WATCHED - Shardlake

 
Matthew Shardlake is sent by Thomas Cromwell to Scarnsea to an abbey where one of his commissioners for the Dissolution has been brutally murdered. Shardlake has to find the culprit, but also must discover a really good reason for why the abbey should be closed down. Cromwell insists he take one of his lackeys Barak with him, which makes Matthew think he is the one who is being watched. When he arrives he quickly discovers all is not well here, and there has been a hushed up murder and a young monk has had a suspicious accident. The murders are definitely an inside job, he needs to discover who that is pronto, before someone else is targeted, or Cromwell runs out of patience with him.

Even when reading C J Sampson's novels they do have a rich cinematic quality, so you knew these would be adapted into a TV series at some point. It was just a question of when. This series, now on Disney + is a pretty fair adaption of the first of his successful Shardlake series of novels - Dissolution. 

Casting wise, it does well in choosing Arthur Hughes for the central role of Matthew Shardlake, the shrewd and perceptive lawyer, who is forever finding himself on the wrong side of the intrigue he is investigating. I'm glad they found such a capable actor as Hughes. Hughes has scoliosis and radial dysplasia, which is a perfect fit for Samson's character. To have gone down the road of faking this disability on an actor, in this day and age, would have been more than a bit distracting. Hughes is a very skilled actor, who plays Matthew with the gentleness mixed with over asserted confidence and crippling self doubt of the book, The script does not tone down the significance of being constantly referred to as 'the crookback' by his superiors, as though he were an entirely different species of human. People cross themselves when they see him in the street. Whatever his current standing in society, he is constantly reminded he is almost there on sufferance, because he is good at his job, almost too good.

Anthony Boyle makes a very good Barak, performing him as alternating between cocky and reckless, with the need he has to hide who he really is behind this facade of status and success. He pulls this off well. I'm unsure about Sean Bean as Thomas Cromwell, he's a bit too northern to have been brought up in Putney. And his hyper masculine style of acting doesn't quite convey the slyness and subtle cunning of Cromwell. One of the qualities of Cromwell was that he was a superlative bureaucrat who managed to do all his machinations in the backrooms. Trying to keep his actual public profile as low as possible. His 'dark arts' were what made him so disliked.

The entire series was filmed in Hungary, Austria and Rumania. Though this produces some very dramatic grand landscapes and buildings, it just doesn't look English enough. In the book The abbey in Scarnsea, is a relatively small festering institution situated near a estuary marshland on the south coast of England. Its smallness in scale is what makes it ideal for Cromwell to start his process of Dissolution there, because its easy pickings. In the series it has become this huge semi- castle. Generally the interiors do seem a bit too plush and shiny shiny. I hope when the series moves to London locations they capture the grubby level of detail that Samson put into his novels, which is a large part of why they are such brilliant books to read. But that said, this is a good start, lets hope we get further and improving further series.

CARROT REVIEW - 5/8