Since I like what I’ve seen of Steven Moffat’s work (Doctor Who, Coupling, Sherlock), I thought I’d check out Jekyll. The two clips below are all I’ve seen so far (and probably all I’ll have time to see this week, since I leave for a Liberty Fund conference in Virginia on Thursday), but it looks promising:
(I’m pretty sure that what the second clip calls “Episode Two, Scene One” is actually Episode One, Scene Two.) If the actress in these opening scenes looks familiar, that may be because she was the star of the short-lived Bionic Woman reboot. Those who’ve seen the third episode of Sherlock may notice a similarity in characterisation between Moffat’s Hyde and Moffat’s Moriarty.
Oh okay, one more:
Fun stuff, except for Joseph Paterson’s painfully fake American accent. (I didn’t even realise he was supposed to be American until he made the crack about British people being funny.)
I’m less sure about that now ….
If you subscribe to Netflix, you can stream the whole series there.
By the way, there’s a Douglas Adams-scripted documentary in which Tom Baker briefly attempts to speak with an American accent (a Texan one, IIRC). I like Baker, but he botches it horribly.
I suppose this is based in my first book, The Strange Case of Dr Jeckyll and Mr Hyde, right? From one of my most beloved writers, Robert Louis Stevenson; seeing how other adaptations had spitted on Stevenson’s face, I’m going to be cautious with this. The worst movie in my opinion was the Spencer Tracy one.
This is a sequel, not an adaptation. If the Spencer Tracy version doesn’t come up to your standards for fidelity, I doubt you’ll like this.
Trivia byte: Mr. Hyde’s singing “You should see me dance the polka” in Alan Moore’s League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (the graphic novel, not the movie) is a nod to Ingrid Bergman in the Spencer Tracy film.
The accent does migrate a bit but I think it could be genuine Caribbean; think Poitier.
Roderick, after I saw your post, I looked into it, and bought the 6 part series on iTunes; just watched it. It was just fantastic. It gripped me more than any TV in recent memory, next to The Wire. It was great.