Carnival Row

 I'm alone in the apartment for the holidays, so I've been looking for various things to watch that I hadn't seen previously and decided to check out Carnival Row.

I've now seen the first episode, which seems to hold some promise (though I've seen reviews that are not so hot on the series).

It's a fantasy show, but one set in a 19th Century-style world (though a character refers to it as the 7th Century, clearly a cheeky way to remind people that this is not the real world). The premise is that this world has humans and it has Faefolk - various classic fairy-folk including, well, fairies (who look like humans but have dragonfly-like wings) as well as satyrs, centaurs, etc. Humans, as they industrialized, invaded the homeland of the Fae and colonized it, but then started fighting over the colonies.

The Pact is some kind of empire that seems to be engaging in a genocidal campaign on the Fae homeland, while The Burgue, a Republic, forfeited their holdings and abandoned the continent, causing a huge immigration crisis as Faefolk come to The Burgue. The Fae are given second-class citizen status, most forced into indentured servitude to afford passage out of their home country, and a vocal political movement (that does not quite have the political majority, but only by a little) wants to kick the Faefolk out or at least crack down on their rights, fearing that these immigrants are going to take over the country. You know, not like that's familiar rhetoric.

In the midst of this, we're introduced to Philo, a police inspector and veteran of the war with the Pact (Orlando Bloom,) who is introduced on the tail of someone who has been assaulting Faefolk on a regular basis - it seems he hasn't killed anyone yet, but he's picking targets at random other than the fact that they're Fae.

Meanwhile, Vignette (Cara Delevigne) is a fairy we're introduced to trying to help a group of fairy women escape a Pact death squad (there are a lot of people getting shot in the head from a, frankly, impressive distance in the first scene of the show). She only barely escapes with her own life, and as if things weren't traumatic enough, the ship she's on sinks as they're nearing The Burgue, leaving her the only survivor.

Vignette gets employment from the man who had invested in the scheme (basically importing refugees as indentured servants) but primarily she wants to meet up with people she knew from the old country - like a friend named Tourmaline who works in a brothel on Carnival Row, the Fae ghetto where they're forced to live.

The thing is, Vignette has come there knowing it's where someone she loved, but who died in the war, is from. Only, as it turns out, the man she loved is none other than Rycroft "Philo" Philostrate, who, as we're well aware, is not quite so dead.

It came to my attention after watching this first episode that the show was in development for a fews years before it was produced, and that one of the people attached to it was Guillermo Del Toro. While I don't think he was the initial creator, you can see how this premise would work well for his sensibilities. The first episode is also called "Some Dark God Wakes," which clearly implies that we're also introducing some cosmic horror elements.

I'm eager to see more. I do have a soft spot for any kind of fantasy that goes beyond a Medieval aesthetic (I believe the term for Carnival Row's fantasy subgenre is Gaslamp Fantasy - though I imagine most people would just call it Steampunk, which, if you want to split hairs, is the sci-fi counterpart).