Carnival Row

Carnival Row Season 1 - Official Trailer | Prime Video
Amazon Prime Video

Here be spoilers.

Carnival Row is a fantastic mix of Victorian England, steampunk engineering and magical creatures. The show starts very grimly with the slaughter of a band of innocents at the hands of soldiers, and then the wreck of a sailing ship with the loss of all passengers and crew except for our heroine, which reminds us that life in some places and in some situations can be brutal.

There are two warring factions on either side of the ocean. The fae (magical creatures like faeries and fauns) are being hunted to extinction by The Pact. The Burgue has been fighting a long war against The Pact, nominally on the side of the fae, but have recently abandoned their effort. Sounds kind of like our war against the Taliban. Now the fae are trying to escape their homeland by selling themselves into indentured servitude to buy passage on a ship. All those passengers on the wrecked sailing vessel? Fae.

Our heroine's name is Vignette Stonemoss - where do they come up with these names? I don't know but thy manage to conjure up a bunch of them, both for people and things, that are different than what we use, but the way they are said and used leaves no doubt as to their meaning. Reminds me of some of the weird names the English have for places, places with names that mean thing like 'deepest hole in the world', or 'abandon all hope', but they use those names just as though they were 'happy valley'.

We've got real tangle of love stories and illicit couplings. In a previous life Philo, the copper, was a soldier fighting the Pact. While overseas, he meets and falls in love with Vignette, a faery, complete with wings. Basically a grown up Tinkerbell. War separates them and he returns to Burgue. Now he is carrying on with his widowed landlady. Philo, it turns out, is the half-blood son of the Prime Minister and a formerly popular faery singer. 

The Prime Minister's arch rival has a daughter who has been sequestered her entire life but is now breaking out, and who does she hook up with? The Prime Minister's son, who, it turns out, is her brother. 

And then there are the series of gruesome, brutal murders carried out by a monster who bears a striking resemblance to Cthulhu. Who is this monster controlled by? A woman with a name suggesting reverence. She is definitely off her rocker, but she continues to play the upright citizen very successfully.

Towards the end, the good citizens of Burgue start rounding up all the fae and confining them to their own quarter of the city. Sounds a whole lot like the muslim migrants from the middle east when they come to Europe.

To top it all we've got a real Beauty and the Beast story where the sister of the man who financed the sailing ship (that wrecked, and ruined him financially) runs off with a fabulously wealthy faun, possibly the only one in existence.

Maleficent's Wings
Walt Disney Studios

While the production values (sets, props, attire, etc.) are great, they kind of cheaped out on the faery wings. Even if faeries only weigh half as much as human, you are still going to need considerable muscles to flap them along with  skeletal structures to match. They skipped all that, they just gave them bumble-bee wings and stuck them to their backs, much like the wings on the minor fairies in the Maleficent video clip, not like Maleficent's glorious wings.

Since this imaginary world parallels our own, it also has it's own religion. During the show, several characters exclaim 'by the martyr' or something similar, much like we might say 'oh my lord'. Okay, but then we visit an orphanage and they have a sculpture of the martyr hanging on the wall, much like you might see in a Catholic church, except instead of him being nailed to a cross, he has been hung by the neck. This only shows up briefly in a couple of dimly lit scenes so you could miss it. I didn't and I was shocked. Odd that I would have that reaction to this depiction of the martyr while scenes of the crucifixion don't bother me in the least. Perhaps because scenes of the crucifixion are fairly common in our world. Hanging scenes mostly show up in movies and they are set up to make you feel something.

Wikipedia has a lengthy article. The show came out in 2019. There might be a season 2 this year. The Hollywood Reporter has a review.

Mini-series on Amazon Prime, 8 episodes one hour each.

Update October 2023 - previous mention.