In Penny Dreadful: City of Angels, the action shifts from the dark streets of Victorian London, to the sunny Los Angeles of 1938.
Penny Dreadful: City of Angels is a spinoff of John Logan’s hit Showtime horror drama series Penny Dreadful. And, Logan is back as the writer and creator.
The action shifts from the dark streets of Victorian London, a classic horror favourite, to the sunny Los Angeles of 1938.
My initial tendency was to dismiss this series without watching it. For one, I loved the original series, which told the story of a singular woman (Vanessa Ives, played by Eva Green) who faces the darkest forces this universe has to offer: Satan and Dracula. The excellent cast included Timothy Dalton, Rory Kinnear, Harry Treadaway, Reeve Carney, Billie Piper, Danny Sapani and so on.
For another, Los Angeles of late 1930s, though going through social upheaval, was not exactly a breeding ground for horror fiction. The title of the series, Penny Dreadful, refers to cheap, lurid fiction that was sold in parts for a penny in 19th-century United Kingdom.
However, the series has so far managed to surprise and impress me with its plot, characters and writing. There may be too many threads to follow, but it still tells a compelling tale steeped in themes like racial strife, Nazism, death and so on.
Natalie Dormer plays the role of a shape-shifting demon and manipulative demon Magda who whispers provocations in the ears of murderous men (a bit like Ares from Wonder Woman) and inspires them to kill, and killing gives her power.
Our hero is a LA police detective who is originally from Mexico, Tiago Vega (Daniel Zovatto) who suffers racist remarks from his colleagues in the LAPD and accusations of being a “gringo” by his brother and other Mexican natives. His mother believes and worships Santa Muerte, the Mexican goddess of death, who is an actual character in the show played by Lorenza Izzo.
Several other plotlines intersect Tiago’s. Rory Kinnear (who returns from the original series) plays the role of a doctor and family man Peter Craft, a German migrant and a firm Nazi in an era where being one was not a crime. He is seduced by Magda. A councilman Charlton Townsend (Michael Gladis) is approached by the Nazi regime for its espionage operations in the United States.
All these plotlines do not gel together well all the time, but they together build a complex, believable world. Dormer delivers an excellent performance and remains authentic in nearly every role she plays. The performances are otherwise good too, and so far at least, the City of Angeles has proven to be a worthy Penny Dreadful spinoff to me. Daniel looks suitably harried in the difficult role of Tiago amid the tensions between the Mexican-Americans and white Americans. City of Angels might not be so taut and cohesive, but it does use its setting really well, something that the original series did exceptionally.