I lasted less than five minutes into this one and I’m not kidding. It opens with this scary scene straight out of Wicker Man as a girl’s arms and legs are duct taped and a mask is placed over her face. She’s then thrown into an open grave while Courtney Love (pretty sure that was her) takes Polaroids. Then they throw a beehive in with her. Told you it was Wicker Man. Not the bees!
The guy shovelling dirt on her? Has a donkey’s head.
I’ve already got the remote control in hand but I’m trying to give it a chance. Shortly we’re introduced to the hotel manager Puck, and the handyman Nick Bottoms. Just when I think I might get something resembling Shakespeare, instead I get a play by play of a girl in the bathroom, which ends with a closeup shot of her phone in the (used) toilet.
At that point I weigh the odds of there being any Shakespeare of note in this, decide no way, and give it up.
I actually kind of liked this episode, which starts with Shakespeare’s wife and kids showing up for a surprise visit in London. This of course throws a real monkey wrench in his plans to swive Burbage’s daughter. But he makes it work, taking them for a tour of town that includes meeting all daddy’s friends from work.
I like this bit. It’s exactly like you’d expect. The kids are young and excited and wild and in the middle of things one of them says they have to pee. Poor Anne Hathaway spends most of her time chasing them around, trying to get them to behave, not losing them in the crowd, all while still trying to be a wife to her husband and not just mother to his kids.
Of course she also learns that her husband is cheating on her in about the first ten seconds, so most of the episode is them fighting over what to do. Of course he says he’ll break it off, but then what? Will the family stay in London with him, or return to Stratford? Will he give up writing and come back with them to be a glove maker?
I particularly like the kids. There’s a scene where Hamnet has written a story about dragons, and tells Shakespeare that it’s for him to use in his work. He reminds me greatly of my son. They’re kids. They’re oblivious to the problems of the grownups. When Shakespeare enters a room they all yell “Daddy!” and hurl themselves at him in their excitement. It’s exactly what kids do.
As a juxtaposition in this family episode, our head torture guy – Topcliffe, right? – also has a “take your kids to work day.” His does not end so well. He catches his daughter singing a “Mary, Mary” rhyme and explains to her exactly how horrible Mary is. But the teenage son actually gets to see daddy beat some guy half to death, until he (the son) has to yell for him to stop. Which of course humiliates dad, and son is off to boarding school.
I still hate the street urchin. I hate everything about the story. On the one side, the woman in charge of the prostitutes has seen him in the dress and tells the sister that she’s going to put him to work because there’s customers that like boys dressed as girls. Great, so we start with the threat of pedophiles. But then he’s caught by the theatre folk for stealing a dress, and immediately declares, “Shakespeare give it to me!” making it clear that he’ll blackmail Shakespeare for the whole secret Catholic thing. So now we have to pretend that he’s Shakespeare’s distant cousin, and they give him a job at the theatre -a job he promptly quits because he can’t read. So we’re left with him cutting himself again. I so don’t care about any of that, it’s all just awkward and uncomfortable and has nothing to do with Shakespeare.
Marlowe’s got this weird obsession with death going on, that ends with him hiring people to bury him alive so he can experience death. Huh? I so don’t get what’s going on with him. There’s an appearance by a character that’s obviously very close to him, but I have no idea who it is.
Is there any actual Shakespeare in this episode? Yes – sonnet 116 is recited throughout, which is an interesting choice if we were otherwise following a reasonably accurate timeline. But we’re to believe that the “two minds” are actually Shakespeare and Alice Burbage, who, whether they’re sleeping together are not, are going to keep the theatre alive.
SCENE : The “Will” writer’s room. BILL sit lazily about, staring at the ceiling, drumming fingers, periodically crumbling paper and tossing into a wastebasket. DAVE sits in a corner, reading.
DAVE: (looking up) Hey, do you know what swive means?
BILL: Swive? Nope. Why?
DAVE: (showing book) Because it says in this Shakespeare glossary that it’s another word for the F-bomb.
BILL: So?
DAVE: (devious smile appearing) Don’t you get it? If we didn’t know about it, neither will the censors! So we can fill this week’s script with stuff like “Shut up and swive me now” and “They can go swive themselves for all I care.”
BILL: That’s genius.
Last week was all about how many naked buttocks they could show, this week is apparently archaic swear words. I can’t make this stuff up. (For the record, my searches indicate that Shakespeare himself never used the word.)
“But what about the torture?” I hear you asking. “I’m not here for the language and the nudity, I want to see blood spattering for no reason!”
Well then fear not, I have good news! There’s actually what I thought a funny scene where our resident psychopath (Topcliffe, is it?) is fishing. “Ha!” I thought. “Fishing. Shakespeare. That’s funny.” (“Shakespeare” is actually a very popular manufacturing line of fishing poles.)
Hahaha, it’s all fun and games until somebody gets a fish hook embedded in his chest. Topcliffe then picks up the fishing rod (still attached, mind you) and starts walking away. I think, nay hope, that he’s going to now lead the poor soul away like a leash. Nope. Just goes ahead and rips it right out of him.
Grossed out yet? Later we’ll see him actually hung from the ceiling by giant hooks in his back.
Sometimes I wonder why I watch this stuff. Seriously.
