I am a pretty big sucker when it comes to watching fairy tales. Ever since the days of Faerie Tale Theatre and The Storyteller back when I was knee-high to a goose, pretty much every time I hear about a TV show or movie based on a fairy tale, my reaction is, “Oof, that’s probably going to be awkward! Still, I’m there.”

My taste in this arena is even more questionable than in most others. (See also: the competing Snow White remakes, Hansel and Gretel: Demon Hunters – oh, it’s real, and it’s happening – and SyFy’s abysmal Beauty and the Beast, among a dozen others.) Your adaptation can be a wonderfully costumed games of Actor Bingo (Hallmark’s Arabian Nights), a hidden gem (The Polar Bear King), a cheeseball epic (The 10th Kingdom), your college video project, or an absolutely unbelievably terrible miniseries (Hallmark’s Snow Queen, YOU PUT THAT FAIRY TALE DOWN RIGHT NOW). I will still watch it.

It is a testament to how strong this instinct is that I intend to watch this show:

…for at least the two episodes they give it before TV audiences get sick of Jennifer Morrison’s non-acting and/or having to think about vaguely literary things for even a moment and/or a child and his endlessly prophetic and pithy advice, and ratings tank, and they yank it. (If it lasts longer than two episodes, I’ll renegotiate with the show based on the levels of non-acting delivered by Jennifer Morrison.)

If nothing else, it will drive me to finish the last leg of Faerie Tale Theatre Episodes I am Willing to Sit Through, so, still helpful!

P.S. Completely not this show’s fault, but it is an indelible byproduct of my early adolescence that the very idea of acting in a fairy tale adaptation immediately makes me want to write a love letter to Lucy Punch, because of her unforgettable Sally Peep in The 10th Kingdom.

The thing about a miniseries as sweeping as The 10th Kingdom is that you really do end up with a cast of hundreds. Some of those people are playing it straight, some of those people are just excited to be there getting paychecks and yoinking free food from the catering cart, and some of those people are in that miniseries purely to mess with you (“Does he KNOW the camera’s on?”). Besides the leads, these actors come and go.

It’s remarkable that in a miniseries where Scott Cohen logged more than half a dozen Ham-Off hours, and Daniel Lapaine tried to top it by being the literal Human Golden Retriever, Lucy Punch looked at her script and said, “So I have four scenes? Can I win the Ham-Off of a ten-hour miniseries in four scenes? LET’S FIND OUT.”

And then SHE DID.

You’d think by this LJ that I am not watching any television right now! That is not true. I am, in fact, watching my normal amount of television, and even more so, since Camelot, The Borgias, and Game of Thrones all started up within a few weeks of each other, ensuring I would never leave the house again.

My opinion about the three fantasy and/or historical dramas that premiered this spring, summed up as succinctly as possible:

And the thing is this: neither Camelot, nor Game of Thrones, nor The Borgias, is terrible. (Well, maybe Camelot. We’ll get there.) Game of Thrones and The Borgias both have some excellent acting, which is 85% of what I look for in a show. David Oakes, seen above making a truly marvelous bitchface, is one of many other actors bringing amazing stuff to every episode of their respective shows.

Here’s where the trouble starts, though.

To talk about how great David Oakes is in the Borgias (and he really is), I have to talk about how great he was in Pillars of the Earth, which I have still not finished recapping. Also, it seems odd to talk about The Borgias when I haven’t yet talked about how I first saw Holliday Granger in Sparkhouse back in 2003 when she was OUTSTANDING in a part that could have been a disaster, and how pleased I am to see her on something that doesn’t require a PAL converter, or watching the later seasons of Robin Hood (where, I will never stop reminding people, Richard Armitage, who had played her stepfather in Sparkhouse like four years prior, played her love interest).

So, fine, speaking of under-appreciated actors coming into their own, we could talk about Camelot, where Philip Winchester and Eva Green are doing the heavy lifting in the middle of one of the oddest casts on television, including the prepubescent Jamie Campbell Bower and the always-off-putting Joseph Fiennes, who has thrown his hat in the Ham-Off ring (against, I am assuming, his more talented brother, Ham-Off veteran Ralph) to mixed results. However, that requires discussing a show that releases this image as a PRESS PHOTO:

And a show that thinks this photo represents it in the best possible light is not a show I am ready to recap right now, you know?*

So, I could recap A Game of Thrones instead, but I just can’t.

