, though many have tried. Thankfully Underground hasn't been killed, and I've tried and given up on enough shows this season to appreciate its virtues. If not a true top-tier series, I'd still put it in the top ten of the new shows I've watched this season.

Too Much TV: JESSICA JONES (2015 -?) and SUPERGIRL (2015 -?)

There is a civil war among comic book fans deeper than the partisanship of Marvel and DC readers or the "who's stronger?" debates within each company's fandom. It sometimes seems like nothing less than a battle for the soul of superhero comics. On one side are arrayed longtime readers dissatisfied with just about every trend in comics over the last generation or two, and on the other are those who rather like what's happened. One side is aesthetically conservative but often self-consciously progressive in their politics, while the other simply knows what it likes. Go to some comic-book news or fan sites and you'll see what I mean. It's kind of a one-sided war, with a vocal minority convinced that it represents a hidden majority of potential readers who'd like comics to be what they were five or ten or thirty years ago. These are the lifers: people who've continued their comics reading into adulthood out of love for characters and the sensations of superpowered action. They've read comics for a very long time, and happened to come of age as fans during a period when both Marvel and DC were committed to intensive continuity that included the evolution of longterm relationships between established characters. This was the era when Superman actually married Lois Lane, and when Spider-Man actually married Mary Jane Watson, among other events. All of this was going on at the same time that Frank Miller and Alan Moore, among others, had transformed the wider public's idea of what comics were and could be. The authors of The Dark Knight Returns and Watchmen are among the founders of what the lifers sneeringly call "grimdark," a sensibility of constant apocalypse favoring worst-case scenarios and extreme responses, where perseverance in spite of pessimism and the picking of psychic scabs prevails. For some time, grimdark coexisted with an older mindset that saw the flourishing of multigenerational superhero families and virtual families as cause for optimism for humanity outside comic book pages. But in the early 21st century something went awry in the comic book business. At Marvel, a story changed history so that Spidey and MJ had never married. At DC, the entire comic-book multiverse was effectively rebooted in 2011 so that Lois and Clark had never married. Continuities and fictional legacies were abruptly purged in other ways that left longtime readers feeling violated and betrayed, especially when new storylines and continuities at both major companies seemed grimmer and darker than ever.

Arguably this was the ultimate consequence of the unintentional self-ghettoization of the comic-book audience at specialty stores where freedom from the old censorious Comics Code was supposed to liberate comics into a wider expressiveness on all levels, but only reinforced the preferences of certain subcultures of adolescent and post-adolescent males. Many lifers presumably went to the same stores, but for whatever reasons they developed expectations from comics that went increasingly against the cultural and corporate grain. Their own preferences may seem old-fashioned or naive to many more recent readers, or to the people currently writing comics, but as noted earlier lifers often see themselves as progressives in most other respects. They may be the sort of people who are dismissed by the new mainstream of comics fans as SJWs ("social justice warriors"). Their desire for optimistic, idealistic comics founded on longterm "ships" includes an openness to greater representation in comics for women as well as homosexuals and other minorities. They are the people who protest against "fridging" female characters -- killing them, often in gruesome fashion, simply to give male heroes something to react to and emote about, named after a scene in a story in which a female victim was stuffed in a refrigerator -- and against the "bury your gays" trope in all media. You could call them "politically correct" to the extent that they want comics to be a sort of "safe space" in which diversity is welcomed unconditionally and all kinds of people are shown to be equally capable of heroism. It's harder to say what the other side wants since they aren't, in my experience, as articulate or dogmatic about their preferences. Many of them, most likely, simply want comics to be cool or badass or extreme, depending on what those terms mean to them. I don't get the feeling that they're as judgmental about the comics the lifers like as vice versa, apart from some contempt for an ideal of heroism some describe in terms of Superman rescuing kittens from trees in the 1978 movie. By comparison, the lifers -- as a matter of disclosure, I consider myself a lifer who has gotten over himself -- seem convinced that there is something wrong with the comics the other side likes, morally as well as aesthetically, and maybe something wrong with the people who like them as well.

Wasn't I supposed to be reviewing some TV shows? Well, wait no longer, because by coincidence two shows with strong female leads, which in theory should be equally popular with the lifers for that reason and may be, nonetheless come as close to representing the opposite extremes of superhero comics as any two shows or movies out today.

Greg Berlanti's Supergirl, in particular, often seems consciously in opposition to grimdark. It's a show that takes to heart the concept from the movie Man of Steel that the "S" on the Superman shield is a symbol of hope, even though Supergirl says it represents the motto, "Stronger Together." As lifers and other enemies of grimdark want comics and superheroes to inspire hope, so Supergirl (Melissa Benoist) literally saves the world in her first-season finale by an appeal to hope. I mean literally: she actually reads a speech urging people under mind control to think hopeful thoughts, and it works. As an expansion of the Berlanti multiverse into Big Three network territory, Supergirl aims for a broader audience than his CW shows while retaining their preoccupation, deeply annoying to fans seeking more badass extremism, with romantic shipping. It comes closer to the camp quality of older superhero shows than Arrow or Flash, though it has its own grimdark moments. It's a free adaptation of the already much-mutated Supergirl comic book mythos, throwing in such new elements as an adoptive human sister for Kara Danvers, nee Zor-El, who also happens to be a badass agent of the DEO, the government agency dedicated to surveillance and control of aliens and metahumans on Earth. Its main organizing concept is that Kara, sent as a babysitter for Kal-El in a separate escape pod, reached Earth late, after Kal had grown up to be Superman (who maintains a quasi-presence on the show as a body without a face or the sender of text messages), and around the same time as a vast Kryptonian-built prison ship whose crash releases a host of alien criminals, along with their hardened Kryptonian keepers, on an unsuspecting world.The warden of the prison ship, now dedicated to conquering Earth, is Kara's aunt Astra. While the DEO keeps its hunt for hostile aliens secret, even from Superman, Kara herself, once she reveals her powers to the world, becomes the target of xenophobic suspicion, stirred up mostly by genius industrialist and Luthor-wannabe Maxwell Lord. In another irony, the head of the DEO, Hank Henshaw, is actually a benign shape-shifting Martian Manhunter who gradually reveals his secret to the Danvers sisters, whose father (former Superman Dean Cain) befriended J'onn J'onzz before a death (at the hands of the real, evil Henshaw) that may not be as fatal as people first thought. Many lessons are taught about tolerance and many messages sent, particularly by media mogul Cat Grant (Callista Flockhart), for whom Kara works in civilian life, about the importance of a superheroine as a female role model and inspirational figure. As a Berlanti show, Supergirl inevitably tangles Kara in a romantic polygon. Her main romantic interest is former Daily Planet photographer James Olsen, who has been reimagined as both black and, more controversially, a stud rather than the archetypal dweeb. Olsen, however, is torn between Kara and old flame Lucy Lane, Lois's sister, who careens between careers as a JAG and a legal counsel for Cat Grant. Meanwhile, another Catco worker, Win Schott, son of the notorious Toyman, pines for Kara and struggles with jealousy of Olsen, just as Olsen, in one hilarious episode, sulks jealously while Supergirl (he knows her secret) pals around with The Flash, who has blundered into the CBS universe (one of many universes, as established on his own show) by running too fast. Inevitably in a "girl power" show like this one the guys end up behaving like the female romantic interests that so many fans of the other Berlanti shows despise. In short, the Berlanti DNA is unmistakable, but despite many violent tragedies the positive is accentuated as often as possible, the idea affirmed more than his other shows dare that heroes exist to inspire and thus empower the rest of us to be and do our best. Supergirl thus has a layer of preachy artifice, largely missing from Berlanti's other shows, that's resented by comics fans who don't like messages (feminism, tolerance, hope) "shoved down their throats" but admired, presumably, by oldschool fans who feel that this, however campy or cheesy it may sound, is what superhero stories should do.

