Watch TV with Paul Flynn
Into a clamouring television universe chewing its own nails off to find the next Game Of Thrones lands Carnival Row.a
mixed-bag Victoriana fantasy drama, its allusions are variously selected from GOT, Westworld, Sherlock, The Handmaid’s Tale, Peter Pan, Penny Dreadful and, yes,
Eastenders. These aren’t casual references btw, they’re noticeable steals. But what the series does offer is Cara Delevingne being star-of-the-show brilliant for the first time in her screen life. It’s a distinction that will carry the show comfortably to its second season (already commissioned).
The Row is the shopping strip of The Burgh, a little like a succession of Stacey Slater’s market stalls in Albert Square, with added potions, lotions, pigs’ heads and a walk-up brothel by way of the Queen Vic. As in Walford, unwieldy crime scenes circle
Carnival Row. Swoonsome police officer Filo (Orlando Bloom, borrowing Ray Winstone’s intonation from Sexy Beast)
keeps it in order with a combination of charm, brute force and slightly obvious hair dye.
The undercurrent climate of The Burgh is a fear of immigration, lending the drama some topicality. A politician delivers a broadside about foreigners coming in to take jobs from the Burghers, worship strange gods and steal their women, a bit like a Brexit party mp to a Thanet constituent having a nervo about a polish supermarket opening. his son Jonah is a regular visitor to the local hookers for levitational sex. The immigrants have wings and are called The Fae, tinkerbell’s own footsoldiers. The political analogies in Carnival Row are well meant, if a little on the nose.
Cara kicks off the whole business as Vignette (oh, add Killing Eve to the list!), a powerhouse immigrant who crashes ashore in a washed-up ship. She sparkles, shines, saves lives, cuts the throat of a warthog and does a better colloquial accent (in her case, northern Irish) than any of the non-brummie cast in Peaky Blinders. Any who wanted to write off the model after the relative disappointment of Suicide Squad, will come to eat their words.
It’s no spoiler to say she was once in love with Bloom’s Filo. The real revelation of
Carnival Row is that she acts him off the screen. go, Cara. This one will run and run.
Streaming Friday, Amazon Prime