Also, did you know that the week before last, at least two of these three shows had graphically-depicted rape in them? I heard rumors that Camelot also had one, but by then I was a little tired of rape as a plot device, especially inserted into the Game of Thrones narrative in which I am told the whole initial point of the scene was Not-Rape, thank you very much for THAT, HBO, and so Camelot is still sitting on my TiVo, where I look at it from time to time and make Juan Borgia face at it and then just go to bed early.

Short version: Yes, I plan to review them all…as soon as I can pull it together. Also, expect a lot of concurrent reviews of things that came out between 3 and 8 years ago, because that’s how my mind works.

* I mean seriously, that is not a screencap. That is a Showtime-stamped OFFICIAL PRESS PHOTO, which means someone looked at this photo, and instead of saying, “This looks like rehearsal,” they said, “Such ACTION! Such DRAMA! Quick, get this to the Associated Press! Now let’s see that audience just ROLL IN!” And someone else stamped it, and sent it to the publicity department, and THEY signed off on it and sent it to the press, and the press, snickering, made it available, and now you have to wonder what on earth is going on with this show, seriously.

In the first part of my “Only the Ones I Feel Like Watching” rewatch of Faerie Tale Theatre, we tackled some of the best, and some of the worst.

I have learned some things since. 1) I do not like many of these animal fairy tale retellings, mostly because of the costumes and the tendency to ratchet up the camera-mugging by about 300%. 2) My laptop monitor lies to me about the contrast and saturation of my images, so many of these screencaps look like I have soaked them in human blood and then shoved them under fluorescent light.

This installment had an unintentional theme of Being As Camp As Humanly Possible, which is to be expected when you put Malcolm McDowell in anything, plus one that was surprisingly good!…because it completely ripped off something else. Whoops.

Cinderella

This is one of the worst ones so far. It’s not quite Thumbelina, mostly because they could afford THREE whole lights by then, but it’s Jennifer Beals, and ’80s special effects (the awfulness of that carriage-in-a-pumpkin shot cannot be described – even that terrible-quality screencap took some getting), and a 14-year-old Matthew Broderick, and I just don’t even know what to tell you, except that I get the distinct feeling that for the two scenes they shared, those two kids really did not get along, which I understand, since their outfits were both so awful.

The Princess and the Pea

Okay, the turned the camp level waaay up on this. Turns out Tom Conti is adorable except when he’s not (so, so many yelling fits in only 50 minutes), and Liza Minelli is…herself. (She is also the lady on whom Anne Hathaway has based her entire acting shtick, which is just going to be GREAT when she’s trying to be Catwoman). Everything else here was…interesting. There’s a frame story involving The Pea in a museum, which I guess is the twist that story really needed? (It was the ’80s. Things happened.)

Little Red Riding Hood

Speaking of things that happened in the ’80s, this was one! Then-spouses Malcolm McDowell and Mary Steenburgen decided they would do this as cheeseball as they possibly could and then spend the money on a trip to Paris or something. I cannot fault them for that. I can fault them for making this painfully awkward for everyone. You know how some couples pick weird fights in public because it fills their sails and everyone else just sits back and tries to ignore it and not get sucked into the conversation because it’s really, really awkward? That was this one.

However, bonus points for having the Wolf actually eat Grandma and little Mary (yup, character name was Mary – this was a weird episode), and then after the rescue he’s sewn up with rocks.

Beauty and the Beast

Have you ever seen Cocteau’s La belle et la bête? Well, you have now.

(Also, Anjelica Huston was one of the mean sisters, and she was OUTSTANDING, naturally, and totally underused, and I just love her so, so much.)

So, I’m pretty sure I’ve told a version of this story before, deep in the mines of my LJ, but in the wake of the surprising news that both One Life to Live and All My Children have been cancelled (to be replaced with talk shows, one of which is about food and is called THE CHEW, as apparently nothing gets people’s appetites going like being reminded of chewing tobacco and/or cud), I feel like it’s worth telling again.