Conveniently, the concept of mind control gives us a point of direct comparison between Supergirl and Marvel's Jessica Jones. On Supergirl the evil Kryptonians have activated a device that puts almost everyone is National City under mind control in an attempt to achieve utopian unity at the expense of individuality, which Supergirl reawakens through her appeal to hope. Over on Netflix, Jessica Jones's antagonist throughout her first season is Killgrave (David Tennant), the twisted result of experimentation who controls minds merely by making eye contact and speaking. In comics his power was explained by his unique purple skin, but the show wisely neglects that detail. Anyway, Killgrave knows no other way to interact with people than by dominating their minds so that they fulfill his every whim. He's not above making people kill themselves to get his way, or to stop Jessica (Krysten Ritter), a woman with unmeasured superhuman strength and other powers, from taking him in and making him confess to making one of her friends kill her parents. Jessica is constantly thwarted by having to save people Killgrave throws into jeopardy, not to mention all the shit that happens randomly in her catastrophe of a life. But as a heroine she prevails in the end, by snapping Killgrave's neck. Until then, Jessica Jones had been an infuriating show in the best possible way, Killgrave's every lucky or unfair escape increasing your eagerness to see him dealt with once and for all, as opposed to shows that infuriate you by having the heroes act stupidly in order to keep a season-long storyline going. Another example of the benefits of shorter seasons at thirteen episodes, Jones represents another twist in the struggle between Marvel/Disney and DC/Time Warner for all-media dominance. While Marvel Studios dominates cinema currently and faces no imminent threat after the critical drubbing given  to Batman v. Superman, DC has the advantage in direct-to-video animation and on television thanks to Berlanti. Instead of sending reinforcements on the conventional TV front, Marvel staked new territory on Netflix beginning with Daredevil and instantly won acclaim for programming that was darker, grittier and less annoying in some ways than the Berlanti DC shows, but also darker and grittier in many ways than the Marvel Cinematic Universe whose advantage over DC's movies was thought to be its lighter, more personable tone. I found Daredevil to be more hype than fact, praised inordinately for its derivative first-season plot mainly for having more visceral violence and less shipping than Berlanti's shows. But Jessica Jones really does live up to the Marvel/Netflix mandate of more mature and truly darker, grittier content. It's basically a superhero noir, right down to Jones working as a private eye in Hell's Kitchen, but also noir for the 21st century without the fetishistic aesthetics you might associate with this particular n-word. Jessica is guilt-haunted after having killed a woman with one punch under Killgrave's control (she's grown immune to him by the time of the show), drinks like a fish and has casual sex with bartender Luke Cage (Mike Colter), who is at once another superhuman (his skin is impervious) and the husband of the woman Jessica killed. If the Avengers cavort at the figurative and literal heights, Jessica's milieu is the lower depths, where hope is a joke and heroism is a matter of muddling through. Platitudes don't offer easy answers here; it may be as much of a contrivance that Jessica has to kill Killgrave as it was in Man of Steel that Superman had to kill General Zod, but there's an honesty to the contrivance on Jessica Jones that doesn't feel like a betrayal of the superhero genre -- I should note that it isn't a bad thing to imagine people capable of solving the worst problems without killing -- because the integrity of the story on its own terms transcends superhero convention. At the same time, Jones doesn't neglect the work of world-building as part of a sequence of shows destined to climax in a Defenders team-up. It remains essentially a comic-book show, but it shows that that label can encompass comfortably much more than those who hate grimdark would allow. Jessica Jones is superior not only to Supergirl but also to Daredevil, and its title character may be the most fully and convincingly developed small-screen superhero to date. Yet I can understand why some people might like Supergirl better for the messages it sends and its pure fantasy of almost limitless power to do good. You could argue that Supergirl and Jessica Jones are two sides of the same coin; perhaps it's Two-Face's old two-headed coin with Jessica the scarred side. I'd like to think that any comics fan could appreciate each show's virtues while preferring one to the other for aesthetic rather than ideological reasons, and that a genre that includes both extremes is actually pretty healthy in its flexibility. Some people feel that there are too many superhero movies and shows already, while others feel that there are too many of certain kinds, but I dare say that the genre is still only beginning to show its range, and I still look forward to better things to come.

Too Much TV: THE SHANNARA CHRONICLES (2016-?) and THE MAGICIANS (2016-?)

Rarely do you see a show so specifically tailored for a cable channel and its audience demographic as Miles Millar and Alfred Gough's Shannara Chronicles, which makes it ironic that the MTV series is effortlessly surpassed in what it presumably wanted to do -- make a world of magic accessible to a relatively casual contemporary viewer -- by Sera Gamble and Sean McNamara's The Magicians on SyFy. It's not just that Magicians is set in the present day, since Shannara bends over backwards to make its postapocalyptic setting as nearly contemporary as possible. The crucial difference is that Shannara tries to bend Terry Brooks's characters and concepts into a cliche of modernity, while Magicians, adapting Lev Grossman's trilogy of novels, relies on superior writing and acting to develop several strong, distinctive personalities who feel modern because they feel real. Shannara ends up a mirror of MTV's own fantasy of youth, while Magicians, for all its purposefully derivative trappings, is becoming a uniquely character-driven fantasy show, and the best new genre program of the 2015-16 TV season.

The Shannara Chronicles approximately adapts Brooks's novel The Elfstones of Shannara. Some time after a cataclysmic event destroys human civilization, once-fantastical species have evolved from man, the dominant species, apparently, being the elves. Culturally, on the show at least, the elves are much as you and I, only with pointy ears. The show begins on a note of progress as Princess Amberle (Poppy Drayton) becomes the first female to pass the grueling endurance test to become a guardian of the Elcrys, the magical tree on which the well-being of the elf kingdom (ruled over by John Rhys-Davies) depends. Progress comes too late, it seems, since the Elcrys is dying, and that puts the kingdom in danger of invasion and annihilation by hordes of demons. The druid Allanon (Manu Bennett), Brooks's badass Gandalf, reports that the cure for the Elcrys can be found in distant Safehold. After most of the Elcrys guard is massacred, Amberle takes up the quest to Safehold, accompanied by half-elf Wil Ohmsford (Austin Butler), a descendant of the hero of Brooks's earlier novel The Sword of Shannara. Wil possesses the mighty Elfstones, which get him out of many a jam but tax him physically, as all magic does to its wielders in this world. Along for the ride is Eretria (Ivana Baquero), a human Rover i.e. a brigand initially tasked by her leader and adopted father (James Remar) with stealing the Elfstones so she herself won't be sold into slavery. Meanwhile, Allanon has magical skirmishes with the big bad and mentors an elf with powerful and potentially dangerous abilities, while the elf king is murdered and replaced by a changeling in league with the demons.

