1.1 A World Without God Sean. Bean. *Other retailers are available. Bringing his intense brand of perma-frowning working-class regular Joe-ness to 19th century river cop John Marlott, Bean’s got lots to frown about with this guy. In 1827 London, a corpse looking suspiciously like Helena Bonham-Carter in minute 86 of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein has washed up on the bank of the Thames, and Marlott is tasked with figuring out who’s been taking their cross-stitching hobby too far. Surrounded by the bad haircuts and political rhetoric of the upper-classes of the time, Marlott is bossed about on the corpse conundrum case by Sir Robert Peel (Tom Ward), and lectured on the moral implications of the looming Anatomy Act by Lady Jemima Hervey (Vanessa Kirby) and Sir Bentley Warburton (Elliott Cowan). It’s as though the sliced/spliced body and the Anatomy Act thing might turn out to be related somehow… Helping Marlott with the case: a top-hatted side-kick called Mr Nightingale (Richie Campbell), and some clues just vague enough to seem deep and meaningful, courtesy of William Blake. The Little Girl Lost, Prometheus Bound, that Red Dragon stuff that was used in the Hannibal Lecter film – Blake’s oeuvre has a lot to be mined, symbolism-wise. Plus, at least some of it was probably on the GCSE syllabus for most viewers. The referencess are populist enough to imbue the action with easy creeps, but just high-brow enough to make you feel clever for picking them up. That stitching together of high and lowbrow; the upper and lower classes; the fictional and historical is what makes this show’s approach to the Frankenstein canon so ambigious so far. Will it be a cop show, with a smattering of ‘Resurrectionist’ scares? Will it turn into full-on gothic horror, with the investigation just an entry point? Will it be a history lesson on the laws and class differences at play in the early 19th century? Whatever this chimera settles into, its offbeat elements are what are working best for it so far. Floating pig aside, not enough shows can claim a hero with the key characteristics: ‘former soldier – dead wife and kids – nice hat – has syphilis’.
