Penny Dreadful

The sly second season of Penny Dreadful finds its drama in characters trying to shake shameful pasts that won’t stop haunting them, and finds rich menace in cunning folk and shape-shifting spirits who make thralls and puppets out of our heroes, robbing them of authenticity and self-determination.

This is a sumptuously produced, beautifully executed show, and if the story doesn’t always make sense, the metaphysics always does.

Its characters aren't valiant champions of truth, beauty, and goodness, but deliciously compromised anti-heroes who are morally ambivalent, if not downright nasty. More compelling--at least for English lit nerds--our leads go toe-to-toe and fang-to-fang against an army of vampires while speaking poetry.

Beyond the elaborate production design and the stately but genuinely gory and frightening Gothic bloodletting, Penny Dreadful is a fairly typical story of troubled people--all the main characters are hiding something, in their pasts or in their bodies--who manage to do the right thing. That it’s the best of its kind on TV right now, along with “The Strain” on FX, has to do with Mr. Logan’s ability to render over-the-top action and emotions in human terms and to choose actors who can see what he’s trying to do.

The tone of the second season is slightly different from the first, yet he remains remarkably true to his stated metaphoric mission. Have no fear, it's the same Penny Dreadful, but Logan is shaking things up in all kinds imaginative ways.... No if about it. Penny Dreadful works.

Even richer and spookier in its second season, this inspired creep show plays like a Hammer horror film rendered by a poet consumed by a fatal romanticism. [4-17 May 2015, p.12]

The achievement of Penny Dreadful is that within its highly stylized, delightfully elaborate and occasionally batsh-t world, it has created complex, fascinating characters--or rather, it has begun to.

It seems hell-bent on not failing us for one single second.

Awash in gothic atmosphere and tasty performances, Penny Dreadful puts a face on evil in its second season, and feels considerably richer for it.

Things are about to get a lot worse on Penny Dreadful, and for viewers, that is a very good thing indeed.

Whether or not this builds to something greater, as hinted at in Season 1, Penny Dreadful has provided more than enough reasons to join its camp.

There are times when I wish Penny Dreadful were baser, lower-brow, and more exploitative than it is apparently willing to be. And yet I can’t quite dismiss it, thanks to winning, carefully modulated performances by Billie Piper—as a woman who fears the man whom she was brought back to life to wed--and Helen McCrory, whose full-bodied incantations are even scarier than Vanessa’s.