Dracula - Season 1
DRACULA - BBC
The legend of Count Dracula is as old and familiar as it is graphic and spooky. A tale meant to stir and inspire the wicked imaginations of its readers with a sense of good, old-fashioned Victorian horror. Thus, as an adaptation of Bram Stoker’s classic Gothic novel, Mark Gatiss and Steven Moffat’s Dracula captures that original tone with faithfulness and sincerity, while injecting the source material with a modern outlook that keeps it fresh and exciting. Though the series ultimately falls short of reaching its lofty storytelling ambitions, there exists enough intrigue, spookiness and aesthetic beauty to keep it consistently fun to watch.
Claes Bang and Dolly Wells star as the titular Count Dracula and reimagined Sister Agatha Van Helsing, respectively. The three-part series follows Dracula’s various vampirish exploits and reign of terror against the humans of this world alongside the fiercely intelligent Sister Van Helsing’s efforts to put an end to his twisted and grotesque consumption of human blood and lives. Bang and Wells are a genuinely winning double act, with fiery chemistry and an awareness of the heightened degree of drama and wit that these two characters are capable of emitting. With the help of Gatiss and Moffat’s delightfully indulgent dialogue, both actors transform their characters into transcendent and highly original new archetypes of the Vampire genre and assist in bringing Stoker’s work into the modern era.
Dracula’s dark and moody colour palette pops with vivid reds and deep blacks, capturing the stylized and dramatic nature of his world in a manner befitting of the character’s design, personality and violent actions. From a visual perspective, everything looks beautiful; the sleek and smooth look of the show reflects Dracula’s style: horror and evil masked through divine beauty and elegance. David Arnold and Michael Price’s haunting original score push the show further into the depths of darkness and give it a slowly rising sense of urgency throughout, even if the writing does not always reflect this.
Each episode is more ambitious than the last and though the writers continue to surprise and reinvent the source material in compelling ways, this ambition causes the show to lose sight of any definite meaning or purpose, thus stripping it of any potential relevance in the modern era. Truly jaw-dropping and exciting twists and concepts amount to nothing except a confused and muddled mess of a story. The series aims for a nuanced character study of Dracula’s vulnerabilities and fears but often forgets to take the time to explore or even commit to this, favouring cheap tricks. The show demonstrates carelessness and thoughtlessness in its plotting and does a disservice to the source material, the lead actors’ delightful performances, and the series’ cleverly subversive reimagining of Stoker’s work.
Though it boasts a stellar cast, high production value and an undeniably twisted sense of fun, Dracula is ultimately an exercise in futility and a meaningless attempt to revive source material while wasting its story potential and amounts to nothing except confusion, insincerity and disappointment.
DRACULA is available to stream on BBC