MTV took on Shannara presumably because the success of its Teen Wolf series showed its audience had an appetite for genre stories. Just as Teen Wolf evolved into something far different and darker than its comic namesake, so Shannara became something quite different from Brooks's Tolkienesque fantasy. As already noted, the crucial decision seems to have been to underscore the postapocalyptic element of the fantasy world far more than Brooks ever has, to my knowledge. You are constantly reminded that the world of elves, gnomes, etc., was built on the ruins of our world, and the ruins often are shockingly well-preserved, given how much time presumably has passed in order for new species to evolve. In one episode our trio find the ruins of a 21st century high school, with many of the posters on the walls and other artifacts intact. In another, a human colony has salvaged artifacts of the distant (?) past and can generate power to play 21st century music for parties that clearly are meant to look inviting to the MTV audience. In other respects the show strives for contemporary relevance. As commentary on bigotry seems necessary again, we get a storyline involving elf-hating human hunters who take pointy ears as trophies, and in general interspecies mistrust exist to a greater degree, so I'm told, than it does in the novels. Relevance and accessibility are the twin goals, the latter theoretically achieved by having the elves and so forth talk in 21st century slang and idiom and by foregrounding the main heroes' romantic triangle and objectifying all three characters as sex objects. Shannara delivers much of the same soap opera many genre fans identify angrily with the CW network, but takes it to a shoulders-and-sheets level CW rarely indulges in. Add to all this an honest effort at fantasy action on a somewhat epic scale -- Manu Bennett often seems to be taking part in an entirely different, possibly cooler show -- and you get an overcalculated mishmash designed to please all-too-specific demographics without any real organic creative evolution. After Into the Badlands showed what Millar and Gough are capable of when they aren't pandering to a specific audience -- unless you can define an AMC demographic for me, that is -- Shannara was doomed to disappoint me. In its defense, while I compare it to the stereotype of a CW show it never really blunders into the kinds of stupidity that renders some CW programs infuriating, while it managed to maintain a dramatic momentum that other, more promising shows (e.g. The Bastard Executioner) never really attained. Its main problem -- perhaps a fatal one -- is that it was compromised by its choice of venue in a way that shouldn't be possible today. My presumption is that a Shannara Chronicles on a different channel would have been a far different thing, everything else remaining equal, but maybe I'm wrong.

On SyFy, The Magicians is part of an attempted renaissance through which the former Sci-Fi Channel hopes to reclaim the respectability it enjoyed a decade ago, when the rebooted Battlestar Galactica was one of the vanguard shows of a perceived new golden age of television, before the channel sold its soul for sophomoric laughs by making "SyFy Original" a byword for self-conscious, bad-on-purpose schlock. If SyFy's other new shows are as good as Magicians the channel is well on its way to redemption. It follows the parallel journeys of two friends from childhood, Quentin Coldwater (Jason Ralph) and Julia Wicker (Stella Maeve). As kids they were fans of a Narnia-like fantasy fiction series about the magical realm of Fillory, but Julia has outgrown that stuff and urges Quentin to do likewise. Almost by accident each wanders by a different path into an entrance exam for Brakebills College for Magical Pedagogy, which I could swear is somewhere around here in upstate New York. Quentin passes the exam and is admitted to Brakebills, while Julia flunks and, according to routine, will have her memory of the exam wiped away. She improvises, however, and cuts her arm as a mnemonic device that overcomes the forgetting spell. As Quentin gets used to life at Brakebills, a campus increasingly under attack by a horrific power known as The Beast, Julia becomes obsessed with learning magic independently, falling in with an underworld of "hedgewitches" and embarking on a roller-coaster ride of brief epiphanies and nightmarish disasters. Since she clearly has considerable talent and possibly tremendous potential, you're left to wonder why Brakebills rejected her, why Brakebills has the authority among magicians it appears to enjoy, etc. But Magicians doesn't indulge in the paranoid fantasies (yet at least) that would render Brakebills itself suspect; the faculty's intentions appear benign, its concern for discipline sincere and necessary given the violence magic is capable of. If there's no clear why for Brakebills having no place for Julia, that's because the show doesn't offer simple answers for anything. Its lead characters grow increasingly complex as we go on, and while some people have objected that none of the main cast is likable, I think the show has gone quickly beyond a dependence on likability in its development of some of the most interesting personalities on genre TV.

At first glance, the high concept of Magicians is "adult Harry Potter" in several respects. There's sex, yes, and there's also a brazen amount of smoking, boozing, drug taking, etc., all without judgment from the writers. Leaving all that out, the students at Brakebills are not children, nor are they stock fantasy types. Along with Quentin, who, defined by his neuroses and obsession with Fillory, is arguably the least fleshed-out character on the show, we get to know his eventual girlfriend Alice (Olivia Taylor Dudley), the most studious and driven of the students, a gorgeous nerd who's socially repressed as a rebellion against her parents' orgiastic lifestyle and obsessed over the fate of an older brother who attended Brakebills; Penny (Arjun Gupta), who despises all trappings of fantasy (especially the Fillory novels) despite his own obvious talents and strives defensively to maintain a too-cool arrogant attitude even as he discovers his dangerous power as a teleporting Traveler; Eliot (Hale Appleman), at first glance the perpetual undergrad, dissolutely easygoing, omnivorous in his sexual and intoxicant appetites, under whose snarky demeanor -- he seems on first impression the most like someone you'd find at Hogwarts -- run deep, dark waters that surface when the Beast forces him to kill a lover; Margo (Summer Bishil), Eliot's BFF ever since they had to strip and reveal secrets to each other in an undergrad rite of passage, who often comes across as a Mean Girl in spite of herself and whose emotional neediness emerges as Eliot's attitude darkens; and Kady (Jade Tailor), who becomes Penny's girlfriend but has to flee Brakebills when her ties to hedgewitches (her mother's one) are exposed and ends up (as of the most recent episode) collaborating with Julia and a group of elite, relatively ethical hedges, in an attempt to summon a god. Even if Quentin seems shallow among them, Jason Ralph conveys the depths of the character's conflicts and confusions, supported by a formidable ensemble of young actors. The writers match the actors by constantly imagining original stuff for them to do as they learn more about magic in general and the dark truth behind the Fillory novels in particular. Of genre shows I watch only The Flash can compete with The Magicians on the high-concept level, and the speed with which Magicians opens up its fantastic universe -- apparently telescoping events in the first two Grossman novels drastically -- while keeping it all comprehensible (or comprehensibly mysterious) is arguably unmatched. I get a greater rush of vital novelty from each episode than I get from any other program, including those I still consider this show's superiors. Best of all, however freely the show adapts the novels, you never feel that Magicians is pandering to specific demographics, or stereotypes of demographics, the way Shannara does. It seems that people recognized the difference; while Shannara's future is uncertain, Magicians is assured of  a second season. Considering that the second season is when many shows hit their stride, that's really good news, and it will make the wait until 2017 (and season four for Black Sails and The 100) even longer.

Too Much TV: INTO THE BADLANDS (2015-?)

