Carnival Row, Season 1

The best fantasy with horror elements since Penny Dreadful.

Carnival Row

Carnival Row, Amazon Prime’s neo-noir Victorian SteamGoth fantasy series, has come to the many fortunate enough to be able to watch it. Combining the worlds of the fae and humanity has never been so well done.

A lot of it is hitting a little close to home: immigrants trying to build a new life after fleeing their wartorn homelands, intolerance, discrimination, ghettos. It’s clear the creators took a good look at human history — Victorian, World War II-era and contemporary.

It shows, not just in the storyline, but in the cinematography. The wardrobes, the uniforms, everything. This is the best fantasy with horror elements since Penny Dreadful (our review here) and it is a shame it isn’t more easily available, because it has a strong story with a talented cast.

One of the series’ strengths is not that it has a good storyline, but that it has multiple storylines that come together really well. The characters and the setting are well developed. At the end of the story, the only kind of questions you are left with are the kind you know will likely be addressed in Season 2. (And there will be a Season 2, the show has been renewed.)

Would I recommend you get Amazon Prime for this? No, not unless you want to watch a ton of other things as well, because this is basically eight hours worth of (good) entertainment. I feel it’s not worth the fee (or giving Amazon your data, if they don’t have it already).

If you can get a free one-month trial, though, go ahead and take it for this. (Make sure you cancel in time. Amazon will pretend you will lose your benefits the moment you do, but the trial will actually last for the whole month. This way you won’t end up paying in case you forget to cancel.)

If you do have Amazon Prime, I totally recommend watching this.

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I had high hopes for the series but couldn’t watch more than a couple of episodes as the dialogue writing is so very poor and the acting is not a lot better.

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