Penny Dreadful: City of Angels

If you came here looking for the grim, supernatural awesomeness of the original Penny Dreadful, then keep on moving. I don't know why this wasn't just sold as some 1950s gangster series. The cast is amazing, great visuals and acting, but there is almost nothing supernatural about this! Which was kind of the entire point of Penny Dreadful. Aside from some dramatic walk-ons in a gorgeous leather gown from Dormer, and some odd side characters she somehow also needs to play, the supernatural aspect is completely missing. There is SO much that could have been done with the story. Disappointed because I was a huge fan of the original PD!

How could that even happen? Isn't that the same showrunner who created the original series? The first five minutes already look strangely cheap, CGI fire from 20 years ago, artificial acting. Then this constant bloom / glare filter in almost every shot. The intense horror show atmosphere with emotional trauma, this time it is just gone.

I had to rewatch the first few minutes of the original to make sure I'm not betrayed by my memory. I wasn't. This just feels cheap and artificial, truly strange it is written by the same guy.

I didn't doubt Nathan Lane was a good actor, and I can't say I remember seeing him in a dramatic role before this, however, he was EXCELLENT in Penny Dreadful: City of Angels. A true standout performance, IMHO, made all the more noticeable by the generally uninspiring and muddled overall story. Too many characters that would be the primary or secondary focus of an episode then largely forgotten other than popping up periodically w/o further development. It's set at an interesting time and place in history, but character motivation(s) and clarity of the stakes at hand were generally fuzzy and underdeveloped. Not sure that I'd bother w/ a second season.

What the hell is this? That was my first reaction upon seeing the US version of "Penny Dreadful".

Aside from sharing the same name as the original it has little in common with it. Penny Dreadful was an encyclopedic trip into the world of monsters and the supernatural. A homage to a time of classic horror and Gothic writers like Stoker and Shelly.

What you get here, is yet another politicised drama with racial overtones, that I quickly found preachy, cliched and ultimately, tiresome.

The US has its own rich history of horror writing in the form of Poe and Lovecraft. These and other works could have been explored in an anthology but instead you get this tedious offering.

A missed opportunity, to say the least. 4/10.

The original Penny Dreadful was one of the greatest limited series ever written and produced. Why create a spin off when everyone just wants the old cast, scenery and macabre sound that made the show special. They should have continued where they left off.