If Into the Badlands had only one thing to recommend it, that would be that it's the best martial-arts show in the history of American television. Most of the show's production values appear to be invested in staging the fight scenes, which rise by the end of the first six-episode season to a level of kinetic energy that puts most superhero shows to shame. The postapocalyptic setting -- some technology survives but guns apparently haven't -- frees Badlands from any obligation to realism, allowing creators Alfred Gough and Miles Millar (of Smallville fame) to indulge every fantasy of martial and spiritual superpower until the characters who appear in the last episode to make mincemeat of our hitherto-invincible protagonist may as well be comic-book supervillains -- if they're villains at all, that is. Badlands thrives on ambiguity, though it leans toward cynicism. There may be no good guys at all in this world, except maybe for the protagonist, Sunny (Daniel Wu). He's a Clipper, an elite fighter and killer who serves Quinn (Marton Csokas), one of the Barons who rule the Badlands. Somehow Sunny has a sense of honor that sometimes clashes with Quinn's amoral or simply impulsive imperatives. For example, when his doctor gives him a terminal diagnosis Quinn wants it covered up and orders Sunny to kill the doctor and his wife. Sunny won't do it, in part because their daughter (Madeleine Mantock) is his secret girlfriend, so Quinn, a formidable warrior in his own right, has to do the job himself. Sunny is so invaluable, however, that Quinn lets a normally fatal act of insubordination pass, little knowing that, worse still in the world of genre TV, Sunny's keeping secrets from him. The first secret is the girlfriend, who ends up the local doctor by default, from whom Sunny must keep secret his own passive complicity in her parents' deaths. The next secret takes us to the meat of the show.

In the first episode Sunny rescues a teenager (Aramis Knight) known only as M.K. -- for Mortal Kombat??? -- from some marauding nomads. M.K. looks like a likely Colt or apprentice clipper for Quinn's army, but Sunny doesn't realize exactly what potential the boy has until M.K. bleeds in a training bout. Shed his blood and M.K. becomes a black-eyed wrecking machine of superhuman power. The Badlands Barons have a vague notion of such people existing. The one female Baron, known as The Widow (Emily Beecham) has the best notion of what M.K. is and wants him, as an exception to her usual all-female rule (not counting some guys who are clearly cannon fodder) as a secret weapon against the other Barons, whom she sees, at least for propaganda purposes, as perpetuators of an oppressive patriarchy. Complicating her plans are Sunny, for starters, and the stirring of feminine feelings for M.K. in one of the Widow's Butterflies, her equivalents of Colts and/or Clippers. Worse yet, Tilda (Ally Ioannides) apparently is the Widow's own daughter, unless "Mother" is an honorific all Butterflies use. Sunny's challenge is to keep M.K.'s potential secret from Quinn, who'd exploit the boy just as the Widow wants to, keep M.K. safe from the Widow herself, and find out why M.K. has a medallion similar to one of his own, showing an Oz-like towered city called Azra. Sunny's endgame is to escape the Badlands with M. K. and Veil the doctor and learn more about his own possible connection to this mysterious place.

Meanwhile, Quinn has more problems that his health and the Widow's aggression. His wives are scheming against each other and one of them sleeps with his son, who's also plotting a double-coup d'etat with a Clipper from another barony. How are you supposed to run an opium plantation with all this drama? No wonder Quinn's head hurts, but that's not the only thing that'll hurt before the season's over. Hardly anyone gets away unscathed, as the final episode kills folks off and throws multiple cliffhangers at us in its bid for renewal.

I'd like to see a second season. Daniel Wu is a bit of a stiff as an actor but still projects the stalwart quality that's essential for Sunny to be our protagonist. He's surrounded by far more colorful characters and benefits from the contrast, appearing more the oldschool strong, relatively silent type. In any event, Wu isn't here to act; he's here to fight and, boy, does he fight! See above: best martial arts I've seen on American television. The other actors, particularly Csokas and Beecham, put up decent fights themselves. Beyond that, Badlands has that essential feel of a thoroughly imagined fantasy world with lots left for us to explore in future seasons. Oddly, and to preview a future review slightly, I found the fantasy world of Badlands more convincing than that of Gough and Millar's other big project, The Shannara Chronicles, even though that show's based on a long-running series of fantasy novels. I suspect that venue makes a big difference in overall quality. Shannara is on MTV while Badlands is on AMC, home of Mad Men, Breaking Bad and Walking Dead, and thus has a very high standard to maintain, but not a demographically narrow audience to pander to. It'll never live up to those other shows' standard of writing or acting, I presume -- I watch or have watched exactly none of them -- but after just six episodes Badlands is already a strong contender for best action show on television. Imagine where it might go if given a chance to really cut loose.

Too Much TV: THE LAST KINGDOM (2015-?)

After announcing that a review of this BBC series would appear two weeks ago, I decided that I shouldn't risk spoiling things for any British readers of this blog. This eight-part miniseries, hopefully the first of several, aired in the U.S. two weeks ahead of its British broadcast schedule. It adapts the first two books of the prolific Bernard Cornwell's "Saxon Stories," nine of which have come out since 2004. They imagine the role played by a fictional hero, Uhtred of Bebbanburg, in the survival of the Saxon Kingdom of Wessex, and with it the idea of England, in the face of invasion and plunder by Danish raiders in the 9th century C.E. Uhtred is both Saxon and Danish; born the former, he is raised a Dane and a pagan after Danes kill his family. When particularly bad Danes kill most of his new family, Uhtred (Alexander Dreymon) maneuvers between Danes and Saxons, seeking recognition as an aelderman and security in land. He is torn by his dual heritage, realizing his best hope of advancement lies with Wessex and its ambitious king Alfred (David Dawson), yet bristling under Alfred's authoritarian notion of Christian kingship and resentful of lingering suspicions of his ultimate loyalty. He has enemies in both camps: the Danish warlord Ubba (Rune Temte) and the Saxon noble Odda the Younger (Brian Vernal), who resents Uhtred's advancement and his arranged marriage to Mildrith (Amy Wren). He has lovers in both camps, not only Midrith, whose religious fanaticism and cultural chauvinism ultimately alienate her from Uhtred, but also the Danish warrior woman Brida (Emily Cox), his childhood playmate turned first lover, who can't cross cultural borders as he can, not to mention the "witch queen" Iseult (Charlie Murphy), a soothsayer Uhtred acquires and falls for while raiding Cornwallum with his ball-busting Saxon sidekick Leofric (Adrian Bower). Over the course of the series Uhtred becomes a more cosmopolitan if not entirely civilized figure, encompassing more of England's heritage than anyone else even if he's not sure what to make of it all, except to remind us at the CW-like opening of every episode that "Destiny is all."

One unintended consequence of watching The Last Kingdom was my decision to quit watching the American series The Bastard Executioner. Set several centuries later, during the reign of Edward II, Bastard was a poor imitation of British historical drama that lacked any semblance of authenticity. Nothing seemed right, from the over-familiar way in which everyone addressed nobility to the horrid accent Katey Sagal employed as this show's witch-woman. I tolerated all of this until Last Kingdom exposed how little actually happened on Bastard -- its main character was like a king on a chessboard checked on every move as he staggered from square to square --and how lousy all the acting actually was. Compared to Bastard's hero, Last Kingdom's Uhtred is a truly heroic, epic figure. Most importantly, he's a hero you can empathize with to an alarming extent. The Bastard Executioner was a self-pitying dope who looked like Thor's developmentally-challenged baby brother. He had a vengeance storyline to motivate him, but nothing like the rage Alexander Dreymon brings to Uhtred. While the rat-in-a-maze quality of Bastard Executioner only induced ennui, you empathize with the fury Uhtred feels at the forces that frustrate him. While I finally couldn't care what the BE did, I found myself rooting for Uhtred to take his frustrations out on the buttheads, barbarians and fanatics who made life difficult for him. I don't know if this is quite what either Bernard Cornwell or the BBC writers intended, but I found myself sometimes wishing that Uhtred would just throttle Alfred the f'ing Great. And this wasn't because I was sick of the show's complications. It was because actor and writers were so successful at getting us to identify with Uhtred's point of view -- and David Dawson nailed this Alfred's cold imperiousness -- even as we realized that history, if not justice on the show's own terms, were on the king's side. Why should Uhtred have to bow and scrape the way Alfred insists? Why should he have to humiliate himself in public penance alongside Alfred's feckless nephew? Because we in our secular age don't really get it ourselves, we empathize when Uhtred doesn't get it; it really does seem picayune and stupid to us. The Danes are little better; leaders like Ubba will kill you on the spot if you cross them, but at least they don't expect their own people to grovel before them.

