A First Look at Camelot

For those of you that don’t know me, I spent some time moonlighting as a high school English teacher. So when I heard that Starz was doing a new series about the King Arthur legend, I was rather excited. However, when you are covering a story that has been told so many times, you have to do something new with it to set it apart. I started to think about all the ways I would set a new King Arthur show apart. You could change the time period or setting, tell a more realistic/historically accurate version of the tale, or edit a part of the story to see how the whole would be changed. The new Starz series does none of these things.

Camelot is an almost textbook retelling of the King Arthur legend right from the first episode. After the murder of King Uther Pendragon, his evil witch daughter, Morgan, believes that she will rule England. However, the mysterious Merlin goes in search of Arthur, the secret heir to Uther’s throne. Merlin this time around is played by Joseph Fiennes (FlashForward) and is a carbon copy of any stereotypical wizard you may be familiar with pre-Harry Potter. Although Fiennes’ Merlin doesn’t bring anything new to the table, he is definitely the best in a sea of mediocre actors. Arthur is played by Jamie Campbell Bower, who, interestingly enough, has a small role in the final Harry Potter movie as the wizard Grindalwald. This and a role in Tim Burton’s version of Sweeny Todd are his only acting credits but in the pilot he seems to do a decent job portraying the boy who just had the weight of the world dropped onto his shoulders. The pilot spends most of its time setting up the story, which is unsurprising because even though it’s a well-known story, there is a large cast of characters. Merlin tells Arthur of his birthright and takes him to a ruined city known as Camelot which Merlin hopes to transform into the seat of Arthur’s power. Merlin also reveals that not only is Arthur the son of the king, but his very birth was all a plot orchestrated by Merlin to create a good king. Merlin used magic to allow Arthur’s father to rape the wife of a rival lord, which as strange as it may sound is actually Arthurian canon. Merlin demands the child that was the product of the rape as payment and whisks him away to be raised by good common-folk so he can learn humility and kindness. This entire back story comes off as rather tedious, and unless these past events become more important to the plot I question how necessary all the exposition was. However, the die-hard Arthur fan-boys will be happy to note that the circumstances of Arthur’s birth are textbook, literally from the old French and English stories.

As a pilot, the episode did a good job of setting up the beginning of the story and introducing us to the cast of characters; note that I said introducing and not developing. If Camelot hopes to succeed it has to do more to develop the rest of the characters because at the end of the pilot they still all seem very flat. This is to be expected though with the large amount of plot that had to be set up in the series and I almost admire how they were able to condense the first act of the Arthur story into a single episode. I had high hopes for the rest of the series and was going to readily suggest it until I got to the last couple minutes of the episode. Not to spoil anything, but Starz seems to be taking a note from HBO’s series True Blood. Anyone familiar with True Blood knows that no episode of the show can just end; it needs to have a twist or a death that sets up the next episode. The writers of the show probably call it a cliffhanger ending. I however call it a poor excuse for writing. An episode of television should be self contained and have a beginning, middle, and end. The writers of Camelot, in the pilot at least feel that their first episode was not good enough to keep people coming back so they took the first couple minutes of the second episode, and tacked it onto the first in an effort to keep people coming back next week to see the resolution. As much as I do not like this style of ending, the rest of the forty some odd minutes of the show were good and I will be giving it a tentative spot on my DVR for the first season.


Update:
You should never judge a series by its pilot, which is funny because the point of the pilot is to give the viewer an idea of what the series will be like. As I stated above, the pilot for Camelot was not bad but it certainly was nothing that had me excited. My two biggest complaints were the ending and that nothing had been done to alter or deviate from the classic King Arthur myth. I wanted to see the show put its own touch on the story. It is a good thing I did not post this until the second episode aired because the second episode was amazing and did the job the pilot should have done by getting me really excited for the show. This episode focused mainly on the “sword in the stone” part of the Arthur myth. If you stop a random person on the street and ask them why Arthur was the king of Britain . . . well they will probably just look at you funny because public education does not stress European myths nearly as much as it should in the curriculum. However, if you stop a random person on the street and they happen to be a student of comparative English literature they will tell you that Arthur is king because he pulled the sword from the stone, a legendary feat that could only be done by the rightful king of England. In Camelot’s second episode, Merlin tells Arthur that to win over the people and gain enough support to stand as king he must do something legendary, such as removing the sword of the gods from a stone. Legend says that the sword was placed there by the god Mars and no one has ever been able to remove it. So far, sounds word for word like every other Arthur story, but this time around the stone with a sword in it is not placed in a nice peaceful field where just anyone can tug at it. The sword of Mars is placed in the middle of a river at the peak of a waterfall. This means that just getting to the sword to try to pull it out means climbing up a freaking waterfall. This is what I wanted when I first heard about the series. The classic tale of King Arthur with a twist and if the rest of the series follows then I will happily tune in.

What do you think of the newest take on King Arthur so far? What other shows are you most enjoying? Leave a comment and let us know what you want to hear more about.