Right after I moved to New York, I worked for a temp agency that specialized in the entertainment industry. It was just like normal temping, except you were stuffing envelopes while simultaneously fielding phone calls about a celebrity who refused to give an interview unless her significant other was present, which was fine except she had broken a leg or something in another country and so the company was scrambling to fly the significant other first class on a plane to get to her bedside in time for the interview to be edited for the evening E! broadcast.

(Caveat: I ran into this same celebrity, alongside significant other, almost exactly a year later, working the Met Costume Institute Gala for my event-planner boss. They were very sweet, and I like them. Also, my day jobs used to be a lot more anecdote-friendly!)

As it turns out, the best job I ever had through that company was at the office that was producing a televised award show. I started on a Monday; by Wednesday they had me writing magazine inserts and copy for the official program. It was pretty awesome.

However, the best thing about that job was that our offices were next door to Unnamed Soap Opera’s writing room, and they believed in keeping the door open.

I spent several weeks writing trivia questions and unabashedly eavesdropping as the writers suggested that she be amnesiac AND temporarily blind, so she could fall in love with the identical (evil) twin of the local noble/business owner; the subplot involved framing someone for murder and a lot of mentions of “learning by touch” (awwww yeaaaaaaah), and at some point a noble yet naïve young person was going to try to save said gentleman by entering into a shady business deal with someone who had faked their own death and gone underground.

There could be a bunch of Things I Learned here about passion for storytelling and embracing the slightly-camp and the cumulative benefits of getting Soapdish: The Live Show piped directly to you for several weeks, but I think it’s clear that it was just something that was exactly as awesome as it sounds, and even though I am not a big soap watcher, I think it’s sad that two such iconic shows will be gone.

(Actually, no, I did learn something: no soap opera character is ever, ever too comatose to whisper someone’s name at precisely the wrong moment.)

I fell off the wagon about these in a major way, didn’t I? And in the home stretch! Shame on me.

For those who are new since my last one (welcome!), a bit about the Catherine Cookson Experience. Catherine Cookson, author of historical potboilers, enjoyed a magnificent heyday between about 1995 and 1997, in which the BBC went NUTS for her and filmed approximately eight hundred of her books in an attempt to employ every actor from Great Britain, Scotland, and Ireland it could get its hands on, and also to use up a lot of sawed-off basketballs they needed to use to simulate pregnancy.

More than a year ago, in a fit of good judgment, I embarked on a quest to watch every Catherine Cookson movie ever filmed. As it turns out, that is very difficult, partly because there are so many of them, and partly because some of them are just the worst ever and involve a lot of asshole dads and/or men getting romantically interested in a girl he met when she was nine and/or a complete lack of anyone making sense. (…a cave? Really?)

It has been a long, long time since my last one (the delightfully cheeseball The Rag Nymph), and I’m not sure why. All I know is that I sat down this weekend and found myself reaching for one of my favorite Cooksons, and the next thing I knew, I had 50 screencaps, so I guess I’m back on the wagon! Let’s do this thing.

Note to all: these entries are inevitably huge and image-heavy. I didn’t use all fifty screencaps, but there are certainly 30something of them under this cut.

This is The Wingless Bird.

It’s different from many of the Cooksons because of its central family’s position in life (firmly middle-class, prosperous shopkeepers) and the frank (for Cookson) examination of class differences. That said, someone still gets beaten with a shovel and someone else dies of consumption, so, Cookson ahoy!

Vital Stats:

Era: 1913 and some years after.
Heroine: Agnes
Siblings that require looking-after: Jessie, her younger sister, who is dumb as a box of hair.
Illegitimate (Self or sibling): Check! Jessie’s as illegitimate as her judgment is questionable.
Asshole Father?: Possibly one of the jerkiest patriarchs in all of Cookson. He spends most of his time doing a Malcom McDowell impression.
Romantic interest(s): Charles Farrier, his brother Reginald. WHOOPS.
Bairnsketballs: Yup.
Fistfights: A shovel-beating and a shooting. Also, World War I, so there’s that.
Assaults: Not one! PROGRESS.

Under the cut: candy-store porn.
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