Yet as the series builds to its tremendous climax, possibly the best mass battle scene ever made for TV, you see both sides evolving as Uhtred evolves. Alfred bends during a desperate time after he's driven from his capital and his son takes ill. Despite the opposition of his still-more devout queen, the king takes Uhtred's advice and entrusts his child to Iseult's healing arts. He learns, as Uhtred's military advice has already shown him, that pagans are not all evil and can be of help to him. On the other side, paramount Dane Guthrum (Thomas W. Gabrielsson) doesn't entirely share his compatriot's contempt for Christianity, recognizing the way it emboldens individuals and inspires multitudes. While Uhtred tips the scales in the Saxons' favor, Guthrum is willing to give God the credit and accepts baptism as part of a treaty with Alfred. As I said, a lot happens in these eight episodes, with a lot more to go if the BBC goes on to adapt the remaining novels. It's good to know that all those novels are out there if they don't, but I don't see why they wouldn't. The Last Kingdom is first-class television in the approved modern "serialized" style with a terrific ensemble cast. Adrian Bower's Leofric steals nearly all of his scenes in badass comic relief, while Rune Temte's Ubba is a truly frightening antagonist, topped only in loathsomeness by his late replacement, Jonas Malmsjö's Skorpa. Brian Vernal's Odda becomes more of a villain as the show goes on, while Harry McEntire as Aethelwold, Alfred's troublesome nephew, evolves enigmatically, always potentially a villain, almost always more certainly a fool, yet potentially still more as well. We won't see all of them again if the series resumes, but they leave us confident of what we'll see in the future. Anyone who starts watching The Last Kingdom should finish wanting more.

Too Much TV: JONATHAN STRANGE AND MR. NORRELL (2015)

Susanna Clarke published her epic fantasy Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell in 2004. Her first and only novel to date, it is epic in size (782 pages) and scope, amounting to a kind of allegory of early modern England. It has at last been visualized by the BBC, in an seven-part adaptation written by Toby Haynes and directed by Peter Harness, that has just wrapped up on BBC America about one month after its original British broadcast. The challenge of adapting the novel is twofold (threefold if you count special effects): its size and its voice. Clarke wrote in something like the style that prevailed in the time she wrote about: early 19th century Britain. Her mock erudition extended to extensive footnotes that by definition could not be adapted for TV unless you wanted the show to sound like The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Since Haynes and Harness do without a narrator after the first scene, it's up to the actors and their writer to sound like authentic creatures of their age, not to mention the authentic creatures of Susanna Clarke. Part of the entertainment of the novel is its recreation of a golden age of English prose -- I rather like Naomi Novik's Temeraire series of novels about the Napoleonic wars fought by dragon-riding armies for the same reason. The cast of the TV Jonathan Strange succeeds in bringing that language to life while dispensing with the narration. I'd like to say I took this success for granted from a British series, but I'd watched The Musketeers too recently to make such an assumption. This time everyone involved was clearly holding each other to a higher standard and the result is a largely faithful adaptation of a great novel. The funny part is that some of the episodes and incidents of the book that I remember most vividly didn't make it onto TV. All that means is that people turning to the novel after watching the show have even more of a treat in store for them.

Though billed second in the title, Gilbert Norrell (Eddie Marsan) is the first of the two English magicians we see in the story. A solitary Yorkshire researcher, attended only by the vaguely menacing but ultimately benign John Childermass (Enzo Clienti), Norrell becomes a public figure by intervening dramatically in the debates of the local Friends of English Magic, who are little more than a discussion group. Norrell offers to demonstrate that he has mastered magic on the condition that the society disband and its members renounce magic. All but John Segundus (Edward Hogg) do so and feel justified by Norrell's apparent animation of a cathedral's statuary. The magician hopes to leap from local notoriety to national fame and national service. Despite his obvious discomfort, he strives to insinuate himself in English society to further his goal of rendering English magic "respectable." As the story develops, we learn that the respectability toward which Norrell aspires depends on purging magic of any dependence on the legacy of John Uskglass, the semi-legendary Raven King who flourished about 300 years earlier, or upon the power of the fairies whom Uskglass mastered. To succeed, however, Norrell becomes a hypocrite. When the wife of Sir Walter Pole, a Cabinet minister, dies suddenly, Norrell resolves to resurrect her and win Pole's support for his project. To restore her, Norrell must make a bargain with one of the fairy creatures he despises and fears, an arrogant character with thistledown hair known only as "the gentleman" (Marc Warren). The gentleman resurrects Lady Pole (Alice Englert) on the condition that he have half of her remaining years -- he knows she'll live to be 94. Rather than take a chunk of years, he takes her sleeping hours, forcing her to dance in an endless ball of Burtonesque boors in his manor at Lost Hope, leaving her virtually insane by day. He also co-opts the Poles' butler, Stephen Black (Ariyon Bakare), at once intimidating him and tantalizing him with the prophecy that a once-nameless slave -- Stephen had been rescued from a slave ship as an infant -- will become a king.

Meanwhile, a random encounter with a mystic tramp Norrell had chased out of London inspires Jonathan Strange of Shropshire (Bertie Carvel) to try his hand at magic. Inspired by his copy of A Child's History of the Raven King, Strange is curious about realms of magic Norrell would rather see closed off. He proves such a prodigy, however, that Norrell accepts him as a student and assistant in his contributions to the war effort against Napoleon. Norrell is a grudging teacher, reluctant to let Strange see any but a few of the books in the vast library he's accumulated. It becomes apparent to the viewer (or reader) that Strange will be more powerful than Norrell, if he isn't already, but Norrell is troubled less by Strange's power than by his curiosity. Strange's desire to learn more about the Raven King and the "King's Roads" he built through the fairy realm, with mirrors serving as portals throughout England, threatens to ruin all Norrell has done to make English magic respectable. Goaded by his co-author and literary agent (John Heffernan), Norrell uses his magic to censor a rival volume by Strange, making the text disappear from every copy published. Meanwhile, Strange's wife Arabella (Charlotte Riley) catches the eye of the fickle fairy gentleman, who affects contempt for Strange's magic while clearly fearing the newcomer's unsounded potential. He schemes to replace Arabella with a changeling, stealing the real woman to Lost Hope where, unlike Lady Pole, she rapidly loses her memory. The changeling proving short-lived, Strange appeals to Norrell to teach him how to resurrect her. Norrell's refusal causes a definitive break between the two magicians, driving Strange to Italy, where he experiments in madness in hopes of gaining access to the fairy realm and the knowledge he expects to find there. He succeeds mainly in destroying the barriers Norrell had merely cracked open but forces the gentleman to use nearly all his power to expel him from Lost Hope and place him under a curse that surrounds him with a funnel cloud of darkness.

