Here's Everything You Need To Know About Amazon's Mystical New Show, 'Carnival Row'
It feels like it is becoming rarer and rarer these days for fantasy fans to find any sort of new, original stories on TV or movie screens. With adaptations and franchises being all the rage in the genre at the moment, Amazon's upcoming series Carnival Row stands out as one of the few 2019 projects that isn't based on anything that already exists. That probably has you wondering, what is Amazon's Carnival Row about? The new series promises to deliver a fresh, fantastical story mixed with some harsh realities about the world today. Fans of the genre should be pretty excited for the series, seeing that Amazon has already picked up a second season of the show before its first season has even debuted. Could this be your next Game of Thrones-level TV obsession?
Carnival Row is a new supernatural murder mystery series set in a large Victorian-era city that's populated by both humans and fantasy creatures, such as faeries and fauns. But just because the show has fanciful beings flying around, do not think it is totally divorced from real-world issues. These creatures are actually living in the city as refugees, having fled their war-torn homelands, and tensions have run high between the human citizens and the mythical immigrants. As fans can already tell, Carnival Row will almost assuredly delve into the hot-button issue of immigration that is as current as ever in American politics.
But the central story of the new series will be about catching a serial killer. As the newly released Carnival Row trailer reveals, a killer has been murdering people in the city every three weeks, and it is up to human detective Rycroft Philostrate (Orlando Bloom) and knife-wielding faerie Vignette Stonemoss (Cara Delevingne) to team up and catch the murderer. Check out the teaser trailer below:
Fantasy fans will also be excited to know that Carnival Row already won the favor of monster movie auteur Guillermo del Toro, known for some of the most iconic films in the genre, such as Pan's Labyrinth, Pacific Rim, and The Shape of Water. Del Toro was actually on board as a writer, director, and executive producer when Amazon first picked up the show in 2015, but had to step away due to his demanding film schedule.
Series leads Orlando Bloom and Cara Delevingne are no strangers to the high-fantasy genre. Of course, Orlando Bloom is best known for starring in the Lord of the Rings franchise as the archer elf Legolas, as well as fronting the supernatural Pirates of the Caribbean franchise. And although Delevingne used to be best known for her work as a model, in recent years, she has moved into starring in movies, including Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets and Suicide Squad.
Not much else is known about Carnival Row just yet, which is partly what makes the new series so exciting. Fans will get to dive into the mysterious new show very soon though, because Carnival Row will debut its eight-episode Season 1 on Amazon Prime Video on Aug. 30.
