Netflix Series Review: The Frankenstein Chronicles

I’m a sucker for a good Sean Bean television show. So when I saw The Frankenstein Chronicles pop up on Netflix, starring Sean Bean as a policeman investigating a killer who’s been murdering children and stitching their corpses together in an unholy amalgam, I was intrigued. And when a friend mentioned she’d been watching and enjoying the show, I decided to give it a shot.

A reminder of my tastes, for those who might not know: I prefer plot to character studies, though ideally a great show will have both. But there are shows I’ve enjoyed but been unable to stick with. Justified is an excellent example. Great writing, solid characters, and I really had a good time for a couple of seasons, but in the end I lost interest, mainly because there was no big plot to keep me watching. Instead, it had smaller plots that masqueraded as a big plot.

Many shows will have a basic formula, and then repeat that formula week after week. House diagnosing strange illnesses. Michael helping out the victim of the week on Burn Notice. Monk doing crazy zany things while he solves the crime. To me, these shows are mainly relics of the Old Way of Doing Business. They stand up just fine for a once a week diversion, but when you binge watch them one after the other (or even just watch one per day), then it’s too easy to see the skeleton of the show. It starts to feel like each week was just a “find and replace” the same elements over and over again. Different zany situations. Different petty criminals. This can sustain a light show well enough, like a comedy, but anything more than that and I just don’t care to hang around.

So there are a number of shows left in the wake of my Netflix queue.

Frankenstein Chronicles has a couple of good things going for the first season. It’s only six episodes long, for one thing. Because sometimes the problem with newer binge-worthy shows is they’ll take a plot that can last five or six episodes and stretch it for ten or twelve. (I’m looking at you, Luke Cage.) Six episodes is long enough to really set up some interesting conflicts and have them pay off, without going overboard.

Second, it’s well acted. Sean Bean does a great job depicting a very confused man burdened with mounds of guilt, forced to investigate a crime he’s ill-equipped to understand. And there are cool supporting characters peppered throughout as well.

The story itself is intriguing, if perhaps a bit too tangled to follow too easily. There were unexpected twists I enjoyed, but others that left me bewildered. Some twists felt gimmicky, as if the show hadn’t taken the time to properly prepare me for what might happen. The best sort of twist is one that is totally unexpected, and yet feels inevitable when you look at it in hindsight. The clues were all there; you just missed them. Weaker twists come out of nowhere. They rely on information we had no knowledge of before they happen. In a murder mystery, this becomes more vital. You want to figure out whodunnit, and it’s upsetting if you weren’t given the right information to work it out ahead of time.

But this show isn’t really a whodunnit. It’s a mystery, for sure, but its success doesn’t rest solely on figuring out the culprit.

In the end, I enjoyed the show, and I plan on starting the second season next. I’d give it a 7/10. If you’re into broody English series with a vein of fantasy horror running through them, this is a good one to check out. It’s rated TVMA primarily for some gruesome scenes with corpses, and a couple brief shots of nudity. (Sean Bean’s rear end, pretty much.)

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