If the TV series drops the ball at any point, it's in the final episode which drastically understates the crisis into which Strange has plunged all of England. The final part of Clarke's book is in part an allegory for the post-Napoleonic period of reaction that climaxed in the Peterloo Massacre, just as Norrell all along has represented a reactionary form of Enlightenment obsessed with control rather than freedom, while Strange embodies Romanticism (inclusive of the Gothic), the reckless genius to Norrell's cautious scholar. The TV series has jettisoned or truncated a military figure who becomes a major antagonist late in the book, and while the abandonment of historical context may have been a necessity of time constraints, the fates of Strange, Norrell and their circle are more than enough to keep everyone interested, especially those who don't know what they're missing. Whether the BBC America audience fully appreciates the meta-English context  is open to debate. If they've stuck with the show, it's because of the action and the acting. Eddie Marsan (who was Inspector Lestrade in the Ritchie-Downey Sherlock Holmes movies) takes top honors by conveying the at-once ambitious and cowardly, arrogant and insecure and ultimately well-meaning Norrell, tough Marc Warren, who may be remembered as the Dracula in a very bad recent TV production, nearly steals the show with one of the strongest TV villain performances I've seen in quite a while. If he'd put more of that into his Dracula we might have had something there. Also deserving of special mention out of an overall superior cast are Alice Englert as Lady Pole, whose righteous indignation is only compounded by the spell that cripples her ability to articulate it, and Vincent Franklin as Drawlight, a toady who takes credit for introducing Norrell to society and deteriorates during the series from Augustan pomposity to Dickensian wretchedness. I could be at the keyboard all night praising everyone who deserves it for this series, but to leave just the tip of an iceberg showing seems appropriate for a program that has the same relationship to its source material. I don't mention that again to diminish the miniseries. In fact, when I see an adaptation of something I've read that leaves out so much or changes so much and can still recommend it (in cinema Michael Mann's Last of the Mohicans comes to mind), it's really one of the highest recommendations I can give.

Too Much TV: DAREDEVIL (2015-?)

Trailing badly behind DC Comics in the race to colonize network television with superheroes, Marvel has virtually yielded the field in order to plant its flag in the realm of streaming media. Fans responded virtually orgasmically when Netflix released the entire 13-episode first season of Daredevil back in April. The first of a sequence of interrelated series meant to climax Avengers-style in the debut of a Defenders team, Daredevil is the first superhero show designed for binge viewing, and that was a major factor in the rapturous reception it received. Inevitably the show was overrated. Some of that was partisanship; Marvel fans who despite their side's dominance at the movies resented DC's superiority on TV could now say that Marvel had outclassed the competition on its favored ground. Venue as much as format mattered in the comparison. It was just as important that Daredevil wasn't a CW superhero show as it was that it was a Netflix show. What this seemed to mean was that Daredevil wasn't saddled with the sort of soap-opera subplots that were necessary to make DC superhero shows attractive to the CW's female audience. Specifically, there was no love triangle involving Matt Murdock, his law partner Foggy Nelson and their new assistant Karen Page. But if these fans abhorred romance there was still plenty of that to overlook as attention was paid to Foggy's flirting with Karen while Matt focused obsessively if not self-destructively on crime-fighting. For some fans "love triangle" was shorthand for everything wrong with the DC/CW shows, but in some ways Daredevil was no different from them, particularly in its conviction that there's no such thing as a noble lie. Nearly an entire episode was dedicated to Foggy's anger at Matt over keeping his crimefighting and superpowers secret since their college days, and the season ended with Karen keeping a guilty secret from her bosses, while Foggy hypocritically kept her out of the loop about Matt's double life. This sort of thing is the CW's meat, but Marvel fans don't really find it distasteful. In fact, it fits perfectly with the show's sometimes oppressive self-importance.

I didn't binge-watch the series, which is why you're only reading about it now, but I imagine that binging would only exacerbate the potential oppressiveness that for fans confers serious respectability on the show. Binging may actually be the correct way to watch a show that rejects a major convention of series television. What it rejects most importantly is the necessity of having a Threat or Mystery of the Week, a particular problem that Daredevil must solve within an hour of showtime. More often these days I see people complain about the "of the week" obligations of longform series, which are necessary if each episode is to have any chance at viability as a standalone, out-of-sequence episode. The binge audience apparently isn't interested in any given hour's potential to stand alone. They're only interested in the one big story of the season, from which the threat or mystery of any given week can only be an irrelevant distraction. By an older standard not much happened in Daredevil's first season, but by a newer standard a lot did, though a lot of it was character development, often done via flashback. I'm not sure so many people would love Daredevil if they watched it one hour at a time, one week at a time, while I might have been more overwhelmed had I done it all in a weekend. Watching it at my own pace, I found it a very good show that didn't quite justify the hosannas it received over the first weekend.

For a while, Daredevil threatened to look little different from the first season of Arrow. We had an urban vigilante feeling uncertain about his resort to violence, and we had an antagonist with an ambitious project to rehabilitate a slum neighborhood. Fortunately, Wilson Fisk (Vincent D'Onofrio) didn't plan to rehab Hell's Kitchen with an artificial earthquake or other scorched-earth measures. The would-be Kingpin of crime -- once an arch-enemy of Spider-Man but deemed part of the Daredevil intellectual property ever since Frank Miller used him in his seminal 1980s stories-- wants to clean up the neighborhood the old fashioned way: by buying the tenements and driving out the tenants, with extreme prejudice if necessary. Daredevil is at its most creative in its fresh imagining of Fisk's background psychology. The comic-book Kingpin was first imagined by Stan Lee as a Sydney Greenstreet who could kick your ass or fry you with his laser-cane if it came to that, while Miller further underscored the big man's prowess as a martial artist. By contrast, D'Onofrio plays an awkwardly self-conscious Fisk, clearly uncomfortable in his own skin, whose fighting style is best described as "berserk tantrum." The show dares make him an object of pathos, flashing back to a tormented past when he killed his dad, a bullying failed politico, to save his mom from another beating. It gives its villain a romantic storyline as he courts the art-dealer Vanessa (Ayalet Zurer), whose abstract paintings calm him the more they resemble the stained, crumbling wall he used to stare at as a boy. In the comics Vanessa evolved from a long-suffering spouse -- we'd eventually meet an adult son who became the Kingpin's rival -- into a ruthless stand-by-your-man type who eventually had that son killed. Here she's an eccentrically, sympathetically amoral figure who seems to love Fisk for his telling her everything about himself and not in spite of his evil. The irony of the season is that, despite other setbacks, Fisk finds the love of his life while Matt (Charlie Cox) is reduced to tears at the thought of losing the few friends he has over the secrets he'd tried to keep.

Daredevil benefits from a solid ensemble, including Elden Henson in comedy relief as Foggy and Deborah Ann Wolf as Karen -- a character with bad news in store for her in the show follows later comics. It was admirably modest in scope in its first season, and if it probably could have shown us more villains it did well to keep Daredevil's two most important antagonists after Kingpin, Bullseye and Elektra, in reserve for future seasons. The show's fight scenes were highly praised, but I might praise them more if I could see them more clearly through the sometimes-stygian cinematography. In the end I was impressed in many ways, yet still felt something was missing. It never quite popped for me the way a superhero show should, and in its commitment to a certain pretentious grittiness the show probably didn't want to pop like that. It was certainly far better than Arrow's unfocused third season, and almost infinitely superior to Gotham's cumulative ineptitude, but I don't think Daredevil is better yet than Arrow at its best, and I enjoyed it less than I did the first season of The Flash. Write that off to personal taste if you wish, but I don't think that more spectacle and more fun would hurt the show. As someone with impeccable credentials with comics and movie fans once asked: why so serious? Another show that ran while I worked my way through Daredevil did a better job of balancing seriousness and fun, as I hope to prove in the next review in this series -- and to give you a clue, I found it in a familiar place.

