In Which Tom Hardy Wanders Around Muttering
“The dogs here live off the flesh of suicides jumping off Blackfriar’s bridge.” Of course they do. After watching a half hour of Taboo (FX), it wouldn’t have surprised me to learn that everyone on the show had been subsisting on corpses. They’re certainly not getting much vitamin D.
But then, Taboo is a show set in London in the late 1700s. No doubt the producers figured a generation brought up on Tim Burton movies would be confused if the city weren’t inhabited almost entirely by grim cockneys, salty wenches, ominous mumbling, menacing whispers, and portentous pronouncements.
There’s so much vaguely threatening talk in this show…it’s really too bad no one has anything interesting to say.
Everyone just sort of drones one in a foreboding manner about this or that, sometimes mentioning sometimes “Africa,” presumably sub-Saharan, from whence our main character, played by Tom Hardy in a tall top hat, has just returned.
His father having just died, he has returned to reclaim what is rightfully his, including perhaps his sister, who is either in love with him or terrified of him. In this show it can be hard to tell. The twist is that he had previously been thought dead himself. And maybe he is. In a tall black hat and black coat, he looks like he might have consorted with a West African witch doctor or two in his day. Meanwhile, a cabal of old white men at the East India Trading Company are trying to buy a piece of land that his father left him somewhere in Canada.
Presumably it will all lead somewhere. But if life is about the journey not the destination, then I’m not sure we’re in for a very entertaining ride.