Forums

Posted: 29-09-2013 10:36 Post subject: Atlantis (BBC)

Anyone see this? (first episode last night.)

Hit or myth for the new Atlantis?
Desperate to fill the void left by Merlin, the BBC has turned to a Greek classic for inspiration, says Olly Grant.
By Olly Grant
8:00AM BST 28 Sep 2013

‘So this is the Throne Room of Atlantis,” says producer Julian Murphy, stepping into a vast film studio. What we’re looking at is an old Tesco warehouse near Chepstow, which doesn’t exactly scream antique glamour. The real magic, though, will arrive later – principally via the alchemy of modern computers, and some of the biggest green screens ever seen in British TV.
“This will be a huge, colonnaded room on top of the city,” says Murphy, stirring mental pictures of teeming temples, oracles and minotaurs. If you were wondering how the BBC was planning to replace its autumn ratings banker, Merlin, this is the answer.

Merlin ended last year when it became clear that the cast wouldn’t sign up to a sixth season. For the BBC, this meant the end of a lucrative franchise: the show sold to 183 territories around the world, making it one of the most successful exports in TV history. When it came to finding a replacement, then, the solution was simple: go back to the people with the golden goose – or, in this case, fleece.

What Murphy and his Merlin co-creators have come up with is Atlantis, a 13-part teatime epic set in ancient Greece. It centres on a character called Jason (Jack Donnelly), a 21st-century youth who washes up in the lost city of legend after a present-day quest to find his father goes seriously awry. Like Merlin, in other words, it has a hero with destiny issues, and a ready-made mythological lexicon. Murphy says they have been “shameless magpies” with the classics, pillaging them for ideas that can be neatly repackaged in a family-friendly action format, from Jason’s sidekicks Hercules and Pythagoras (Mark Addy and Robert Emms) to Jemima Rooper’s girl-next-door Medusa, minus the snakes.

“Virtually all our stories come from Greek literature,” says Murphy. “The dramas, the epic cycles. We read Greek myth and we steal from it – often more than one myth in each story.”

Atlantis also benefits from having Howard Overman as a co-creator and lead writer. For the uninitiated, Overman came up with the Bafta-winning superhero show Misfits, which did a very good job of taking an established genre and giving it a witty reboot. His marks are all over Atlantis, particularly in its humour.
Addy’s Hercules, for instance, is reconfigured here as a paunchy faint-heart whose heroism is self-embellished.
“He’s the son of Zeus and a mortal, but it’s the mortal side that has prevailed,” Addy laughs when we meet on set. “Basically, he’s a liability. But I think that’s really well constructed by the writers. They know that the more peril you have in a show like this, the more you need a little humour to lighten it.”

The thing that really sets Atlantis apart, though, is scale. For exotic backdrops, the cast spent three weeks in Morocco. The rest of the show was shot in 170,000 sq ft of that Chepstow warehouse. Murphy says they needed every inch of it, too, since Atlantis is meant to be filled with “palaces so vast they were said to be built by giants”, and when it comes to projecting lavish, computer-generated environments on to green-screen walls, “size is literally everything – the bigger you make them, the more real they look.”

Computers also generated most of the monsters, episode one’s Minotaur included. “For a UK drama, it’s probably the most CGI there’s ever been,” says Murphy. CGI can, of course, look jarringly artificial on screen, but Murphy says they have been alive to those pitfalls. “I was incredibly worried at first, but I’m pretty confident we haven’t done that.” The key, he adds, is to underplay the technology: “If you do ‘helicopter shots’ over Atlantis, it will look like a CGI place. You have to let the world unfold, and always in the context of the action. It mustn’t be centre stage.”

How the story unfolds will be interesting to observe. One thing Atlantis has over Merlin is a dramatic exit strategy; namely, a massive flood. Murphy says the coming Armageddon is “delicately hinted at” rather than overstated. But ultimately the intention is to conclude the story arc with the deluge – ideally after several seasons. “For us, that’s the natural endpoint. That’s how we’ve always thought of it.”

Theoretically, this could either inject dramatic tension – or diminish it. As one YouTube comment on the Atlantis trailer put it: “Looks good, but they all drown in the end.” Overman, take note. Not even Merlin had to deal with that kind of pressure.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/10322844/Hit-or-myth-for-the-new-Atlantis.html

On BBC iPlayer:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p01crz3s/Atlantis_The_Earth_Bull/

Atlantis
- 1. The Earth Bull

When Jason goes in search of his father, he washes up on the shores of a strange and mysterious land. A world of mythical creatures, soothsaying oracles and palaces so vast it was said they were built by giants; this is the lost city of Atlantis. But it seems the newcomer has chosen the wrong time to arrive in the fabled realm, and Jason soon finds himself at the mercy of a deadly ritual, from which there is no escape...

Available until
8:14PM Sat, 4 Jan 2014

Posted: 29-09-2013 11:02 Post subject:

Posted: 29-09-2013 19:57 Post subject:

Unusually for me, I watched it. Normally (apart from Doctor Who) I avoid watching BBC dramatisations because they're usually not that good.
I thought this was OK - it wasn't all bad.
They did shamelessly pinch stuff and rework it a bit, tsk...

Posted: 30-09-2013 12:31 Post subject:

Saw this on Saturday, it's quite fun - obviously done by the same team as Merlin. I'm predicting the Jason and the Argonauts storyline as a two-part season climax. They've set it up as a bit as all the Greeks myths were true, but they took place long ago (or in a parallel universe) which was Atlantis.

Posted: 30-09-2013 12:54 Post subject:

Atlantis - Thought it a steaming pile of dog poo.

instead watch Michael Scott's excellent programmes on Ancient Greece :
eg - one looking the place of luxury / pleasure in greek society :

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b0126vdc/Guilty_Pleasures_Ancient_Greece/

for some reason the beeb has already pulled this series from iplayer :

His latest series, Ancient Greece: The Greatest Show on Earth explores one of the Greek world’s most important legacies, theatre. It examines the way in which theatre was impregnated into the fabric of ancient society, and follows the story of theatre’s development from the Greek to the Roman world and to us today.

keep an eye out for repeats.

Posted: 01-10-2013 13:00 Post subject:

For me, one of the benchmarks of sloppy scripting is if one of the characters says 'Guards! Sieze him'. Atlantis gets this out of the way in the first episode.