The Nemanjic Dynasty: The Birth of the Kingdom

Suffers from mediocre script, direction and acting.

Actors are unconvincing. Granted the material they have to work with isn't the best (to say the least) but they lack energy and passion.

Dialogues can be cringe worthy at times. It feels like the show is expecting to create tension and emotional involvement by merely being set in the time when medieval Serbian state was being created.

Characters lack any development and appear to be nothing more but a bare bone recreation of historical characters, which is very weird since important historical events like battles are merely hinted at or shown in the background, while majority of screen time deals with character interacting with one another.

Cinematography is great and really puts you in the mood, but it alone isn't enough to make you emotionally involved, even if you're a Serb. For any non Serb, this is going to be extremely boring.

Very little substance, all in all. It feels like the producers are expecting success simply because of the time period it is set in and money spent on cinematography.

Hopefully it picks up, but beginning feels very underwhelming.

Very bad first episode.Poor acting,poor script...i hope that second episode will be better.

Awaited as a "Serbian GoT" (wich it could never be, for a number of reasons), the show posted high expectations. On the other hand, many of us knew deep down in our minds what to expect of the whole thing, but we didn't want to admit it to ourselves. What we got was dissapointing, to say the least. Based on other popular modern history action-dramas many people thought we could get a history spectacle that would excite the crowd and introuduce young audience to the important part of Serbian history. Instead, we got uninspiring screenplay, boring dialogues that led to moderately bad acting from otherwise respectable actors and most notebly - lack of action and true excitment that could entertain the masses. The show's excuse was that they are primarly based on available history facts. Although true to some point, it was OK for the directors to move away from them when they felt necessary and to make up some segments. The problem is they did it very badly, which made the show look like a mix of history lessons and poorly written drama with some annoying and almost cringy mistakes along the way. A decent number of people decided after a few episodes not to follow it anyomre, and the rest mainly stayed so they could count the f*** ups or to see the history portrayed. To sum up, the show is not unwatchable for Serbian crowd, but I would not recomend it to anyone else who is not interested in Serbian history. We had a solid number of worse shows that aired on Serbian TV much longer than this one, but that is no excuse.

Do yourself a favor and just go to wikipedia. Characters in the show just deliver wikipedia lines in first person, deprived of all emotion, so the actors seem to be bad, but they have only been given a crap script that they can't emotionaly conect with

This is far from good, even decent beginning of this long awaited epic series. Such complex historical characters are completely undeveloped preventing spectators from being emotionally involved in the story. Dialogues are empty, not convincing enough and pointless on many ocassions. Costumes and photography cannot bridge all the gaps which are huge, particularly in terms of script and acting. Judging the first episode, I cannot conclude what the idea of the authors was, because this looks more like an educational program. In my opinion, the only good moment in the entire episode was the scene of Stefan Nemanja in captivity praying to Saint George. This is too little and not nearly enough. I respect the effort ot the authors, but they had a brilliant example from the past how historical series of such genre and complexity should look like. Thus, an epic saga on the life of Vuk Karadzic that was filmed 30 years ago set hardly reachable artistic standards while series on Nemanjics apparently turned from that path at the very beginning offering an below average outcome. I do hope that situation will improve in later episodes, but I am afraid the damage has alredy been done.