Penny Dreadful

After five months, we've now cancelled Now TV - we'd reached a point where we'd watched almost everything we wanted to from the service, and it wasn't worth paying the subscription for the last two episodes of "L.A.'s Finest" (which, frankly, was just about worth investing the time to watch, and no more than that).

We actually got a fair amount of value from those five months - in addition to the final season of "Game of Thrones", I watched the third season of "Supergirl" (not great; it's been getting steadily worse since the start), the "Deadwood" wrap-up movie (which was good), "Chernobyl" (which was excellent, but somewhat flexible with the truth; ironically so, given the show's most-quoted line), the aforementioned "L.A.'s Finest", and "Penny Dreadful".

That last was one of those shows that I'd heard about but never had the opportunity to watch - a sort of alternate take on the "League of Extraordinary Gentlemen" concept, where the various characters from classic horror stories come together in an interlocking plot. It was good stuff, rather uncomfortable to watch at times, all underpinned by a great performance by Eva Green.

Of the three seasons, I felt that the first was the most solid. After that first season I got the impression that they knew the characters still had a lot of potential, but didn't have a clear idea quite how best to use them. The third season was maybe a step up from the first, but suffered very significantly from splitting up the core cast - at times it felt more like watching three separate shows than a single coherent whole.

I was also a little dismayed by the ending. The main plot all came together really nicely, but the two side plots just seemed to... stop. They didn't really go anywhere, and indeed one of them ended by pretty much just undoing everything that it had been building up to. That's a bit of a shame, especially since it seems the end was planned, rather than being an unexpected cancellation.

Still, it was a good show, and well worth the time we invested in it. I doubt I would watch it again, but then the days of my rewatching TV are largely coming to a close - there's already too much that's new that I want to watch, and way too little time.
#46: "The Crimson Legion", by Troy Denning