- Network: Prime Video , Amazon Prime Video
- Series Premiere Date: Aug 30, 2019
Season #: 2, 1
Watch Now
Where To Watch
| Stream On |
|
| Buy on |
|
Critic Reviews
- Critic score
- Publication
- By date
-
The world Carnival Row creates is handsomely realised and sufficiently different from Game of Thrones, Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings etc to feel like its own unique corner of the fantasy universe.
-
It takes a few episodes for the series to introduce and spin out this cobbled mythology — and that will undoubtedly lose some people — but ultimately it works when it gets going. Carnival Row has a strong cast . ... If you're not into fantasy, that probably seems a real hodgepodge of mythos, but Carnival Row succeeds precisely because it's different (and looks expensive while creatively employing its CGI).
-
Carnival Row, whether airborne or down-to-earth gritty, keeps flexing the power of its oft-breathtaking visuals. The worlds it creates are the greater sums of its whole while the messages it sends can be a little two telegraphed.
-
The divided world of the Burgue is harrowing enough to navigate with a killer on the prowl. Then add in the drama’s array of subplots only loosely connecting most parties during the first four episodes of season one, and at times, keeping all the stories in order feels akin to sorting through entrails — though much lovelier, of course, and peddled by extraordinary actors.
-
The main attraction of “Carnival Row” is, in fact, its incongruities—the familiar in unfamiliar places, an amalgamation of myths, tropes and themes wedded to each other despite their seeming incompatibilities. Not everything works in the show. But when it does, it takes flight.
-
Like many a silly novel, it is a shambles, but an enjoyable one, and as long as you’re up for some full-throated groans (Tourmaline Larou?!) you’ll be rewarded with a long, messy, and satisfying distraction.
-
At times, the mythology can feel needlessly complex, but there is something truly endearing about Carnival’s earnest, irony-free storytelling. Oddly, this splashy streamer production built around a movie star and a former model feels like an underdog — a Cones of Dunshire-style labor of love on a Jack Ryan budget.
-
While this series also begins with an unwieldy amount of place-setting involving a war that led to the current refugee crisis, “Carnival Row” proves more palatable than “The Dark Crystal.” The Amazon series is easier to follow even as it introduces initially-unconnected characters in multiple social classes. This gives “Carnival Row” plenty of areas to explore. If only it all felt more unique.
-
Amazon Prime’s new allegorical steampunk fantasy is grim, gory, and exhaustingly self-serious.
-
Carnival Row is not the next Game of Thrones, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t doing a good job of being its own thing entirely. If it could just take itself a little less seriously next series, please.
-
Carnival Row's biggest problem isn't that it's overtly political; it's that this political drama anchored in a fantasy setting uses allegories for racism without tackling the issue head on.
-
As is, it’s a highly ambitious series sporting a pair of faery wings that can’t carry its own aspirations off the ground.
-
It’s a show with certainly admirable ambitions, but through nearly every aspect of its swirling narrative, “Carnival Row” is less than the sum of its otherworldly parts.
-
World building is hard enough, but as circus acts go, Carnival Row is like a juggler on a unicycle. It's kind of interesting to watch, but nobody really needs it. Nor does the prejudice directed at the mythological races really come alive, as allegorical as it might feel.
-
As it stands, season one offers an outline for the type of show Carnival Row wants to be—mixed genres and all—instead of the Thrones successor Amazon is banking on with an early renewal.
-
Fantasy junkies may be able to get by on this grade-B stimulant until the next great visionary show comes along, but right now the second-season renewal (before premiere) for “Carnival Row” seems extremely rash.
-
Not an episode goes by that doesn’t make one wonder what Carnival Row could have been had it not bitten off far more than it can chew. There’s much to like here—mostly the kaleidoscopic genre-mixing—but not enough to overcome the show’s confused handling of the socio-political allegory at its core. Would that this beast were more thoughtfully stitched together.
-
Too crass to care about, too serious to take seriously. Still, for all that, it is a solidly crafted creation with only the set designers working even harder than the leads.
-
The series reanimates bits and pieces from different branches of the fantasy genre into a glum and lumbering beast that only occasionally sparks into life.
-
Ultimately, the world is much more interesting than the spree of murders within it, or the love story, such as it is, between Philo and Vinny. Carnival Row has built a fascinating metaphor for colonial power, resettlement, and migration—but doesn't quite know what to do with all that raw material.
-
This new series reaches for credibility with gruesomeness and exaggeration, falling flat at every turn. It’s painful proof that a genre success cannot be reverse-engineered.
-
What is by turns a Jack the Ripper riff, an Austen-style comedy of manners and a dark political thriller (starring the great Jared Harris), with a Dickensian street gang and a fairy brothel thrown in for kicks. These story lines rarely intersect with one another or with the show’s themes of anti-imperialism and tolerance in a way that justifies the collage of references. And hacky dialogue (“Oh, come now, woman!”) doesn’t help.
Awards & Rankings
User score distribution:
-
Positive: 50 out of 72
-
Mixed: 11 out of 72
-
Negative: 11 out of 72
-
Sep 1, 2019
-
Sep 5, 2019This review contains spoilers, click full review link to view.
-
Aug 30, 2019