25 thoughts on “Will on TNT: Stream-of-Consciousness Recap

    1. Dame Vivienne would have done a better job! This isn’t quite ‘hot mess’ territory, but it’s not fashion-forward either. I guess that’s to be expected for network TV. sigh

  1. “Nothing is super soap opera-y”
    Nothing was soapy, period. Honest, do we really need the universal greasy hair, uncombed to boot, and all that dirt? Your ex-boyfriend torso looks like it’s moldy.

  2. I’ve lost patience with it already. You’re right about it being not good enough to be interesting, and not quite bad enough to be fun. I mostly found it head-scratching, although I did spend a lot of time wondering how all those groundlings could afford that high-quality ink.

  3. Oy vey. I’m too young to drink, but I need alcohol after seeing this.

    (Though you mentioned Highlander, will we ever see a post about it? Sure it was kinda goofy, but I loved that show.)

  4. Will avoid it like the plague. Ghod, Reign was totally accurate compared with this travesty. Let’s see I’ve already filled the bingo card up on the pics, where to go from here (she ponders grinning evilly)
    And WTF with Anne’s nightie thing?

  5. Wow…just…wow. I haven’t seen that much drug-addled garbage since the last time I watched “Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs.” Either that, or it was when my family took our trash cans to the dump because SOMEONE (a brother who shall remain nameless) forgot to take the cans out the night before and we were desperate. Thankfully, that was nearly 20 years ago.

    I’m not surprised you drank while watching this show. I’d drink until I fell asleep before watching this monstrosity. However, the producers, costume designers, and everyone else involved in making this freak show probably had enough alcohol and drugs in them to compete with Kieth Richards while putting this hideous mess together. Frankly, I think the only reason anybody even showed up for casting was because of the paycheck offered.

    I don’t see this gross mess having any more survival chances than “Still Star-Crossed.”

    There are just SOME lines people really should not cross when trying to make a historical fiction tv show for the younger generations. This is one of them.

    1. I swear I read somewhere that they had filmed the one season of Will & shit-canned it a year ago, with no intention of ever airing it. Then the production company found a buyer, TNT, that needed a summer replacement series. So I don’t think we’ll ever see a second season, thank the gods!

  6. You couldn’t pay me to watch that mess. But I will comment that there have been persistent rumours that Marlowe was a spy, probably in the pay of Walsingham. This may have been the cause for his death by being stabbed in the eye in a tavern brawl. Or maybe he saw a future vision of this show and did it himself.

  7. I have it on the DVR, but the previews were already making me a bit flummoxed …it looked to me as if Will was writing with a metal quill on his pen??? I know it’s a little thing, but need to discover if it was true. Thanks for the review!

  8. Since this reminds me of a cross between Burning Man, Mera Luna festival, and Pennsic War (especially the Bog), I’m going to wait until I need a boost around January. When Events are scarce and I need to get a fix to carry me through until the season picks up again.

  9. Ok, after seeing this, I might have to go and rewatching Upstart Crow on BritBox again. Somewhat the same characters, Shakespeare, Marlowe, Burbage, Greene, et al. But the writer is Ben Elton, so it’s Blackadder levels of snark. (And the costuming isn’t terrible, but not spectacular. But not Pennsic “it’s an attempt, not sure at what, though”)

  10. Will was totally attempting to pander to the “young” audience, and that sucketh. But I’m going to keep watching — for Colm Meany, who can rock bad makeup and wigs like no one else and for the graphic artist who did the play posters. Those are fabulous. Heck, that ‘s the image chosen for this post. Also, that “green’ character is Robert Greene, so famous with us anti-Oxfordians as one of the few contemporary references to Shakespeare. That he was there using words Robert Green actually published to give Shakespeare the side eye is great!

  11. I’m only tuning in when they acknowledge Marlowe’s open homosexuality and/or Will’s queerness. I mean, they’ve already dashed my hopes for compelling female and/or nonwhite characters, costumes that at least have a consistent vision even if not historically accurate, and a well-researched look at Elizabethan theatre. Otherwise, I will be looking if frockflicks does any more recaps, but this show seems like a definitive Hamlet, act III, scene III, line 92 to me, for those up to date on their Shakespeare memes.

  12. Back to the hair issue: all the busts of Shakespeare show him with well-combed locks, regardless of how scant they might have been.

  13. I could behind the costuming and such if this was like an adaption of one of the plays, it’s not far off from the 80s punk-inspired costume treatment I devised for ‘Much Ado About Nothing’ for my college thesis….
    But as a fictional show about Shakespeare himself? Lolnope.

  14. I’m having a moment. I love Lady Hawke, Plunket and McLean and to a lesser degree, Knight’s Tale because of their deliberate anachronisms and consistent vision of an alt world. But neither are dealing with actual real and living historical people like Will S and Liz 1 and Mary QOS, and these flights of fecked up fantasy just grate at my brain. I would love to see a film of a Shakespeare play set in this alt punk 16th C London, but I hate this twisting of history. And as for the life sized Nac Mac Feegles doing what I can only assume is MacBeth? Oh FFS!!!!

  15. Ok, so I’m writing this 2 1/2 years ex post facto…The costuming was atrocious, but it is EXACTLY what they wanted. I watched a featurette on the costumes and was shocked to learn that Caroline McCall, who was Assistant Costume Designer and then Costume Designer for Downton Abbey, designed the costumes for this TV show. She is someone who knows what she is doing. So, in the producer’s ill-conceived notion of being (in their minds) “punk rock-esque and edgy” they went all-in on this look.

    Now for the show itself, I watched all the episodes and it remained maddening throughout. The costumes and soundtrack were distracting. The plot points were inane, unnecessarily violent, vulgar, and sometimes interesting.

    This entire concept desired much better treatment. And what hurts is that they had talented people working on this project–including Caroline McCall–and many of the actors.

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