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49% Avg. Tomatometer 85 Reviews 79% Avg. Audience Score 1,000+ Ratings A growing population of mythological immigrant creatures struggles to coexist with humans after the creatures' exotic ...
- (85)
- Orlando Bloom
- TV-MA
- 2
Beautiful, but bloated, Carnival Row boasts meticulously crafted mythology and luscious world building -- unfortunately its story of haves and have nots simply has too much going on. Read...
- (68)
- August 30, 2019
- Orlando Bloom
Feb 17, 2023 · Season 2 of the Amazon Prime show has made the Burgue world that Philo (Orlando Bloom) and Vignette (Cara Delevingne) inhabit feel much more contained and boring.
- Zosha Millman
Carnival Row is a captivating fantasy series that tells the story of a Victorian-inspired world where mythical creatures and humans coexist. The show's first season features strong performances by Orlando Bloom and Cara Delevingne, who bring depth and nuance to their characters.
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By Laura Prudom
Updated: Apr 28, 2020 10:16 pm
Posted: Aug 30, 2019 5:30 pm
This is a spoiler-free review for Season 1 of Amazon's Carnival Row, which is now streaming on Amazon Prime worldwide.
When venturing into the sprawling world of Amazon’s Carnival Row, be forewarned: its greatest strength - its ambitious, sweeping scale - is also its biggest weakness.
Meticulously realized by creators Travis Beacham (who first developed the idea as a spec film script that hit The Blacklist, Hollywood’s repository of the best unproduced screenplays, in 2005) and René Echevarria, with an assist from fellow executive producer Marc Guggenheim, Carnival Row tries to accomplish a lot of different things with varying degrees of success.
Their storyline alone would be enough meat for most shows to chew on, but Carnival Row also throws in a dizzying array of subplots. The season’s most engaging and resonant supporting narrative involves a pair of upper-class siblings, Imogen and Ezra Spurnrose (Tamzin Merchant and Andrew Gower) grappling with the scandalous arrival of a wealthy faun neighbor, Agreus Astrayon (a scene-stealing David Gyasi who exudes both grace and subtle menace when the situation calls for it) in their exclusively human enclave.
Then there's the political machinations of Chancellor Absalom Breakspear (Jared Harris), his savvy wife Piety (Indira Varma), and their layabout son Jonah (Arty Froushan) as they struggle to maintain power against their Parliamentary rivals, the ambitious Longerbane family; plus myriad detours featuring the various fae and faun factions as they attempt to survive in a city that treats them as second-class citizens, their clashes with the constabulary, and the resentments that bubble up as a result.
Many of these disparate threads do start to tie together in clever ways as the show nears its finale, but with so much going on in every episode and no clear throughline until the back half of the season, it sometimes feels as if Carnival Row can’t decide what it wants to be. Minor spoiler alert: the season also features a chilling monster that is crafted from pieces of other creatures, which becomes an apt comparison for the show itself - a jumble of competing ideas, all fascinating in their own right, but still somewhat clumsy when stitched together.
The show straddles that line between the silly and the sublime in its visuals, too. The costumes, production design, and makeup effects (especially for the fauns) are stunning, creating a vibrant, tactile world that’s teeming with activity and nuance, with the sights and sounds of the Row practically wafting off the screen. But when the show relies too heavily on CGI effects - from the fae’s wings to snarling werewolf attacks - things start to look a little rough around the edges. Given how Game of Thrones had to essentially write its direwolves out of the show because it didn’t have the budget to do the creatures justice, Carnival Row deserves bonus points just for attempting to bring a whole world full of fantasy creatures to life with such aplomb, even if it sometimes misses the mark.
To Carnival Row’s credit, it definitely doesn’t take the audience’s intellect for granted - the show throws viewers in at the deep end and trusts them to keep up with the many competing characters and loyalties it introduces, and makes quick and confident work of establishing their personalities, even when their motivations are murky.
The worldbuilding for the series is staggering - you can feel the depth of all the mythology that Beacham has clearly mapped out, even if we don’t get all of the answers or backstory we might be craving in this eight-episode first season. In some ways, Carnival Row feels like it might’ve been better served as an open-world game than a linear TV narrative, with fascinating side quests waiting around every corner. There’s so much history, so many different locations and species to explore, the possibilities for where the series could go feel almost limitless, which is why it’s a little disappointing that Season 1 spends so much narrative real estate on a fairly standard murder mystery plot, even if it’s one that features plenty of fantastical flourishes.
Ambitious, evocative, and timely, Carnival Row has a lot of big ideas (and an even bigger canvas), but by trying to explore too many of them at once, it never quite picks up the narrative momentum to match the bingeable quality of Amazon’s most recent hits, like The Boys and Fleabag. While it often gets tangled in the weeds even as it’s attempting ...
Even more uneven than before, Carnival Row's second season doesn't lack for ambition, but its endless sprawl of subplots mostly dovetail into a storytelling dead end. Read Critics Reviews
Aug 19, 2019 · THR review: 'Carnival Row,' Amazon's ambitious fantasy starring Orlando Bloom and Cara Delevingne, has a murky concept but quickly finds its footing.
