Carnival Row episode 1 review: Messy, overly complicated and strangely intriguing

The first episode of Amazon’s lavish steampunk Victorian fairytale Carnival Row is so overstuffed that it’s hard to tell what kind of show it wants to be. But at least it’s fun.

You have to give Amazon credit: Their series always swing for the fences. Whether it’s a romantic apocalypse tale (Good Omens) or a terrifying vision of a Nazi-infested future (The Man in the High Castle), they’re telling big, complex stories. (Yes, even The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.)

So it shouldn’t surprise anyone that Carnival Row, the streaming service’s epic steampunk Victorian fantasy that’s got everything from faeries to forbidden love goes all out, in every sense of the word.

The sets are gorgeous. The production are values epic. The characters themselves varied and weird. This is a series that wants you to fully commit to the world its busy weaving around you, and it honestly is so earnest about, well, everything, that that’s pretty easy to do.

The problem is, is that Carnival Row doesn’t entirely know what to do with itself. It’s sprawling and messy and so full of plots and sideplots that it’s hard to know what’s important. If anything is. But in spite of all that, this is still a pilot – and hopefully a series – worth watching.

In theory, this show revolves around two main characters – who sport just two of the ridiculously over the top names we’ll come to take for granted pretty soon. There’s Vignette Stonemoss, played by Cara Delevigne, a smuggler who helps other fae out of their war torn homeland – for a price. Finally forced to flee herself, she ends up as an indentured servant in The Burgh, a city full of humans and fae that don’t always get along.  There’s also Rycroft “Philo” Philostrate (Orlando Bloom) a detective with the local police department, who has a soft spot for the fae folk and works to help protect them in a city that’s often hostile toward them in every way.

Carnival Row is about a lot more than just its two leads, though.

In fact, its first episode is a little bit like that Marie Kondo GIF about being excited because “I love mess.” Because while the hour is largely enjoyable thanks to its truly incredible cast – Jared Harris is in this, y’all – it’s also all completely all over the place. So much so that it’s hard to tell precisely what this show is about, which is sort of the “you had one job” rule of pilots.

Is this a steampunk mystery series? Maybe. Bloom’s Philo spends a bunch of the episode tracking down a Jack-the-Ripper-esque criminal named Unseelie Jack, who’s attacking fae folk and beating them half to death with a hammer.

Is this a social allegory? Sort of.  The show isn’t subtle about drawing parallels between the fae and faun refugees and more familiar marginalized groups. And the racism and xenophobia they must face within a city that’s purportedly meant to give them shelter is so uncomfortable precisely because it’s the least fantastical part of the show.

These characters – the fae and fauns and everything in between – are all outcasts and forced to live in what is essentially a red-light district known as, you guessed it, Carnival Row.

Is this a romance? Definitely. Philo and Vignette have some unfinished business between them, having fallen in love the nondescript war between humans and fae and…other humans? (The show hasn’t done a great job of explaining who or what, exactly, The Pact are and/or why all these folks were fighting in the first place.) But for whatever reason, she thought he was dead, he didn’t bother to tell her otherwise, and now they’re at each other’s throats.

Literally, by the end of the episode, which sees Vignette pull a knife on her ex while he sleeps. Yikes.

Is this a political drama? I think so? The aforementioned Jared Harris plays Chancellor Absalom Breakspear (These names! I cannot!) who appears both vaguely sympathetic toward the plight of the fae refugees crowding into his city daily. He’s got an ambitious wife, a lazy son who loves patronizing faerie brothels, and a political rival itching to take him down, and this is only like the third biggest plot in the show somehow.

Or is it a domestic comedy of manners? Vignette finds herself working for a pair of siblings with the best names on the show, aggressive social climber Imogen Spurnrose and her sniveling brother Ezra. Imogen is simultaneously repulsed and fascinated by the faerie folk, and is openly displeased to discover their rich new neighbor is a faun himself, and therefore distinctly not marriage material.

There’s just… so much.

Carnival Row’s first episode takes a little bit of everything and throws it in a blender, as if to see what might happen. No series, not even one that seems to reveal in its very overstuffed nature as this one does, can maintain this level of thematic and narrative disconnect for long. Which threads will ultimately win out? That remains to be seen.

All episodes of Carnival Row are available to stream on Amazon Prime.