Penny Dreadful

Penny Dreadful is John Logan's 2014 Showtime series, three seasons of Victorian gothic that yanks Frankenstein, Dracula, Dorian Gray, and a stray werewolf myth into the same fog. Eva Green plays Vanessa Ives, a medium whose faith is at war with something that keeps trying to move into her. Timothy Dalton is the grieving explorer she's tethered to. Josh Hartnett is the American gunslinger who wandered into the wrong city. Rory Kinnear plays Frankenstein's creature, Harry Treadaway plays Frankenstein, and Reeve Carney turns up as Dorian Gray hosting parties nobody should attend. Early episodes are séances, tuberculosis wards, a séance-and-tuberculosis-ward mash-up, and a lot of gaslight.

Eva Green is the reason this show has a fanbase. Her Vanessa is operatic in the technical sense, big theatrical instrument used with real control, and Logan writes her monologues like arias. The production design is filthy in the good way, thick fabric and wet cobblestones, and the cinematography treats every candle like it's carrying the scene. Dalton plays a specific kind of Victorian regret that most actors can't touch, and Kinnear's creature might be the best performance in the whole run, Miltonic and pitiful without tipping into self-pity. Logan's script loves language, actual sentences instead of quips, and when the show slows down for two people just talking about God or grief, it's genuinely great TV.

The plotting is a mess. Logan has a novelist's love of digression and a show-runner's obligation to keep supernatural plates spinning, and the two goals fight each other constantly. Whole subplots vanish for episodes then reappear expecting you to care. The Dorian Gray material never earns its runtime. Season three loses the plot entirely, and I mean that structurally. Pacing lurches from hypnotic to inert. If you need momentum you'll be checking your phone.

If you liked Hannibal for the mood, or Crimson Peak for the wallpaper, or you'll sit through anything with a séance in it, you're the target. Fans of Interview with the Vampire on AMC will slide right in. If you need a tight case-of-the-week or you get itchy when characters recite poetry at each other, you're gone by episode two. Anyone hoping for a Universal Monsters team-up in the fun sense should recalibrate; this is gothic misery with jump scares, not a crossover event.

Background TV is the honest verdict because the show is a great performance and a beautiful object attached to a story that can't sustain itself. Eva Green and Kinnear are doing work worth watching. The scripts, when they're on, are richer than almost anything on cable from that era. But Logan couldn't stick the landing, and the final stretch actively damages what came before. Nothing here is preachy; the themes about faith, shame, and monstrousness are earned through character, not sermonized. The problem is craft discipline, a writers' room that indulged its mythology instead of resolving it. Put it on, let Eva Green cook, drift when it drifts. Two seasons is the deal.