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TNT's New Shakespeare-Inspired Series 'Will': Everything Wrong With Historical TV

With each successive historically-inspired television series that comes along, it seems that there's a competition to get further and further away from anything approaching reality. Looking back now on 1998's Elizabeth and Showtime's The Tudors, the furor about historical accuracy in anything from costuming to what people actually did around those seems almost quaint when comparing them to the recently completed Reign from CW and now we go so far afield in TNT's new Shakespeare-inspired flavored series Will. I hadn't really expected anything to come along that would make A Knight's Tale's dance sequence look relatively historically accurate by comparison, but we've finally got one.

Will takes place in 1589, and the 25-year-old William Shakespeare (played by Laurie Davidson) has left his wife and home in Statford-Upon-Avon to seek his fame and fortune as a playwright in London. He arrives the somewhat fish-out-of-water country bumpkin in the thriving and colorful city and begins hunting for a theater where he can act and write. That's a find enough of a premise for a show. There's plenty of adventure and intrigue around London and it's various theaters of the period to keep a series running for a good long time.

However, Will's showrunners takes things right off the rail. Executive producer Craig Pearce (Strictly Ballroom, Moulin Rouge!) uses the ever-popular "filling in the blanks" excuse for running the story out of reality towards a pure fantasy that happens to have characters running around with names that belonged to historical figures. Pearce said:

"We know Shakespeare wrote about characters that are as relevant today as they were 400 years ago. So you go, 'If he wrote about characters that were relevant 400 years ago that are relevant today, people must have been doing things today that he did 400 years ago.'"

The logic of that statement is so bewilderingly wrong (If all items A are in B, therefore all B are in A) it boggles the mind. The makeup and costumes therefore reflect well. If those stories written of the time still resonate today, then of course a punk mosh pit must totally have existed in the late 16th century (yes, they really include stage diving and a mosh pit).

The image above is a shot of the groundlings watching on of the performances. Let's just take a moment to take in every element of that scene: the hair, the colors, the modern spiked clothing. It's especially shocking that the designs come from Kym Barrett (Cloud Atlas, The Matrix) and Caroline McCall (Downton Abbey), both of whom have far more talent than what they were forced to come up with.

The writers took the concept that actors of the time must have been treated like the punk rock stars of the era far, far too literally. While it's true enough that not a lot of historical documentation is available about Shakespeare, especially during his early tenure in London between 1585 and 1952. However, there is plenty of documentation on the goings-on around London at the time, and it's other actors and playwrights, of the theaters, and of the city at large.

A large element of the story is driven by Shakespeare's fear of being found out as a closet Catholic. His initial arrival of the city has him stumble across an individual being drawn and quartered for treason (the only individuals executed in such a way in '89 were in Oxford and York, not London. In addition, Queen Elizabeth was relatively tolerant of individual Catholics, as long as they practiced in private and were not actively anti-Protestant so a good portion of this driving fear for Will in the episode is based on if he is found out he would be immediately executed.

Like Reign, people have the right names, but any similarity ends there. There's really no purpose to have the series be set in the 16th century or to involve these particular characters. TNT's executive vice president of original programming described the series as:

"The classic story of a young man coming to a big city with nothing but his talent and moxie."

That's fine, but it's like the showrunners really wanted a series about '80s punk culture, but only had a license to turn in a series about Shakespeare and so came up with this thing. As with Reign, it's pure cowardice and laziness on the part of the writers to not be able to come up with a compelling story from the actual history.  The best I can say for anyone that has ever actually done so much as read a single book about the Bard or about the era is to make the show into a drinking game and have at it.

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