Carnival Row: What the Must Watch reviewers think

Must Watch reviewers Scott Bryan and Hayley Campbell share their thoughts on Carnival Row, Amazon Prime's new show which is being described as a 'neo-Victorian fantasy'.

The eight-episode series stars Orlando Bloom and Cara Delevingne and premieres on 30 August 2019.

Have you watched it? What did you think? Leave your comments below...

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Hayley says: “You don’t really care that much, you don’t understand and it is so dark you can’t really see”

"The central story is a series of murders in a place that looks like Victorian England – it’s quite a Jack the Ripper sort of thing – only instead of murdering prostitutes he’s murdering fairies who are immigrants after a war in their homeland. That is some of the plot that I managed to understand.

"It's such a mix of stuff. You’ve got the Victorian detective story, the fairy stuff, there are battle scenes in a forest, there is a sort of Merchant Ivory bit where we get to see Cara Delevingne being a miserable housemaid in a posh English mansion.There is even a bit that feels like Batman Returns.

"You’re watching it trying to figure out what it is you’re watching until you just realise that you don’t really care that much and you don’t understand what’s going on and it’s so dark you can’t really see.

"It’s going to be, lazily, compared to Game of Thrones just because it’s got fantasy stuff in it but it’s not like Game of Thrones at all.

"It does have a good cast. Jared Harris from Chernobyl is in it. Indira Varma from Game of Thrones is in it. It is six hours long and they’ve optimistically already commissioned a second season."

Scott says: “Amazon don’t really know what they’re doing”

"The synopsis for this show is like the autocomplete button [on a smartphone] that finishes your word and sentence for you. It’s like they kept pressing autocomplete because it makes no sense.

"A lot of it is just Amazon going.: ‘Look we’ve got money. Look how much money we’ve spent.’

"I think, and this is purely by my own gut instinct, that Amazon don’t really know what they’re doing. For ages a lot of their shows were basically history documentaries or Top Gear - but not with the name of Top Gear. Then they started to go into elaborate expensive dramas, then these super sci-fi style shows.

"It does feel with Amazon like they pick it out of a hat and they go ‘oh yeah, fairies, wonderful, let’s do that then - two series. Hooray everyone!'"

Carnival Row is available from 30 August on Amazon Prime Video.

Must Watch is available as a podcast every Monday evening from BBC Sounds, or through your podcast app.

On this week's episode - Scott told us about the return of 13 Reasons Why and the controversy of the Netflix series.

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