If you liked the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, you should like Penny Dreadful. Another show that steals some of the great characters of speculative fiction and tosses them into one big bowl. Penny Dreadful is a good looking show with great sets and costumes. Among the cast are such familiar names as Billie Piper and Timothy Dalton. The rest of the cast is a little less familiar, but they are good looking in a Steampunk and a horror kind of way.
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After one episode, I kind of like Penny Dreadful. Yes, it is a bit predictable and it’s lack of originality is stunning, but it was still fun. Though to be honest, I could have done with a few less mounds of rotting bodies and a little less blood painting the walls, but it is a horror show, right?
We have vampires that don’t seem to be standard issue vampires and we can expect a slightly twisted take on other monsters from the good old days. Or so I would guess. It looks to me like the good people at SKY looked at BBC’s Ripper Street and said, Hey, that looks like fun! So they whipped up their own late Victorian horror story and the Ripper even gets a mention in the first episode of Penny Dreadful.
The nudity rules are different in the UK and it’s always a bit shocking to see full frontal nudity on the corpses in these kinds of shows. The mounds of body parts are pretty much what you would expect from mounds of body parts.
Penny Dreadful should be fun. We’ll have to wait and see how it plays out.
