Rewatch: 1x01 - Will You Tolerate This?

[rochvelleth]

I'm participating in the rewatch going on in roh_fics - see here for this week's.

Here are my thoughts on 1x01...

Comments

[rochvelleth]

I'm a history buff, and I was really jonesing for good period drama...and what I got was...well, NOT. Your first review reflects many of my own thoughts on the show at first watch.

I'm glad to hear I wasn't the only one who wasn't inclined to give it a good review right at the start! I think, more than decent period drama, I was hoping for something that got in line with moral commentary American and Americanesque TV shows that I was such a fan of back then (Buffy, Xena, Roar). I should really have taken a step back and appreciated it for what it was, I guess.

My sense is the first two episodes were written as a sort of pilot for the show, and all the characters are essentially cardboard cutouts of stock characters from the Robin Hood legend and other revisions of the legend.

You know, I find that very convincing. There's something about episode 1 in particular (I hadn't thought of adding ep 2, but I do see what you mean) that comes across as an exercise in impressing people and as such has amazingly little depth - depth being one of the things I really crave in TV shows, because I like to lose myself in them.

I wonder whether they actually had to produce the first couple of episodes quite early on and show them to someone in order to secure the series, or something like that... I haven't heard that they were filmed earlier (and I know most of the filming was massively out of sequence - I've been listening to the audio commentaries finally, yay!), but it's so different.

I'm looking forward to next week's reviewing. I dug out my old review for 1x02, and it starts off with me deciding that maaaybe RH isn't so bad after all. The speed with which I descended (ascended, really) into a slash-writing frenzy based on the show is really rather interesting, looking back...