DOWN FOR THE COUNT
Put Sherlock creators Mark Gatiss and Steve Moffat in charge of yet another Victorian-era series, tell them to reinvent it like they did the perennial meta-detective from Baker Street, and you get the Netflix series Dracula. Lurid, gothic and campy as hell, the three-episode first season, now on Netflix, follows the Sherlock template a bit — each episode runs about 90 minutes, basically a mini movie, but also serving as a cliffhanger for the next episode — and as usual, Moffat and Gatiss take great liberties with the original text.
Dracula stars Claes Bang as the Count, but opens on Jonathan Harker (John Heffernan), weak and drained, under the care of two nuns in a mental institute in Switzerland. Besides his mental collapse, Harker has an unnerving habit of looking quite dead — a fly quietly enters his eye socket and pads around in there before escaping from his mouth.
Sister Agatha (Dolly Wells) hears out the story we know: Harker voyaging to Transylvania to write up a property contract for the Count to buy an abbey in London. So far, so Stoker. Yet Gatiss and Moffat swing for the fences here, working in crazy plot twists and embellishments on the Dracula myth that are cool, self-referential and up to date. (Making Van Helsing a woman, for one.)
With Bang doing a Benjamin Button as he begins draining fresh victims, and Harker’s fiancée Mina (Morfydd Clark) along for the bloody ride, Dracula does go full bonkers before winding up its first meta-driven season. But it’s a good kind of crazy. (Now on Netflix.)