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Penny Dreadful: The Neo-Victorian ‘Made-for-TV’ Series

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Adaptable TV

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Abstract

Penny Dreadful (2014–2016) is an exemplary neo-Victorian TV series that heralds the arrival of a new kind of serialised TV costume drama adaptation. Unlike the traditional, fidelity-driven ‘classic’ adaptations that dominated television screens pre-millennium, it taps into current audience desire for a more playful, less reverential adaptive treatment of canonical literature from the long nineteenth century. This chapter explores the ways in which the series breaches the boundaries of our perception of the TV costume drama genre, taking its audience into the darker realms of Gothic TV horror by wedding the transgressive elements of the canonical narratives it appropriates to its newly incepted neo-Victorian story arc.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Fingersmith (2005), The Crimson Petal and the White (2011), Alias Grace (2017).

  2. 2.

    Penny Dreadful was voted ‘best contemporary adaptation’ by scholars in attendance at the International Association of Adaptation Studies conference in 2015.

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  1. University of New England, Armidale, NSW, Australia

    Yvonne Griggs

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Griggs, Y. (2018). Penny Dreadful: The Neo-Victorian ‘Made-for-TV’ Series. In: Adaptable TV. Palgrave Studies in Adaptation and Visual Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-77531-9_2

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