Too Much TV: WOLF HALL (2015)

Hilary Mantel's trilogy of novels, still incomplete, has already conquered all media. The two novels published so far, Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies, were both bestsellers and Booker Prize winners. A two-part, six-hour stage adaptation currently reigns on Broadway and has been nominated for Tony awards. The BBC's six-part, six-hour TV adaptation has just finished its run on PBS in the U.S. People who've seen both the stage and tele plays say the TV version is better. Playing on PBS, it probably got less ratings than it could have elsewhere on American TV. The ratings were definitely strong for PBS, but I don't know how they compare to Downton Abbey or Sherlock. There's definitely a big audience for this sort of thing. The Thomas Cromwell trilogy, for want of a better label, is, after all, a revisionist fairy tale, with the added kick of being revisionist history.

The fairy tale it revises is Robert Bolt's play A Man For All Seasons, best known as Fred Zinnemann's Oscar-winning film from 1966. In Peter Straughan's teleplay for Wolf Hall, Cromwell (Mark Rylance), the chief minister of Henry VIII (Damian Lewis), practically prophesies the Bolt play. He imagines Thomas More (Anton Lesser) writing a play ensuring that More will have the better of their disputes, not to mention the best lines, forever after. On the evidence of the teleplay, Mantel may once have believed in the More legend, as propagated by Bolt, only to learn later that it was a big lie. Her portrayal of More, predictably, is the most controversial aspect of Wolf Hall in all media. Bolt's More, a hero for the Cold War era, takes his stand against absolute, arbitrary power and dies a martyr. Mantel's More is virtually an English Torquemada, a Catholic fanatic dedicated to the destruction and torture of heresy, who dies for a point of fanaticism rather than a point of conscience. Like much revisionism, Mantel's revisionist take on More has provoked a backlash, as well of charges of anti-Catholic bigotry. I can't comment on claims that Mantel's account is historically inaccurate, but the charge of bias seems unfair given how sympathetically she portrays Cardinal Thomas Wolsey (Jonathan Pryce), Cromwell's mentor, who is hounded to death for failing to facilitate Henry's first change of wives to the king's satisfaction. Mantel's More is presumably more a portrait of generic fanaticism than particular Catholic evil. It's the sort of thing we should expect to see in a revisionist fairy tale, the debunking of a hero who may have seemed all along to some too good to be true.

In a revisionist fairy tale we should also expect to see a villain rehabilitated, or at least explained, since our age rebels against the monotonous depiction of some figures, at least, as irredeemably evil. Thomas Cromwell is a villain when More is a hero, and some would dub him a historical villain for his role in consolidating Henry's despotic absolutism. Mantel's Cromwell is the protagonist, if not a hero, and so he must have his reasons. He is a man abruptly detached from most of the joys of life following the sudden death from illness of his wife and two daughters in one day. Estranged from his brutish blacksmith father, he sees Wolsey as more of a father figure, arguably, and resents the suffering inflicted on him by Henry and his cronies. He seems to resent the most a petty satire staged after Wolsey's death in which noblemen play demons dragging the cardinal to Hell. The king may be as much to blame as anyone for Wolsey's fall, but if Cromwell truly seeks vengeance against Wolsey's tormenters, he must leave Henry standing as the instrument to destroy the others. Until the end of the miniseries, when he most explicitly orchestrates the fall of Anne Boleyn (Claire Foy), for whose sake Wolsey fell, Cromwell is less conspirator than facilitator. He is most often shown modestly observing the story's grotesque egomaniacs, letting them rage and insult him yet keeping score for the future. Everyone confides in him, to their peril, presumably because they find him too contemptible, due to his common birth, to be taken seriously as anything but a stooge of the king or the Boleyn family. He takes their abuse stoically and hardly revels in his revenge. He grows passionate only twice, once raging against More both for his onetime friend's atrocities of thought and deed and for his foolhardy refusal to save his life with mere words, then waxing retributive as he compels the young men who mocked Wolsey in death to denounce Anne and themselves.

Toward Anne Cromwell is more ambivalent. I really haven't seen many Tudor tales -- I missed the more salacious Showtime series entirely -- so I can't say if Anne Boleyn has ever been portrayed as such a vicious bitch as Claire Foy portrays her. For much of the series she looks like the main villain, spitting contempt at the man whose name she insists on pronouncing with what I assume is a French accent ("Crum-weycch" is my best approximation) while reminding him that he is but a creature made by the king (or by her) and thus can be unmade in an instant. Near the end, after another such reminder, phrased in general terms about any arriviste, Cromwell says, "I entirely agree," thinking of Anne herself. Yet he seems to take no satisfaction in her ruin as she goes the way of Henry's first wife, only more violently, for the same offense of failing to give the king a son. In fact, the teleplay ends with awful emphasis on how hollow a victory, if he even sees it as one, Cromwell's is over Anne. We linger over the execution scene as Anne makes a pathetic speech blessing the king, some observers assuming she still expects a last-minute reprieve. We see her blindfolded, trembling and struggling to suppress sobs as the executioner makes his eccentric preparations and Cromwell asks whether she'll suffer from the swordstroke. We hear him stage-whispering to her not to move her head so the end will come quickly and painlessly. We're spared the actual blow -- a great thing about Wolf Hall is that it gives us all the intensity and intrigue of today's great TV shows with very little of the violence -- but we see her ladies-in-waiting, who've never been afraid to talk back to her and gossip about her, collect her head and body like valkyries while warning the crowd that they'll not let male hands touch her anymore. There's too little, or rather too much, to gloat over here; miraculously the show has left us pitying Anne. And from that scene Cromwell has to go to the king, who waits for him arms outstretched for a celebratory hug, as if he's won another jousting tournament, that Cromwell accepts as if it's a devil taking him to Hell, and that's the end ... for now. History tells us, of course, that Cromwell's turn is coming.

Rylance and Foy are extraordinary, while Damian Lewis deserves a lot of credit for a more thankless role playing the king as a bit of a jock and a bit of a twit with the power of life and death over people. Lesser's More (was he cast so reviewers could write that?) gives a repellently effective performance that has no doubt exacerbated the controversy over Mantel's accuracy of bias. I also should acknowledge Bernard Hill of Lord of the Rings fame for his relatively small but showy role as Anne's thuggish uncle, the Duke of Norfolk. The six hours are a slow burn that breaks out on schedule into a purging fire, after an early crescendo during the fall of More, but after delivering what we expect it leaves us with a gut punch that reminds us of the truth of the era, that there was no justice then, only arbitrary power. That's a theme that appeals to us today -- and it's worth noting here that George R. R. Martin has said that his Game of Thrones novels owe more to historical fiction of this grim sort than they do to generic fantasy.  Wolf Hall may be as close to Game of Thrones as PBS gets -- and it's actually pretty close.

Too Much TV: THE ABBOTT & COSTELLO SHOW (1952-4)

As a rule I don't seek out TV comedy but around the turn of the year I needed something to lighten my mood and I was feeling nostalgic. As it happened, MeTV had just put Abbott & Costello on their daily schedule at the DVR-bait time slot of 5:00 a.m. I remembered the show fondly from my youth and I'm happy to report that it mostly lived up to my memories. At its best it's extraordinary, an almost Kafkaesque burlesque of American life and one of the last yawps of an especially irreverent comedy tradition. But then there was the second season.

