Carnival Row: Trailer, certificate and where to watch
Fantasy tale in which mythical creatures and humans co-exist
Year: 2019-2023
Certificate: 18
It's the sheer scale of Amazon's series that really wows you. It looks like Victorian Britain but with a fantastical twist, with humans and magical creatures sharing an uneasy peace as they live side-by-side in dank, teeming cities. Across all the chaos, two beings make a connection - a detective with a secret and a tough faerie (Orlando Bloom and Cara Delevingne) - and it's their fortunes we follow through this world.
The first series is set not long after a devastating war in which humans left the world's magical creatures - once their staunch allies - undefended against a vicious enemy known as The Pact. The Carnival Row of the title is a seedy area in the humans' capital city, The Burgue, which has become a refuge for the 'fae', or magical creatures, left homeless by the war. These include faeries, many of whom end up in brothels, and the goatlike pucks, some of whom work as domestic servants.
All this immigration has created a lot of tension with the humans and as we first meet Burgue detective Rycroft Philostrate (Bloom) he's investigating a string of grisly murders carried out by a creature 'neither man nor fae'. At the same time, he's also carrying out a dangerous affair with his ex-lover, the feisty faerie Vignette Stonemoss (Delevingne) - and things are about to get complciated. In the second and final series, the tensions between the two peoples hit breaking point. Will our heroes' love survive?
The series does feature some racy nude sex scenes which leave little to the imagination - something Bloom admitted he found awkward to film with Delevingne. 'I don't think it's intentionally gratuitous, it leads into the fantasy genre of the show,' he said. 'It's always a little awkward, honestly, there's a lot of people standing around watching you pretending to have sex!' (Two series)