There’s almost no actual Shakespeare in this one. He’s riding on the popularity of Two Gents, but everybody keeps calling it a “tragicomedy” and saying how much they like the dog, and Will wants to be taken seriously.
He’s got some good lines about why he wants to write – to explore why we love and why we fight and what it means to be human. That’s the good stuff, that’s what I want to hear about. But it’s pretty brief.
Of course we drop a few random lines, Marlowe talks about how it’s not his fault that his life’s not going so great, the fault lies in his astrology. This of course is wide open for “The fault is not in our stars but in ourselves,” or maybe ” Additionally we meet Sir Walter Raleigh, who has been to America, and describes it as “Brave new world with such stuff in it.” You get the idea.
(I’m going to try reviewing every episode of Will on TNT as they come out. If something doesn’t seem right this week, it’s because last week they actually ran 2 episodes. So this is second week, third episode.)
This week’s episode does not bode well (bode Will?) for fans of the text. For fans of naked guys, absolutely.
You know the theory that Marlowe is gay? Not really a theory in this show. Marlowe is naked for much of the show, and surrounded by lots of other naked dudes. Not knocking the lifestyle, just saying that’s not what I’m here for, and I think they’re trying way, way too hard. It’s not even that naked Marlowe wakes up, strategically draped by another naked guy. Or that he leans over the balcony and yells to the other six naked guys, “Time to leave, I have to go to work.” Later there’s a full on naked orgy, with Marlowe in the middle demanding that he be serviced. Can we get back to the text, please?
The actual interesting plot line opens with Will being way too confident in his abilities and knocking out a random play that sucks. Everyone tells him, even Burbage’s daughter who is normally on his side. It takes him a little while to accept that he’s still new at this and needs to learn to improve his craft. Specifically, he needs to do so, daughter tells him, by stealing from other people. “Everybody does it, even Marlowe.’
Off they go to the bookseller to find source material, end up stealing a book, getting caught, and then … nothing happens. I found that relatively pointless, other than to set up as a cute little bonding adventure between Will and, I really should go look up her name. Alice? For a universe that started out showing us torture, you now have someone catch a thief red handed and play it for comedy. Make up your mind.
Anyway, now we get to the stuff that’s cribbed right from Shakespeare in Love as this girl acts as Will’s muse, helping him alter his ideas into the lines we know and love. It is not until I hear them change a character’s name to Sylvia that I can finally relax and think, “Ok, cool, they’re doing Two Gentlemen of Verona. The universe is back where it’s supposed to be.” Hence title of this post, by the way 🙂
The comparisons are obvious, but the competition isn’t even close.
I hope that we can fast forward a little bit and get to some of the material that typical audiences know. It’s going to be cliche as all heck for we geeks to have to sit through Romeo and Juliet like it’s a new thing, but I think that’s part of the reason why the show is so weak now. There’s nothing for the regular audience to recognize. They don’t know their Two Gents from their Two Kinsmen. Once we get to writing Hamlet and Lear and Othello (if we get that far!) then maybe we can settle in to having some episodes center around what the actual Shakespeare actually did, and not all this made up nonsense.
I wish I had more time to review this, but I barely had time to watch it. So I’m going to try and hit the highlights, and we can talk about it.
When Shakespeare, Kemp, Burbage and the other “moderately historically accurate” characters are on screen, I am enraptured. I could watch it all day. I’ve been telling people it reminds me of the recent “Jobs” movie starring Michael Fassbender, which was basically two plus hours of a universe centered on Steve Jobs. To the degree that this show will be a universe centered on Shakespeare and his circle, you won’t be able to tear me away from the television.
Alas, television producers don’t have nearly enough faith in modern audiences to allow for that. Instead it’s set against a backdrop of such gratuitous language, sex and violence that I’d be embarrassed to share it with anybody, and almost turned it off fifteen minutes into the show. Think I’m exaggerating?
We watch a man’s intestines pulled out. Another has what I believe was some sort of hot poker shoved down his throat. Great, we get it, we live in a world where to go against the crown is to risk torture. But you could just as easily have said “you risk losing your head” and had the same effect. Unless you want an audience turned on instead of off by that sort of thing. If I wanted that I know what channel Game of Thrones is on.
I’m not a prude and I realize that the later the hour, the more sex is allowed in these shows. But as I told one friend, “I didn’t realize that people were allowed to get that naked for that long.” Seriously, it made me wonder whether they were going in and digitally erasing bits, because there’s literally nothing for them to strategically hide anything behind.
If that’s not awkward enough for you, there’s a side plot involving a prostitute and her little brother who is desperately trying to make enough money to get her out of that life. Just to hammer the point home, we’re treated to a scene of him hiding under her bed while she services a client. The icing on the cake is when he takes out his knife and starts cutting himself, so we’re quite sure of how emotionally messed up he is. Tell me again what the show is called and how any of that has anything to do with Shakespeare?
We could get into the details about the storylines and characters, how much they’re playing up the Catholic/Protestant thing, and whether or not we’re supposed to like Marlowe (I don’t). But that’s my summary for now. When it’s about Shakespeare, it’s got me. Just about everything else, I’m disappointed and embarrassed for the people that made it.