Abbott and Costello, which is to say Lou Costello, had creative control of the TV show, which means that the show gives us the comedy team in something close to its purest form, freed from the too-frequent cinematic obligation to help boring young lovers or fill the time between songs. An anarchic burlesque sensibility comes through that arguably was typical of radio comedy. In television George Burns gets a lot of credit for "breaking down the fourth wall" by addressing the audience during The Burns & Allen Show, but for much of radio comedy there never was a fourth wall -- the comics often went out before a live audience with scripts in hand, after all -- and a certain self-consciousness prevailed that enhanced the burlesque elements of those shows. On TV Burns was perhaps less an innovator than a holdout, doing his thing while a fourth wall was being built to suit a sitcom paradigm. For Abbott and Costello the fourth wall went up between the first and second seasons. The first time around, the comics would come out from behind a curtain, address the audience, and set up the situation for the episode -- and a card girl invariably came out and put a card listing that week's guest stars in front of Lou's face. Between the acts and before the end credits, they'd take the stage again to comment on the story in progress. It was a zone of unreality, in story terms, or reality, in real terms, but comics could occupy both at the same time, confident that no matter what happened, nothing would really change. And that meant nearly anything could happen.

The show takes place in a slightly surreal quasi-world in which Abbott and Costello are down-on-their-luck personalities constantly scrambling to make the rent, though we're occasionally reminded that they are entertainers, if not famous entertainers. They're well-known enough that the audience at an actors'-home benefit show can demand the "Baseball" sketch (i.e. "Who's on First?") of them, but much of the time they may as well be nobodies. There's a difference between Nobodies and Everymen, and the comics definitely aren't the latter. Bud Abbott is an often repulsive figure, a parasite on Lou although he seems more competent at nearly everything than his partner and roommate. He' can be wicked toward other people -- having arrived at a bank after a robbery, he occupies a teller's window and is ready to confiscate Hilary Brooke's deposit until Lou stops him -- but he has a special relationship with Costello. Their routines nearly always involve some kind of psychological torture, not to mention physical abuse, of Lou by Bud. On the most innocuous level, Bud will torment Lou by forcing him into theoretical situations. For instance, let's say, as Bud would say, that Lou is at the train station. Where's he buying a ticket for? "I dunno," says Lou. "Then what are you doing at the station?" Bud demands with disgust. Bud's life work is the psychological manipulation of Lou, the better to make a minion or meal ticket of him. But Bud's abuse is only the beginning of Lou's victimization.

Lou Costello's first season is nothing short of a nightmare. His ordeal isn't merely the typical struggle of an amiable incompetent, as it would seem more often in the second season. When he leaves the safety zone of the stage he enters a world in which everything and everyone is actively against him. Something is wrong with this world. If you want to understand the difference between the first and second seasons, the first is the one with Joe Besser, the future Stooge, as Stinky, the apparently overgrown child who always picks fights with Lou. As a kid, I couldn't figure out what Stinky was supposed to be, but it's clear now that for the show's purposes he's not a madman or a retard acting like a child but a literal child in old-time short pants played by a fortysomething fat man. He's like an imp from hell -- or in hell -- assigned to torment Lou and get away with it, since bystanders almost invariably take the poor boy's side against the older bully -- though we should note how often Lou himself is referred to as a "boy" in these shows. If Stinky is the most obviously surreal element of the show, there's also Mr. Bacciagalupe (Joe Kirk), who seems to hold a different job in every episode, and the extended family of Sidney Fields (playing himself and all the family members), to whom Lou is always applying for jobs or other forms of assistance.

If anyone other than Lou Costello is the auteur of the first season it's Fields, who has a "story by" credit for the entire season and wrote the majority of episodes. Compared to the second season, when he's mostly reduced to a mere actor and tones down his personality accordingly, First Season Fields (or Melonhead) is a more eccentric and flamboyant figure with an almost soothing voice that belies his potential for violence. In one episode Bud and Lou are trying to entrap Fields by goading him into physically assaulting Lou. With every fresh insult from Lou Fields goes berserk, mauling Lou mercilessly while Bud, inevitably distracted, looks away. But it's not just the regulars. This is a show where random strangers seem to attack Lou out of nowhere, or where his pathetic attempts to sell products or simply strike up acquaintances expose him to explosions of psychotic rage (from "Niagra Falls! Slowwwwly, I turned..." to "Susquehanna Hat Company!").

Looming over the whole neighborhood, perhaps less amusing now than then, is Mike Kelly (Gordon Jones), better known as Mike the Cop. Mike is proof, since he lives in Sidney Fields' building as Bud and Lou do, that community policing is no panacea. Mike may as well be the last of the Keystone Kops. He is just about the last great expression of comedy's irreverence toward police, a great American tradition dating back to a time when cops were mostly political placeholders answering to few standards of professionalism or competence. Mike is a bully and an idiot; his interventions are almost always misguided and always make things worse. You'd hardly believe that this show was contemporary with Dragnet. Even though Bud and Lou appear to apologize in one onstage epilogue for the "fun" they've had with the police -- the episode had Lou and Mike wreaking havoc at a police firing range -- and appeal to the kids in their audience to treat the local police as their pals -- Mike's moronic antagonism was one first-season feature that persisted unapologetically into the second season. When people complain today about growing disrespect for the police as if Americans have abandoned a great and ancient tradition, Mike the Cop is evidence to the contrary.

There's a relentless quality to the first season that's made bearable by Lou Costello's wide range of defiance. Lou is no sad-sack victim of existence. He rages and dreams of fighting back, and if this world is his personal Hell, his sin is that he might be a bully if he could. Lou's vocal performance seems much influenced by Harry Langdon, though I don't know if the influence was ever acknowledged. Like Lou, Langdon paradoxically embodied adult appetites in a childlike if not infantile form. Lou Costello is a less passive, more uninhibited and turbulent Langdon, flailing at a world he can't master, falling from delusional heights of confidence to crying fits of despair. He's a fighter but the fix is in, but you love him for fighting anyway, especially if you feel the fix is in for you, too.

Something went wrong in the second season. Fields was demoted, maybe because he'd run out of creative gas, and Lou brought two new writers in. You can judge second-season shows pretty simply: if Jack Townley wrote it it has a chance of being good; if Clyde Bruckman wrote it, it stinks. Townley specialized in farcical plots, putting Lou in some form of peril and often having Mike the Cop assume that Lou had committed some crime. Bruckman was a storied figure of silent comedy, credited by Buster Keaton as co-director of The General, who was boozed up and washed up. His scripts for Abbott and Costello play out like Three Stooges shorts and often steal gags from them. They often degenerate into slapstick brawls that played to neither comic's strengths. Finally he stole gags from his onetime collaborator Harold Lloyd, who considered his intellectual property something to sue over. Lloyd sued Bruckman several times over two decades and arguably hastened his end, and the end of The Abbott & Costello Show. Bruckman killed himself in 1955, a year after the show folded. There were only 52 episodes, little more than half the traditional minimum for syndication, but like The Honeymooners' "Classic 39" the show stayed on the air for decades. It lost its staying power a while ago, despite Jerry Seinfeld crediting it as an inspiration for his own TV phenomenon. It was probably no reflection on the show, although today's sitcom fans might barely recognize it as a show, but a business decision that downtime airtime was better filled by infomercials than the old stuff that sustained stations for generations. You used to see this show all the time, but its reappearance on MeTV is like the unearthing of a buried treasure from a vanished time.