The Terror: Season 1

So much to say about this one - and the book on which it's based, which I just finished reading a month ago. Let's bring back the bullets, folks!

• I first heard about this show way the hell back in like, 2013. TV was different back then, mind you, and every new prestige drama carried a certain weight with it; it's not like ther ewere just a hundred new ones a year! I was immediately interested, to the point where I went ahead and bought the acclaimed book the show would be based on - a 750-page tome by Dan Simmons - sight unseen.
• Years passed. I tried to start the book once, in 2015 or so, but nothing in the first 50 pages grabbed me and I was already having trouble keeping track of different characters and their motivations. Not helping matters was the time-jumping nature of the narrative, starting in the middle of a crisis and interspersing flashback chapters. There was no word on the show, at all, either. What a bust!
• Then out of nowhere, late in 2017 or so, I heard that The Terror would in fact be coming to TV screens very soon after all. After the first two episodes of the show, I raced back to the book and read it as quickly and thoroughly as possible, and the difference was night and day. Where before I had no idea about the doomed Franklin expedition or why I should care about any of its members, here now I had character names and faces and accents to cling to, and it made all the difference in the world. It's not unlike Game of Thrones in that respect, I think, where I used a TV show as a jumping off point for a previously overwhelming book, then after racing through the book was excited to see how the TV show would continue to adapt it.
• The book was very good! And I think the show was too. I consumed them at the same time, so it's hard in a lot of ways for me to keep them straight, and it's possible I'm inadvertently allowing them to bolster or detract from one another in my head. But, again, I liked them both.
• The show definitely suffers form what I'd call Dunkirk syndrome, or perhaps Band of Brothers syndrome, where a fuckton of white men in similar uniforms are thrown at you all at once and it's impossible to keep them straight for a while. It gets easier to keep track of the various characters as the season progresses, especially as more and more of them die off, but it's still a big problem in the early going.
• Another thing I don't think the show did very well at all, relative to the book, was establish the timeframe and location of the conflict. These are arctic explorers in the far, far north. Summers have 24-hour daylight. Winters have 24-hour darkness. There's ice everywhere all of the time. That's bleak as hell - not to mention nearly impossible to make work as a TV show - so the show can be forgiven for cutting ahead by months at a time. I just wish each episode had begun with a date, or something. Possibly even also a location on a map, Game of Thrones opening credits-style. Oh well! Maybe this stuff doesn't matter as much to a lot of people.
• The show - like the book - could really be divided into three parts. There's the first part, where the sailors get frozen in and stuck, and need to winter in place, and come face to face with a giant monster, and begin to really understand their plight; there's the second part, where they spend an entire year snowed into the ice - no summer thaw here, folks - and rapidly lose morale in a dark ship eating rotten food and slowly succumbing to frostbite and disease and starvation; and there's the final part, where they make a far-too-late break for it, abandoning the ships and attempting to sledge-pull lifeboats a thousand fucking miles south toward the middle of Canada in hopes of rescue. For my money, the show was strongest in that first part and that last part. Really especially in that last part. Desperate, doomed men, marching to near certain death, going insane from lead poisoning, all while a monster stalks and hunts them on the ice - that's good, harrowing shit right there. Being cooped up in a dark ship for three straight episodes, eh, less so.
• All things considered, I really liked the show. It'll end up in my top ten on the year almost certainly, and now AMC is considering making it into an anthology series, with a new historical/horror story every season. I'd be very into that idea! But Season 1 would be a high bar to live up to.