Gothic horror is enjoying something of a revival on TV at the moment, from the absurd American Horror Story to the curiously restrained and sanitised Dracula, which was cancelled after just one season. This will not be the fate of John Logan’s Penny Dreadful, however, which has already been renewed for an extended second season just four episodes into its debut. Taking its inspiration from the sensational serialised fiction of the penny dreadfuls popular in mid-Victorian Britain, the show is a patchwork of famous Victorian literary characters featuring alongside Logan’s own fictional creations and all set against the backdrop of the most elusive and enigmatic character of them all, the city of London. This is the London of fog and gaslights, of excess and restraint, and the collision between modernity and tradition; a place where the spectre of Jack the Ripper still haunts every dark alleyway. "There is only one goal worthy of scientific exploration: piercing the tissue that separates life from death", says Dr Viktor Frankenstein, just one of the many literary figures reincarnated in Showtime’s Penny Dreadful. This is a show all about the spaces in between, the lines between the living and the dead, the beautiful and the horrific.

Shot in Ireland, where Dublin’s streets have maintained a more authentic Victorian façade, Logan and his team have captured the fear and gritty realism lingering in the shadows of the Victorian city. Penny Dreadful is an homage to Gothic horror, featuring characters such as Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Gray, Mary Shelley’s Dr Frankenstein and his monster, and Bram Stoker’s Dracula. However, these famous literary figures are supercharged by Logan, infused with subtler depths and surrounded in more fully realised eroticism and danger. This is especially true of Frankenstein’s monster, played by Rory Kinnear with a sensitivity and refinement in contrast with previous, overly simplistic, screen realisations of the creature.

Styled in the tradition of these famous literary predecessors are Logan’s own fictional characters: clairvoyant and possible demonic siren, Vanessa Ives, African explorer, Sir Malcolm Murray, and American gunslinger, Ethan Chandler. Of these, Vanessa Ives, played by the incandescent former Bond girl Eva Green, is by far the most original and enigmatic; in her, Logan has imbued all the most fascinating paradoxes of Gothic fiction and these have been translated skilfully to the screen by Green. Josh Hartnett’s Ethan Chandler and Timothy Dalton’s Sir Malcolm Murray suffer the fate of being less finely drawn and less compellingly realised on screen by their respective actors, but they serve to buttress and support the considerable talents of Green. Only Reeve Carney’s Dorian Gray manages to match Green’s charisma, and the scenes where both of them appear together are the most mesmerising to watch. Billie Piper warrants mention as the poor Belfast immigrant, Brona Croft, who enjoys an erotic liaison with Dorian Gray and a tender love affair with Ethan Chandler, but her truly atrocious attempt at an Irish accent seriously undermines her impact as a character. Harry Treadaway presents a complex, acutely drawn Dr Frankenstein, a man with the soul of a poet, but the unrelentingly ambitious and driven mind of a scientist. 

John Logan has become a big name in Hollywood, serving as screenwriter for films such as The Aviator, Skyfall and Coriolanus, but Logan’s heart lies in theatre, and this dramatic quality is key to Penny Dreadful’s success, where the character-centric focus lifts the show above the level of other horror productions. Not only did Logan write the scripts for the first eight episodes of Penny Dreadful, but he is also executive producer on the project, working alongside Sam Mendes. Mendes, too, has a theatrical background, having been artistic director of the Donmar Theatre in the 1990s, but his film career has also been incredibly successful with the critically acclaimed American Beauty, Revolutionary Road and Skyfall under his directorial belt.

Penny Dreadful is a lavish, phantasmagorical blend of some of Victorian horror’s most compelling tropes. There are certain absurdities, such as the incongruous inclusion of a mystery involving the Egyptian Book of the Dead, but the show really comes into its own in episode four, with the irregular pacing of the first few episodes corrected and the various strands of the plot becoming more clearly defined. It’s difficult to see, at this point, where Logan will take the show in future episodes, but this reviewer will be tuning in to find out.