Tut

The plotting and counter-plotting in Tut are meshed with some fairly ambitious battle scenes and pulsating full-gallop chariot rides. Not everything is telegraphed, with Grand Vizier Ay in particular a fairly nuanced man of deception and feints.

A largely enjoyable, if uneven three-night epic about one of the best-known rulers from Ancient Egypt: Tutankhamun.

It's all a little bland; even the battle scenes are uninspired. [10/17 Jul 2015, p.103]

It's fertile (crescent) ground for any writer, and, indeed, Michael Vickerman, Peter Paige and Bradley Bredeweg pull out all the stops. So many, in fact, that you wish they'd shove a few back in.

Instead of taking any creative risks, Tut trundles along down the familiar "Game of Thrones"-wannabe path. The emphasis is on battles for power, conspiracies, warring tribes, with some cable-style sex scenes thrown into the mix.

For a while, palace intrigue, Egyptian architecture and a few rousing battles are enough to keep Tut moving. But the farther it moves, the more it gets entangled in that demeaning queen-vs.-queen subplot, to the point where Tut vanishes from his own movie as thoroughly as he's vanished from history.

You might wonder about some of the script’s lapses in logic here and there, but most likely you’ll just shrug at them because Tut is primarily meant as an old-fashioned, blood, sand and sex epic with cool battle scenes, grunt-filled lovemaking, serviceable dialogue, CGI and papier mache sets and minimal heavy lifting on the part of Oscar winner Kingsley. He proves that he can glare with the best of them.

The soap keeps generating suds, while Kingsley plays it solemn and serious. Clearly, the producers started with the premise they could make this Tut anything they wanted. They just don’t seem to have ever decided exactly what that was.

Like a lot of period dramas, it settles for being slightly silly and mostly dull.

A flaccid script leaves both men without much to work with, however, and the rings of black kohl around their eyes make them look like silent-movie stars in a “Saturday Night Live” skit.

Tut has a florid quality that can be intermittently fun, in a campy sort of way. That said, the script doesn’t withstand much scrutiny.

Three nights' worth of Tut became a slog, some of it through copious amounts of spurting blood.

The series is so devoid of any real riches, it should be hosted by Geraldo.