If you haven't been watching "The
Vikings" (produced through The History Channel), you should be. It's fantastic. The History Channel doesn't have the highest
reputation among my fellow historians, in part because the channel has a strong
tendency to sway to whichever breeze blows from its current ownership. That's the explanation behind what are
sometimes "interesting" trends in the channel's lineup—and why we
sometimes refer to it as the "Hister" Channel, based on the recurring
predominance of shows about Hitler. An
apparent fascination with aliens and Armageddon are also explained by this
phenomenon. But "The Vikings"
is pretty solid, from what I've seen.
It's the first historical drama (ok,
ancient historical drama) whose writers seem convinced that you can tell an
intriguing story and still include a bunch of interesting and
informative historical information. It
isn't perfect, but considering that its current competition is probably
Spartacus: War of the Damned (whose writers specifically said that they weren't
going to let the history "hold them back") we can forgive "The
Vikings" for instances where the interpretation is relatively free.
The portrayal of religion—pagan as well
as medieval Christian—is really neat. As
is the inclusion of interesting material about sexuality, technology, and
social and political hierarchy. History
really is better than fiction. To my eye
at least, "The Vikings" is far more watchable, full of color and
depth and "foreignness" that makes it far more effective than the
Spartacus series. The people at Starz
took a lot of time and effort (and money) to portray the story of Spartacus and
the Third Servile War (73-71 BCE) in a way that is largely style, rather than
substance—if the writers hadn't decided that the history would have hampered
them, they could have used what little solid evidence we do possess to
construct a truly great story. There's a
lot of meat on the bones of the tale of Spartacus, and the writers missed most
of it and presented us with scraps and gristle instead. The History Channel's Viking series, after
only a few episodes, seems to me to be a truly fantastic piece of historical
fiction...you can learn a lot of interesting things and still be
entertained.
As of now I believe there will only be
nine episodes of "The Vikings," which is a tragedy considering that
Spartacus got 3+ entire seasons to not actually get around to telling much
about the story of Spartacus. They could
have easily done much more than they did, especially once you remember that we
live in the great Renaissance of epic movie-making...with the massive
improvements in technology studios are more or less free to paint whatever
canvas they want, on whatever scale. The
Viking show should be the recipient of three seasons of tale-telling, rather
than the historical mutilation that is Starz' Spartacus series.
I don't think I'm alone in this, for a
variety of reasons. I'm a historian, so
of course I'm interested in things including more history...but I think that lots
and lots of people, and not just academics, are interested and entertained by
more historical accuracy. I suggest this
based partly on conversations I had with customers when I worked as a barista,
during the first part of my grad school career.
If you work or have worked as a barista, you know that you end up
talking to a lot of random people that you'd otherwise never encounter. And one of the things that I found over and
over was that people in their later twenties and thirties routinely said that
they had grown to like history. It was
common that I'd talk to somebody who had once hated history (thanks to our
miserable public school curriculum in the US, especially after the debacle that
is No Child Left Behind) who later grew to like it a lot. I think there's a large audience of people
who want more rather than less substance.
And so we should all watch "The Vikings" and tell our friends
about it...I already have...since that's the only way we can influence studios
to pay more than lip service to the historical foundation of past events they
want to dramatize.
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