What I think we can all agree we’re wanting in these barren post-Game of Thrones times is a shonky fantasy epic set in half-fantasy Victorian London with Cara Delevingne as the lead, who is inexplicably a fairy, and inexplicably also Irish, and Orlando Bloom is there, too, trying very hard. Prayers and thanks, then, to the megacorporation gods at Amazon, who have produced Carnival Row (from Friday 30 August, Amazon Prime Video), a beautiful, expensive mess.
The set-up for Carnival Row is this: I don’t know. Every single sentence uttered in this show hints at rich lore and vibrant world-building but very crucially doesn’t reveal any of it, because Cara Delevingne is running Irishly around a grey sub-city with a pair of CGI wings on her back, and they keep forgetting to tell the story. So the dialogue is like: “Did they kill all the women and children at Bleakness Keep?” and Cara Delevingne half weeps beneath her eyebrows and goes “Aye”. Actually a line I transcribed from the second episode: “Critch magic is a sin against the Martyr!” Another one I didn’t quite understand but: “They call themselves the Black Raven. Fae folk, part of the Wing Brigade … they run ’lixir.” I think ’lixir is this world’s version of illegal hooch, but I do not know for sure. People keep saying “assuredly”. The first thing rich socialite “Ezra Spurnrose” says is “Now, now, dear sister”. Someone wheels a penny farthing through a town square. The entire series is a fever dream hatched in the frenzied mind of someone banned from every steampunk pub-meet in the UK. It absolutely reeks of taking a pint of Hobgoblin back to the bar because it wasn’t tepid enough.
The story we are supposed to care about is: one island (humans) was at war with another (mythical folk). The humans won the war and the refugees from the mythical kingdom started coming over to the human island in boats, and the humans hate them now, and what that all means really is that sometimes the house staff randomly have ram’s horns. Delevingne, as aforementioned, is an Irish (none of the other fairies have Irish accents. Why does Cara Delevingne have an Irish accent?) fairy who washed up ashore and was put to work as a maid, but then she broke out of that house (because she has wings) and will probably, if you can be bothered to watch the rest, lead a revolution.
Orlando Bloom is a human detective who is trying to crack a series of murders that hint at a dark power brooding beneath the very city he lives in. He keeps punching other policemen, and the whole thing is an incredibly clunky allegory for racism. I don’t know what else to tell you, because Amazon already ordered a second season, which means it goes one of two ways now: Carnival Row will be the blockbuster mega-series of the next generation – ie the most annoying person in your office is going to talk about it near-constantly, proper “Yeah, I think I really identify with Agreus the Puck” energy. Or, more likely, it’ll be one of those weird shows that exists in culture only among frenzied housebound teenagers who all start a massive petition when it gets cancelled three seasons in. Let us all hope it’s the latter. I really don’t want to have to ever learn what ’lixir is.
