Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 1/10
Cast: Mark Addy, Jack Donnelly, Robert Emms, Aiysha Hart, Sarah Parish, Jemima Roper, Juliet Stevenson, Amy Manson, Ken Bones, Peter De Jersey, Lorcan Cranitch, Vincent Regan, Robert Lindsay, Joseph Timms, John Hannah, Robert Pugh, Ronald Pickup, Philip Correia, Anya Taylor-Joy.
The surprise was not that Atlantis was cancelled but the fact that it was made at all.
In one of the rare mistakes of drama production by the B.B.C., Atlantis finally washed up on the shores of discontent and died a long lingering death in a series that was split in two. Much heralded as a winter replacement for Doctor Who, the second series of the fantasy based drama descended to the point where arguably viewers were watching to see how bad it could actually become.
It surely is a concern for the future that a programme such as Atlantis, a drama which housed some of the very best actors around and has a cast list that includes Juliet Stevenson, John Hannah, the redoubtable Robert Lindsay, Sarah Parish, Ken Bones, the tremendous Lorcan Cranitch and the beguiling Mark Addy, can be so woeful and depressingly bad. In one of the very few points in which the series lifted, any Iron Maiden fan worth their salt who had been caught up in the unholy mess, must have punched the air with forlorn delight as Daedalus, played by Robert Lindsay, told his son Icarus to “fly, fly like an eagle.” It would have only taken a small leap in the musical knowledge for the strains of Nico McBrains drumkit being hammered out and the class driven bass of Steve Harris to add insult to a series that might arguably go down as one of the most awful to be shown on television in the corporation’s history.
How does a series plumb such depths when it has such great ingredients? A very good cast, in fact a cast that many series would kill to have, a setting and scenery almost second to none and the whole of Greek mythology and history in which to scour in the striving of producing a great story. If films such as the phenomenal 300 and Troy can capture the heart of such times, if the 1963 film Jason and the Argonauts can fire the imagination to the extent that young teenagers and children pester their parents into buying books on the subject, then how on earth did Atlantis fail, how did it sink without barely causing a ripple of concern?
Playing fast and loose with Greek mythology is one thing but to have it changed, to add bits that just don’t make sense to even the most interested and engaged of minds is quite another. A hero who isn’t heroic, the addition of man, Pythagoras, who actually lived through history reduced to some sort of cosmic joke and whose melancholy was tiresome and lacking any truth, it begins to resemble a series created on the back of looking at a disreputable mythology site ran by someone with a series grudge against drama.
There will always be a series to come along which just hurts the senses and the intelligence of its viewers; you don’t expect it when it comes to dealing with the classics.
Some things in life are to be dismissed as soon as the thought arrives, it is therefore a shame that nobody told the B.B.C. this when they pitched Atlantis to them.
Ian D. Hall