life and robin hood // an explanation and a review

(apologies to all of my email followers: I accidentally hit the 'publish' button before I was finished writing this post, which means you'll have the draft copy as well as the finished product emailed to your inbox.)

 

Life. It has a strange way of being boring and busy and empty and amusing and full, all at the same time. I know posts have been scarce since Christmas, but that's the best way I know how to describe it. So much has happened, and at the same time it feels as though life has been moving along the same path as always...there have been many note-worthy moments, and yet both my journal and my blog are looking sadly neglected.

I've been reminding myself that the purpose of blogging is not to meet a weekly post quota, but to speak because I feel I have something important or interesting to share, which is the main reason I haven't been bombarding you all with senseless ramble about what I ate for breakfast. (Or something else equally irrelevant.) But I'm hoping that I've managed to climb out of this miniature creative slump...for better or for worse, I'll be posting a little bit more often, at least in the near future.

 

***



I am a huge fan of the way BBC portrayed the classic tale of Robin Hood. I know I normally END reviews with my recommendation, but this time I'm going to be completely opposite and state my opinion up front.

I heard about this show first through my Grancha, who invited me to watch several of the episodes with him; the added positive reviews from several friends of mine prompted me to watch several episodes that had been uploaded to YouTube.
Not long after I became really interested in following the adventures of Robin and his Merry Men, BBC began removing the episodes from YouTube, which ended up in me taking the safe route and buying all three seasons online. (which, by the way, is a decision I have not regretted and would do again without deliberation)

My favourite part about this show is the characters. They're easy to relate to: they love and lose and get angry and make mistakes, just like the rest of us. Even Robin isn't perfect; he's the hero, but he has obvious flaws and his mistakes are just as big as anyone else's. Over the three 13-episode seasons, I've grown quite attached to Robin's scraggly gang (just ask my younger sister. How she puts up with my semi-constant flow of advice to the characters, I'll never know). There's a real depth to the characters; for someone who tends to get emotionally invested in tv shows/movies/etc, each episode was jam-packed full of held breaths, relieved sighs, and at times yelps of horror. Betrayal, love, heartbreak, humour - Robin Hood has it all.


One of the other things I admire about the way BBC handled this show was the fact that they weren't afraid to let big things happen. Some television/radio programs (and even long-running series' of books) become monotonous after some time, because you reach a point where you realize that the main characters are untouchable. The producers refuse to kill off anybody important (or, for that matter, let anything of importance happen to them. All the big things are hinted at and foreshadowed and dragged out as long as they possibly can before they actually [and usually anticlimactically] occur.) Even though this show only lasted for 3 seasons, big things happened! People died, professed love for each other, made enormous, life-changing mistakes...you never knew what was coming next.

Overall, my rating for BBC Robin Hood is a 8.5/10 stars. There were several minor subplots that I thought could have been tied up better, and to be perfectly honest, the character of the Sheriff of Nottingham was comical, but not particularly frightening. Certainly not what I would consider a realistic, well-rounded or particularly deep villain. (his second-in-command, Sir Guy of Gisbourne, fits those criteria much better.)

One final thing that I don't normally include in most of my reviews: age appropriate-ness. I've been asked about this before, and now that I've seen the whole series I feel safe giving it a rating of 10/11 years and up. The battle scenes are very well handled (violence and gore sits somewhere at a 2/10, very low), and while there are several love scenes, the intimacy doesn't go past kissing. (older viewers will catch the double-meaning in some conversations, but it is well-hidden and not what I would classify as inappropriate.)



-pictures courtesy of google images-