Carnival Row

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.