The Hollow Crown (2012)

slantmagazine.com

For God’s sake, let us sit upon the ground and tell sad stories of beautiful BBC miniseries:  how some have been held ransom by PBS; how PBS dicked U.S. viewers around for ages; how Shakespeare fans were sent scouring Google, Wikipedia, and PBS.org for news of a U.S. air date; how PBS finally got off its butt and did the decent thing; and how, by then, it’d been so long that the DVDs came out simultaneously (not that you could get them from Netflix – the waiting list was so long.)

 

Seriously – I first heard about The Hollow Crown, high-quality adaptations of Shakespeare’s Richard II, the two Henry IV plays, and Henry V, in the summer of 2012.  It was going to be airing in Britain later that summer, for people disinterested in the London Olympics, with the understanding that PBS would quickly follow suit on the other side of the pond.  All it took was a cursory glance through the cast list, and I was salivating with nerdish glee.  I sprang into action; the rest of my summer reading focused on getting through all four plays.  I tore through them and waited eagerly for the stateside release.  

 

And waited.  And waited.  Try as I might, I couldn’t find so much as a whisper – no news, no joy.  I resisted the temptation to acquire the series through “other means,” because it looked gorgeous and I wanted to see it at television quality on a good-sized screen.  Fast-forward to the fall of 2013; yep, more than a year after it aired in the U.K., PBS finally gave us The Hollow Crown.  Way to reward people for watching stuff legally, PBS.  Jerks.  

 

Truth be told, these four films are so exquisite that I tended to forget the injustice while I was actually watching them (only when the end credits rolled did I remember how I could’ve been enjoying them for the past year, at which point my anger returned in full force.)  At any rate, it was only a matter of time before they ended up here.  Well, that time has come.  Once more unto the blog, dear friends!  First review to follow.