Television Review - All's Well That Ends Well for TNT's Will
⭐️⭐️⭐️ (out of 5)
At first blush, TNT’s Will is certainly much ado about nothing. With an awkward mix of punk hairdos and Elizabethan tights, creator Craig Pearce tosses the audience into the mosh pit, offering a psychedelic look at Shakespeare’s early life in London’s populist theatre scene. It’s a laudable and ambitious approach, but unfortunately the first few episodes are “full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” Lost in the rock and rap is any real sense of character, time, or place. The set pieces are historically accurate, but the costumes are punk chic. The plays and poetry are in iambic pentameter, but the dialogue and characters are right out of A Clockwork Orange. All this would be fine, if the artistic vision brought us any closer to understanding the forces that shaped the development of the greatest playwright in history. Alas, our initial hopes are lost in a tempest of clunky exposition, graphic sexual undertones, and unnecessary plot contrivances.
Fortunately, for those brave enough to venture forth, the show transposes before our eyes over the course of the season, turning from an ass into something almost worthy of love. Laurie Davidson’s Will begins to develop dimension, and we can see a touch of the bard’s genius sandwiched between a frivolous and unnecessary sub-plot that would be more at home in The Da Vinci Code. Jamie Campbell Bower’s Christopher Marlowe is a worthy foil, perfectly capturing the creator’s vision of 70’s rock in sixteenth century London. Ewen Bremner brilliantly finds his inner and outer Richard III as the shows villain, Topcliffe. And Olivia DeJonge is charming as Alice Burbage, the theatre owner’s ambitious daughter. At this time, the show’s future is uncertain, which is a shame, because all’s well that ends well for this historical melodrama on TNT.
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